i want to be really clear that this blog post is not a set of rules or instructions. you don’t need to do these things. and you don’t need to do these things to be part of pastagang.
different people and communities are doing different things with “pastagang” and it’s interesting to see them all emerge. this is my description of some of those things that i’ve seen. you may have seen other things, and i encourage you to edit this post to add them yourself.
if we create something in a pastagang space, we tend to say that the thing is “by pastagang” and not by any of the individuals involved.
the blog and website are also “by pastagang”, as is everything else that people make around it, like the nudel tool itself.
if you export something from pastagang into a different tool, like strudel, it’s still “by pastagang”, even if you go and edit or build on it further. “by pastagang” is infectious, in that sense.
i think there are a few reasons people do this.
i think it started out of convenience.
the very first pastagang creations involved lots of people, like ten to fifteen people. and it would be too tricky to track them all down and attribute them all correctly. some people would inevitably be missed. and some contributions would be from anonymous users. and it’s not always clear who people are from their name. and there’s no auth on names anyway, so some people could pretend to be other people.
if you were to try to attribute everyone correctly, you would inevitably miss some people out, and that seems unfair. it would be unfair to attribute some individuals but not others, so it’s better to include everyone equally, and say that it’s “by everyone” … it’s “by pastagang”
it’s also much quicker to do it that way! it makes it easier to share pastagang creations quickly and immediately
even if it were possible to attribute every individual line of code to every individual, it would still be too hard to attribute everyone individually, and i can prove this to you.
yes, even if we could say “todepond wrote that line” and “froos wrote that line” then we still couldn’t say it was made by anyone other than pastagang. because writing the lines of code that ended up surviving to the end is such a small part of how something is made. it misses out all the process: the drafting and redrafting, the editing and copying and pasting and cutting and killing that are all crucial for making something.
knowing who wrote each line does not let you attribute individuals and i can prove it to you! because it’s happening right now, on this blog. we can look at a file’s history on any file and see which “contributors” “contributed” each line. for example, take a look at the history for the ongoing paper and you might (incorrectly) believe you can reverse engineer who created that piece of writing.
you’re wrong! a file’s history only shows one limited view of its history. it misses out so much information and context. if you determine an essay’s authors from its history, you’ll get it completely wrong. this happened in the wild! v buckenham wrote a response to a pastagang blog post.
in her response, V says:
a post almost certainly mainly or exclusively written by Lu
and this is one thousand percent not true! from a count, at least nine people participated. if you look closely, you can even see glimpses of the ongoing conversation between different authors. if you didn’t know to look for it, you might think it’s a single author’s stream of consciousness. but no, it’s the classic pastagang-style back-and-forth that we see in tools like nudel all day every day.
so why did V think it was just me? well, if you look at the file’s history, I am one of the only “contributors”, according to github, and I was the only one at the time. but it tells an incomplete picture.
i was listed as the only contributor because i moved that writing from one overflowing blog post into a fresh one, to make space for more writing. In actual fact, I wrote very little of the final post.
I think it’s very understandable to make this kind of error, and V corrected herself immediately, adding this comment:
i regret the inaccuracy, and i especially regret erasing the work of a diversity of contributors while making a post trying to connect a variety of ideas together
I think that people are too obsessed with giving, taking and claiming credit. the world is obsessed with making sure we know who did what, and who was “responsible” for something. i don’t think it works like that. all we have is our circumstances right now and whatever we choose to do to influence the jam to make it better
live coding is not just “writing code”. it is also “editing code” and “deleting code”. in fact, “deleting code” is perhaps the most important part, as we have previously discussed
by deleting some code, you create some negative space, which may contribute to the creation in some way. or it may make room for something else to grow. by having the insight or instinct or gut to delete some code, you are partly responsible for what comes next.
even if you come in and delete everything and leave / you could delete the whole thing / you could delete every line of code and do nothing else, and you would still be contributing to the jam. so even if you make something in nudel entirely from scratch, you were only able to do that because someone else deleted something.
or if you come in and delete whatever’s already there and then start from scratch, you can’t help but be influenced by what’s there already. even if you only saw the old code for a split second, it might influence you in some way. you might feel a natural urge to do something different, or to do the same. you might want to make your code a different shape, or the same. or you might make an active choice to not be influenced by it, and this is a form of influence too. there is no escaping it!
even if you decide to hop out of the jam into a private or single player room, like a different flok room… if you do this you’re still building off the pastagang jam and what was already there: you’re continuing it in a different direction.
there is no escape.
in algorave, there’s a feedback loop between the plugged in artists and the crowd. the artist makes sound and visuals, and this makes the crowd move or not, which influences the artist in return, and this cycle continues. the same is true in pastagang. your presence affects the jam.
if you’re inside the space, you’re a participant, and you influence things. a coder will make a very different kind of music if there are 20 cursors in there compared to if there are none. it changes things.
and often, non-coding participants don’t just sit and do nothing. I’ve done sessions where listeners have suggested things, or requested things, or even written lyrics for me to make vocal samples of.
your presence influences the jam. your lack of presence also influences the jam. by choosing not to join the space, you also steer its output.
by removing your cursor, you create negative space, and you may not see the results of this, but it will happen.
whether you’re there or not, you steer the gang.
there is no escape!
attributing everything to pastagang is a value statement.
it’s us saying:
we didn’t create this to get credit or favour or recognition. we created this because we wanted to!
because we want to make music! we want to play strudel! we want to do hydra! we want to eat nudel! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise—
this blog post was written by pastagang. anyone can edit this blog post.
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