Category: Fall 22

Yej

A computer agent will be developed that produces a live coding performance indistinguishable from that of a human live coder

This idea made me further question – how should a creative software agent look like in the context of live coding? Considering the physical nature of conventional live coding performances, where you see a person in front of their computer tapping onto their keyboards, does the computer agent need to embody a human form? Not only software-wise, but also that of hardware? Is it only under this condition that they are truly indistinguishable from a human coder? Or does the physical component not matter as much?

The spontaneity, which is an integral part of what makes live coding interesting, is also up to question. Can a machine truly be spontaneous and improvise if they are not yet susceptible to biological conditions and emotions – two major sources of human spontaneity? What other inner impulses could non-feeling computer agents use to show spontaneous behaviors similar those of humans?

“Live coding has far less perfection and the product is more immediate. It allows for improvisation and spontaneity and discourages over-thinking”.

How does a machine discourage itself from over-thinking? Perhaps, they can systematically control, or simply dial down, the amount of “thoughts” they have? Does such simplification of the process threaten the quality or even the validity of spontaneity expressed by the agent?

I was very surprised by the reading’s claim that every live coder has a personal style that they develop through their performances. I remember in class Professor Aaron mentioned that we are basically learning to express ourselves in a different language (algorithms). I found this to be something very interesting and the reading highlighted the ways live coders were developing the programming languages they used for their performances in order to redefine the ways they express their art.

When I was reading that, a comment said by my Data Structures and Algorithms professor came to mind. She said that we all have our own styles of coding and that shows through our way of writing logic in our projects. Of course, she was saying this mainly to get us worried about plagiarism. But, it made me think of the group projects that I’ve worked on and how we all had different ways of doing things that showed through the code (how we made functions, how we commented and even how we declared variables). A lot of it has to do with personal preference and with finding techniques that work for us.

At the same time, I was also thinking about how we personalize our code editors to create a work environment that gives us the best results. For instance, I have a very particular theme in VS Code and a very particular way of organizing my windows in Unity. It made me reflect on we “decorate” these online workspaces (similar to decorating a studio or office) so that it aids in our creative process.

What I am trying to say is that the paper made me think about how we all have our own styles of writing code in general and how that can show through very distinctly when we decide to do creative and live coding.

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