My proposed article ‘Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding’ has been selected for development as a full paper for the forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (Issue 12.2, October 2016), on the topic of Live Coding in Performance Arts.
A PDF of the article can be downloaded here.
Abstract:
Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding
This article will address
live coding both as a dynamic model of ‘performing thinking’ in action,
and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’. Underpinned by the principle of
performing its thinking through ‘showing the screen’, live coding involves
‘making visible’ the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of
live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. To expose
the inner workings of practice foregrounds process, emphasizing the methods and
mechanics of production, the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening
(live). Moreover, the making visible of thinking ‘in action’ has
epistemological import, shedding light on the nature of knowledge production
and mode of intelligence operative therein, generating insights into this
habitually unseen or unshared aspect of creative endeavour. Live coding is arguably a hybrid - even liminal
- practice, operating at the critical interstice between different disciplines, oscillating
between a problem-solving modality and a problematizing, questioning, even
obstacle-generating tendency. Demonstrating a multi-modal model of
‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ emerging between the lines of musical-rhythmic,
linguistic-verbal, spatial-visual and numerical-logical intelligences, live
coding has capacity to offer insight into the commonalities and potential for
complementarity between ways of knowing emerging from the sciences and arts.
Live coding can also be
conceived as the performing of ‘thinking in action’, a live and embodied
navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where
its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a
latent knowledge or ‘know how’ activated through action. Live coding is
arguably performed in actu, where in Alan Pottage’s
terms, its power “exists only en acte, or in actu, (which) is
to say … that is ‘is’ only in the process of its exercise”.[i] I propose
to explore live coding as a performative exercise in ‘thinking in action’, for
the live navigation or negotiation of certain concepts and conditions,
thresholds and limits: for working with elective rules/restraints as critical
leverage; for testing the relation between receptivity and spontaneity, between
the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and
split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known.
Moreover, live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on
different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live
performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated,
between present and future-present, proposing even towards a quality of
atemporality or even aliveness, the temporary suspension of chronos. Against
the privileging of real-time performance – and narrowing of the feedback loop
between intention and execution – I advocate critical value for the gaps and
lags within live coding performance as reflective intervals for building the
capacity for biding one’s time and knowing when to act, for the kairotic practice
of intervention and ‘invention in the middle’.[ii] Drawing
on the Ancient Greek concepts of techne, kairos (opportune
timing) and metis (cunning intelligence), I conceptualise live
coding as a contemporary exercise (askesis) for performing
thinking-in-action (a meletē - meditation or ‘thought experiment’), for
practicing the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical
intelligence, for cultivating a more critical mode of human agency and
subjectivity.
About the
issue
Live coding has grown as a
performance method over the past decade, infiltrating diverse art forms, but
with strong grounding in musical and audiovisual performance. Following a
decade of music releases, festivals, journal issues, symposia, and conference
tracks, with online hubs like TOPLAP and
the AHRC funded Live Coding
Research Network supporting both artistic and research activities
within the field, the first International Conference on Live
Coding will take place at the University of Leeds in July 2015. This
journal issue aims to explore the new possibilities offered to artistic
performance by live coding, and whether the algorithmic approach to dynamic
thought and action which underlies live coding practice can shed light on
aspects of more traditional approaches in the performing arts. Live coding is
essentially the act of creating and modifying symbolic instructions in
real-time, encompassing historical and contemporary work that goes beyond
computer-based systems to include practices in improvisation, choreography,
literature, live/performance art, visual arts, and theatre. The issue will
explore pertinent questions of liveness and what rule-based instruction
formats, such as live coding, live scoring, or live notation, offer to the
performance arts; engaging with the physicality of performance, embodiment,
considerations of space, machines, audience, and perceptions of the flow of
time.
[i] Alain
Pottage, ‘Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault’ in
Economy and Society, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1998, p.22.
[ii] Debra
Hawhee, ‘Kairotic Encounters’, in Perspectives on Rhetorical
Invention, (eds.) Janet Atwill and Janice M. Lauer, (University of
Tennessee Press, 2002), p.18.