I spent a lot my time in New York City hanging around Washington Square Park between study breaks from Bobst. One of my most memorable encounters was with a jean skirt-wearing Jewish fella who liked to dance and spoke about how they believed their dead grandmother still lived in their hands. I think they danced because of this idea––that they were, in a way, facilitating communication between their grandmother and the audience through their living body. I commented on how this form of person-to-person interaction was more important than ever in our time of image saturation. Today, between the Internet and social media, we are constantly inundated by what I call “dead” material, or, material that has left the alive, breathing body into fixed positions, such as poetry that has been written down, or photographs. While these mediums are beautiful and important, the links between living things to other living things have been increasingly replaced with various methods of digital pseudo-connection, which could help explain the loneliness epidemic. The true poem is the one that Walt Whitman was constantly rewriting and sharing from his heart. I believe in tangible communication. I believe in dance.

That is why I believe in live coding. I signed up for this class in order to use computers towards this end. I really resonated with the idea that “we do not use computers; they use us…” All we have to do is look at how dependent we are on our phones to realize that we might be the ones being used. But computer manipulation is a way of responding back; of admitting awareness in this current technological landscape, and saying it takes two to tango––I am going to shape you just as you shape me. Within the confines of capitalism and production, most technology is used to manipulate and exploit, but within the framework of this class, I am really excited to collaborate with technology and engage in it as a means of physical, living communication. Get out of the DMs and into the techno raves! I say. One last thing I wanted to mention was the notion of “Being a User,” which entails acknowledging that there “there is, whether visible or not, a computer, a programmed system that you use.” All of us live within inherited systems and ideologies that perpetuate a lot of destruction and suffering. Whether we realize it or not, these ideologies form our thoughts, dreams, jokes, and very realities, and it is our responsibility as thinking, alive humans to question and challenge these often-invisible frameworks so that the world can actually start to change for the better.

To be a User is to be alive. Becoming a live coder means becoming an active participant in and hopefully challenger against whatever systems you find yourself in. It means observing with intent and responding real-time. This reading inspired me to keep this philosophical groundwork in the back of my head as we all start to exercise this practice.