I still wonder what the point of live coding is.The authors seem thrilled by the concept because it resolves an issue of ‘authorship’. In other words, live coding puts the human in a position where it is obvious that they, and not the software. are the artist. I’m not sure if the authors really care about authorship as much as recognition though. Most artists wouldn’t mind a little pat on the back for all the tedious work that led to the final result. But the whole point of art to me is to make the audience wonder about the journey that led to the final outwork. We stand in front of art and think: what does this mean, how was this drawn? And that thinking process, this series of questions, is what we artists provide our audiences. I’m not sure if it’s worth giving that up just so that the audience understands how hard it is to create our art pieces or realize that it’s us and not the software that’s drawing stuff.

The article also frames live coding as a novel way of self-expression because of the different notion of time. But I believe these same creative incentives can be reproduced in live performance without the need for risk-taking or literal coding–which I find optimistic at best and elitist at worst considering most people wouldn’t understand the code anyway.