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Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 02:57 authored by Sally Jane Norman
This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

ISSN

1479-4713

Publisher

Intellect

Issue

2

Volume

12

Page range

117-128

Department affiliated with

  • Music Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Sussex Humanities Lab Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-09-19

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-12-07

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-09-19

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