The reading inspired much thought concerning the boundaries drawn between and around different disciplines of art. While the reading focuses most on the emergence of a specific blend of fields (the artist-musician), it discusses the convergence of artistic fields at large. I took particular interest in how sentiments seeking to challenge such boundaries culminated in modern movements “in which works were dematerialized and became increasingly independent of materials, techniques, media, and genres.” This sort of deconstruction seems particularly prevalent and relevant in today’s age of digital media and art. Characterized by an unprecedented scope of accessibility, variety, and volatility, the digital landscape innately carries an ethos that questions traditional definitions and lines that have made up the art world. This ethos also muddles the edges of non-digital art, as everything that exists in the physical world comes to exist in relation to a digital counterpart and context.

As I made my way through the reading, I was also struck by how topical this discussion was to our class in specific. In the context of live coding, the fogginess of this distinction between artistic fields becomes all the more apparent. As we live code, we are engaging with a mode of composition that sculpts both music and visuals (hence the live coder as the artist-musician/musician-artist) through the language of code and patterns—it is a composite of various art forms, an active  conversation between the coder and the computer, and a performance that situates it all in front of a live audience. Live coding embodies and simulates the feeling of synesthesia. Stimuli bounce around and riff off of each other in what is a dynamic art form that defies the possibility of a singular definition and—hearkening back to the previous reading—even challenges the basic conventions of how we understand knowledge.