this was a great reading, and captured precisely why I am grateful I majored in this hodgepodge field despite kind of sucking. I read a book about mycelium-inspired-anarchy a little over a year ago, and a lot of the aspirations expressed in this reading echoed it. Through live coding, we can discover what we should cherish and encourage within ourselves and among each other. For example, this resistance towards being defined, of having to be boxed in. Running away from the idea that you have to know or control something to love it. It is possible to love even if you can’t do both those things, which is fearlessness I guess. Unashamed love. I am still trying to get around to this idea regarding this major, and actually, probably regarding everything, now. I’ve been getting into rituals and these sorts of things, but I acknowledge that live coding can be another practice in order to lean into that way of embodied living. It actually is probably a good thing for me to do, which is why I took this class. Get more comfortable opening up in the world, real time! Literally real time. I’m a reader, and I think this always gave me a sense of safety and distance. I liked processing and analyzing things from afar, and pressure is probably one of the scariest things to me. So truly, this idea of REAL TIME. We’re all here right now. I’m 22, and I never expected to get this far, and the fact that I’m 22 and still required to figure it out as I go is insane to me. Like, I can never quite wrap my head around the absurdity of it. It’s all really real-time. How does live coding open up? How do you open up? We’ll see, I guess.

I also really liked the idea of “thinking in public.” I am a bit ashamed to admit that I have incel-tendencies. But people are not something you should be afraid of. I think I learned this because of the times I am in, but this idea of thinking in public really resonated with me. Like it’s no big deal. In fact, being around people is magic, and leads to magical times. Sweat and breath in a dance room, you know?

Something else that hit was this quote: “This way of computing . . . helps me ‘unthink’ the engineering I do as my day job. It allows for a relationship with computers where they are more like plants, rewarding cultivation and experimentation.” I think, in the modern world, and for a lot of human history, we maintain the relationships that we are required to to survive, but we also know there is a better way of being in the world that feels like beauty, feels lighter, and feels true. Live coding is a way to be that way, I understand. Sort of a release, something you GET TO DO rather than something YOU HAVE TO DO.

I also really liked the idea of presenting “familiar things in a strange way.” I think a lot of things look dead to us and we have to shake things up to recognize them as alive. It goes hand in hand with this idea: “This is a problem for her (and us) inasmuch as Big Tech wants computers to be invisible so our experience of using them becomes seemingly natural.” I like minimalism, but it is also a trap of invisibility and complacency. A really well-designed snare. So keeping things strange and LOUD and VISIBLE appeals to me. And the point of all this is, exactly as was written here: “The capacity of live coding for making visible counters the smart paradigm in which coding and everyday life are drawn together in ways that become imperceptible. The invisibility here operates like ideology, where lived experience appears increasingly programmed, and we hardly notice how ideology is working on us, if we follow this logic, then we do not use computers; they use us.” How do you learn to SEE what can’t be seen? How do you learn to acknowledge that it takes two to tango and it’s not just you running things? I think live coding makes you sharper, or rounds out the depth in the back of your eyes. There’s this great Susanne Sundfor quote: “We don’t do life. Life does us.” And yep, just about. I don’t believe it in my bones yet. Another reason why I took this class.

And the last thing I want to write is that the nature of computers is soooo hyper hyper intimate. It’s like your pet dog except that dog is a mirror and a portal to any world you want to go to. A magical object! The art that has come out of computers consequently has this…feel. It feels kind of windy and spicy, and like an igloo. But then bringing that hyper super intimacy into a public space…? It’s kind of like you’re opening up that intimacy to everyone. It’s safe vulnerability. So wow.