This opening excerpt from Live Coding: A User’s Manual offers a compelling definition (or rather, a set of definitions) for the practice, art, and philosophy of “Live Coding.” I was immediately intrigued by how the author(s) addresses the strange nature of writing a book about live coding, much less one that seeks to be a manual (“there is something perverse in writing a book about live doing”). Posed with this question, I was then convinced by the claim that the very constraints of written text—the same ones that lend to this “perverse” disjunction—may also serve to be ample grounds for creative and critical thought. Within this very first portion of the book I saw what I thought to be the riveting soul of live coding: a performance practice that both works within and challenges the limitations of the media used (whether it be the computer used to code or even the book used as a manual).
Another idea that stood out to me was the identity and presence of the “user.” Much of the definition of live coding hinges the presentation of this live conversation held between the user and the machine. I was particularly struck by the part of the text in which the artist Olia Lialina was invoked to discuss the disappearance of the user. The mention of “smart” products and how “Big Tech wants computers to be invisible so our experience of using them becomes seemingly natural” thus goes in tandem (or rather, at odds with) how live coding may be seen as an ideologically potent practice that directly fights against this (corporate) trend to bring the user—and the computer—back into the visible foreground (or even existence) It then does not seem to be merely coincidental that the very title of the book describes itself as “A User‘s Manual.”