Live Coding Blog

“Live coding is a way of improvising music or video animation through live edits of source code, using dynamic language interpreters.”

Is this a universal definition of live coding? Is it a new discipline at all? I found this cool website that talks about the history of live coding and performance.

One resonating idea throughout the reading — to what extent a human is a real artist in computational creativity? What would happen if an A.I. algorithm were to replicate a human in a live coding performance? Has this been done before?

What in my opinion live coding embraces greatly is the affordability of mistakes. It is the spontaneity that is born with experimentation on the spot and embracing imperfection that gives a unique spike to each performance.

There is no such confusion with live coding, there is a human clearly visible, making all the creative decisions and using source code as an artistic medium.

A programmer making generative art goes through creative iterations to, only after each edit they have to restart the process before reflecting on the result. This stuttering of the creative process alone is not enough to alter authorship status.

What live coders themselves have to say about their art is what’s the most interesting in the reading. One can infer a great deal about their bold character and adventurous work style has given many rounds of iterations, experimentations, and failing that they have to go through before giving THE performance.

What has been said about personal style and the design process of their own language reminds me of what Richard Hamming says about style in his “Learning to Learn” lecture:

“There is no one style which is successful. Painters paint many different styles. You have to find a style that fits you. Which means you have to take what fragments you can from other people, use them and adapt them and become yours.”

What I am taking away from this paper: Live coding means that there is beauty in imperfection that is born on stage during the performance. Live coding music ⇒ music that “could be understood in a novel way”. This is not electronic music, neither it is music created by an algorithm; it is a collaboration of human, chance, and code.

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.