Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Publication: Live Coding - A User's Manual

Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice, gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts to computer science.


Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multiauthored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice’s future forms.


Read the book!

This book is published open access by MIT Press, widely available in paperback (please consider using an ethical bookseller), and for free download as epub, pdf or mobi files:

 * Download as epub (recommended for e-readers)

 *  Download as pdf (may be easiest for laptops/desktops)

 *  individual chapters are also available as separate PDFs via MIT Press

 *  Download as mobi

For e-readers, please refer to your device’s manual for how to load them. For example on kindle, you could use the send to kindle service, and on others you might transfer via usb cable from a computer.

There is also an experimental version readable online.


Authors

This book is written by Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson, with an expositions chapter consisting of contributions from Rangga Aji, ALGOBABEZ, Jack Armitage, Rafaele Andrade, Pietro Bapthysthe, Lina Bautista, Renick Bell, Alexandra Cardenas, Lucy Cheesman, Joana Chicau, Nick Collins, Malitzin Cortes, Mamady Diara, Claudio Donaggio, Rebecca, a Fernandes, Jason Freeman, Flor de Fuego, Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, Mike Hodnick, Timo Hoogland, Miri Kaat, Abhinay Khoparzi, Shawn Lawson, Melody Loveless, Mynah Marie, Fabrice Mogini, Kofi Oduro, David Ogborn, Jonathan Reus, MicoRex, Antonio Roberts, Charlie Roberts, Jessica Rodriguez, Iris Saladino, Kate Sicchio, th4, Rodrigo Velasco, Elizabeth Wilson, and Anna Xambo.

Please refer to the acknowledgments section of the book for a (unfortunately but necessarily incomplete) list of all those who made this book possible.

 

Design: The cover design is by Joana Chicau, using FT88 from the Degheest font family designed by Mandy Elbé and Oriane Charvieux, based on typeface by Ange Degheest.