This reading made me realize how normal it actually is to move between different mediums, even though it sometimes feels like you’re supposed to “pick one thing.” The idea of the artist-musician isn’t new, instead it goes all the way back to people like Leonardo da Vinci. but what changes is how each era makes that crossing easier or harder.

What I found interesting is how a lot of these shifts come from both artistic and practical reasons. Sometimes people moved between art and music because of curiosity or experimentation, but sometimes it was also just about survival like which field could actually make money at the time. That made it feel less romantic and more real. Being interdisciplinary isn’t always a pure artistic choice; it’s also shaped by context.

The part about abstraction and how visual artists borrowed concepts from music (like composition, rhythm, improvisation) also stood out to me. It made me think about how we naturally use one medium to understand another. Like when I’m working visually, I often think in terms of timing or layering, which feels very musical even if I’m not consciously trying to “make music.” Livecoding already blurs the line between musician and artist: you’re writing code (which feels technical), but the output can be sound, visuals, or both at the same time. It’s not clearly one discipline. And similar to what the reading describes with movements like Fluxus or experimental music, livecoding also includes performance, unpredictability, and sometimes even failure as part of the work.

I also liked the idea that in scenes like punk or early electronic music, intensity and experimentation mattered more than technical perfection. That feels really close to livecoding culture too. You don’t have to be a “perfect” programmer or musician—the point is more about what you do with the system in the moment.

The section about the computer as a “universal machine” also felt especially relevant. Now one device can handle sound, visuals, performance, and distribution all at once. That’s basically what livecoding relies on—you’re using the same tool to generate and manipulate everything in real time. It makes the idea of being just a “musician” or just a “visual artist” feel kind of outdated.

I read Artist-Musicians, Musician-Artists and I like how it traces something that feels obvious now but apparently took a century to become normal.

I think the part that resonates most with me is the computer era section. When techno and house came along, the machine just didnot care what you were. You could make music, make visuals, run a label and design the artwork all from the same tool. The software doesn’t ask if you’re a musician or a visual artist. You just open it and start.

The article goes through all these earlier movements like Fluxus, punk, the Factory scene and they are interesting, they feel like people consciously pushing against something, making a statement by crossing disciplines. What I find more compelling is when it stops being a statement and just becomes how you work. The computer made that possible in a way nothing before really did.

I think that’s where we are now. Nobody finds it strange if someone makes music and visuals together. The article frames it like a long historical liberation, but honestly from where I’m standing it just feels like the obvious way to work and I’m not sure we even notice it anymore, which is kind of the point.