reni hofmueller and michael pinter, both part of the organization, and in the role as moderator winfried ritsch, opened nearly exactly at 07.00pm the long desired "first international pd-convention" in graz.
the history of pd might be seen as an long one, and plays somehow a traditional role in graz, surely in his beginnings just used by a small group of technicians, artists and theorists, who trying to force this medium becoming the status of a medium of art, comparable e.g. to oil.
as reni mentioned, was pd growing out of university, technical works and- here in graz- out of the pd-stammtisch, which exists since 2002,where in the regulary meetings technical questions are discussed. the idea of this convention is, to bring people together, who know each other just in an virtual mode, at this time in a physical space. the wide-range of the social-setting is from programmers, developers (e.g. musil, zmoelnig)to theorists (e.g. wiltsche, murlasits) to students (hollerweger, gruber) and artists (e.g.pinter, miha ciga)
involved institutions as mur.at (with 20 nodes) via network, cc (a laboratory, for tests), esc (where to present pieces), iem, mkl: so we have on one side the university and also self autonomus spaces for art. one of the main goals might be, that "everybody" gets an idea of pd...what it is...
Not only the work of people should be presented, but also the person behind itself. After a short presentation of the faces of the present, accompanied by some few words of the addressed, some words about pd : miller pucket, the inventor of this software, is at the moment writing a book, -and the most users of pd use it since 2 or 3 years (of course, there are exceptions)
it is a computer music language, a graphical one, and pd stands also for public domain, so it is the first open source software for real time...a big advantage for programmers. You can not only produce sounds with it, controll data, which is esp. interessenting in the technical worlds, but also the software is ready to use for the enduser, (e.g. interfaces, plug-ins, a lot of tools are provided) pd´s function as a framework
there are some important historical dates, you know,-the first time when...etc. just mentioning the date, I think, the concerned will know anyway: 1953, 1960 (max mathew)-1967, and finaly 1985: c-sound. the first real tim processing was msx/icw, and afterwards, max spd was splitted, by the way in pd and gem, and so on. the main topic is, that pd is a graphical language.
the expectations of this software will be discussed on this convention.