 So, when Alex asked me to write an article for the Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music about the philosophy of time and music, I was very happy to engage in that and embark on the research for it, which turned out to be a little bit more than I actually had hoped. So, now it's kind of a mix of things that popped up in the reconsideration of these older ideas, and then, you know, it's not about algorithmic music in general, there are different topics there to talk about, but life coding more specifically. So, life coding, I think, has, from the very beginning on, always had some, you know, a tendency to play with time, or has a lot of time words in it, like, for example, live coding, the liveness at the time, the temporal organisation, I mean that it's gone soon, I mean an empty future, or perhaps, you know, it will make itself unnecessary, probably it has already. Then just in time programming, just for anyone who doesn't know, that was tongue-in-cheek, you know, that was not serious. Then not to forget the shreds, you know, the most serious thing in computer science that was, you know, played with in chalk, then temporal recursion, of course, how can you recursion in time? And not to forget, you know, the night time, night time that makes spaces differently, like writing code at night, that's a totally normal thing, but writing code, of course, in night clubs is an unusual thing. So, yeah, and so on, you can, you know, if you have others, I'd be happy. So what is our, I used the hour, you know, before I was made aware that, you know, the we is a dangerous formula, but I love it anyway. So what are we, how are we using time? So are we using it? Are we using it up? Are we abusing it? This morning was a very nice session in slowness and abusing time in a productive way. Then perhaps we analyse it in a certain way by performing. That's a perspective that I like a lot, analytic art, you know, epistemic art, something like that. Or are we making it up, you know, like are we generating time, like, you know, perhaps as an illusion, as a construction or something. All these perspectives are maybe there. So there is an old paper by Donald Knude where he compares mathematics and computer science by random access to his bookshelf and just picking out random problems and analysing them really carefully in his paper and then looking for different reasons. It's not so important, that's why I made it. You know, you can't read it. But there are two things that for him mathematics as it were in his textbooks empirically and computer science or informatics or as he would like to call it algorithmics would be typical for algorithmic thought. One thing is a lack of infinity for some reason. I think that's still a myth that computers can't deal with infinity. I would like to dispel that because, you know, in mathematics infinity is not that much of a problem, but it's also a way of writing. So we shouldn't forget that, you know, there's distance between the medium of inscription and what we're talking about. So of course computers can deal with infinity. That was his first point. The second point was the assignment operator that appears in computer science. I think that's interesting because that's the moment of intervention or the moment of break or the moment of state. The whole state thing is a problem. You know, even in pure functional programming your whole program is a state so the problem is still there. So the question I would like to consider together is what can live coding tell us about time and, you know, like maybe nothing because it's all about processes and so on, not about time itself. But then also the other way around what is it that perhaps we can learn from philosophy of time or thinking about time for live coding. So, yeah, we have this weird ambiguity and this is a classic in philosophy of time. You know, when like I think important texts or important authors of course can't, for him time was just a form of possible experience. So it is not something you can talk about like an object because it is already the precondition of your discourse basically. It's what is today often talked in terms of media. Like, you know, you can't, it's really kind of hard to write about the conditions of writing. Of course you can, you can say, you know, let's do it, you can do it. But there is something like a horizon in it perhaps. So we are on the verge of a rationality that allows to talk about things like its own limits or perhaps not. So I think one should leave that question open in a certain way. But there is a problem that which I mean was one of the reasons why I can't have this idea is that things that happen in time always happen in time and it's not time itself. So if you look at movements, of course you can say a movement, a clock for example moves the hands of a clock moves. So that's time but that's of course could argue that's not time. It's just the measuring of time but are you really measuring time or are you measuring the mechanics of that clock? So changes and events are one level that's very close to time that have a kind of medial relationship. And algorithms and causality is a general other thing that is laws that kind of bridge time over a long time. Like planetary movements like clocks or the, you know, any kind of process that has a law, I would call a law or some constancy over time, bridges time. So I think in this triangle we have to kind of move around and orient ourselves. And I think it's a bit undecided where we access a knowledge of time. So in the, when we had this dark student meeting we thought a bit about how actually life coding appeared. What was the essential bits and I mean, you know, I don't want to make anything essential about life coding. It's about making things in a certain way unessential. But historically what is it that broad life coding together as it is today? I think it was this combination of thinking in public like when people sit on stage and they actually think it's actually rarer than the normal thing that it takes. And I think we should really do that actively. And then changing laws while we obey them in a sense. Changing grammars while we speak was this, you know, changing grammars or changing algorithms while they unfold or changing programmes while they run. So these are the, so these two things. And I would like to consider a little bit how these two things kind of fit together in that way. So, yeah, I know that manifesto should be reworked but that kind of thing should stay, right? And our thoughts, so what is thought? It's not as clear as it seems to be in the beginning. So, I mean, this situation where you sit on stage and think or even, you know, like when you teach or even when you have a conversation with friends or colleagues this thinking, what is it that happens when you really think and not just, you know, talk? I mean, it is really that one doesn't know. I mean, it's this performance of not knowing and still kind of getting to know something. I think that needs its own time to accept that someone in public doesn't know really. Also, you know, that's something that I think from school we are all used to this arrangement that not knowing is a really bad thing especially when you're in this position now or when you're exposed. As soon as you're exposed you should know what you're doing. But I think that's a very problematic thing because usually we don't and that, you know, there's a lot of fake front coming up. And we don't know, well, we know of course but we don't know for sure and I think we shouldn't throw away all rationality in that sense. No, I want to be crazy. We try still to understand, otherwise the whole tension is lost. I mean, trying to understand but not fully understanding is something that... So what is really not there so much is this transparent feeling of being in control of oneself or even understanding the others. And the second aspect I think is that algorithms and their accounts for computer music in general they really have no necessary connection to our human body or to our human constraints and so on. That has often been framed in terms of the separation of the mind and the body and so on. One doesn't have to do that one just can say, neutrally say it speaking, our cultural limit between nature and culture is not obeyed by algorithms and perhaps, you know, thought is something that is already in between that whole. We may have more liminal states anyway than we think we have. There's a famous debate in music of Stockhausen versus Crisee where Stockhausen in the Zeitvergeet claims this kind of total uniform time between timbre and rhythm where everything is basically ruled by the same law and Crisee says, well, if I don't perceive it, what it is. And he has this question, who perceives that? I think who we should really ask because we just don't know. We don't know what a human being really is and what it will be. Of course, sometimes there are limits. We can, you know, like certain. But within these limits certainly we don't know who we'll perceive and everyone knows that who composes music. Some people understand and understand. So I think there is a very particular moment of alienation in this whole process. I would propose to see alienation not per se as a negative thing as it was, you know, kind of taken for granted in part of the Marxist tradition but only part actually of the Marxist tradition. That, you know, alienation is opposed to autonomy. Well, it is in a certain way. That's true. But autonomy is not something good in itself and alienation is not something bad in itself. But it has to do with delegation of agency to some processes we cannot fully control. Actually there's a very different aspect in it. It's trust. If you trust something, you can delegate it and give it away and you can lose control. And that's not necessarily a bad thing but kind of a certain way of using power makes it a bad thing. I mean alienation becomes a bad thing as soon as there are certain power relations. So one can think of different kinds of alienation. So one way of course is alienating when you walk across or along this border between things that are within our sensual apparatus and not within our sensual apparatus. The question is how to get to this kind of outside, how to perceive something that's not in our sensual experiential frame not in the form of experience we are used to. And I think in a way thought can be seen as something like that. It's an indirect experience. I mean it's just a redefinition. Now I propose that thought equals a sign to indirect experience. Just as a case. So again then algorithms are thoughts not chainsaws then how far algorithms indirect experiences of time in that sense. That would be a possible reply to the Kantian question how you know your horizon. Of course for Kant it was mathematics, which is actually okay. Algorithms are also mathematical. So there is something like an epistemic non-violence there. You know the term epistemic violence is important that frames of rationalities create a kind of violence. But you can also say that frames of rationalities can deter or protect from certain violence. So that would be the sense. So move the diagram. But not too much situations. Algorithms would be kind of the triangle. We are moving between trying to find where we can say anything about time. So I'm trying to, you know, that was a bit strange because I have to read it out like this. So that's Derrida. I'll quote a bit from those philosophers that have expired the early history of life coding for myself. So I'm now reading more others. Still I think in terms of philosophy of time the post construction is really interesting. If the living present, the absolute form of the opening of time to the other in itself is the absolute form of ecological life and if egoity is the absolute form of experience then the present, the presence of the present and the presence of the presence of the French word are all originally and forever violent because it's a kind of incorporation of the other in the self, in the self-transparency of the self. The living present is originally marked by the presence, the violence of the meaning of finitude, the meaning of history. So you can see that the presence suddenly becomes a really negative term. Usually we use presence as a really positive word and I think it's interesting that we can also turn it around because we know this self-presence is actually violent in a certain way and this break with this presence or with this uniform presence let's say is an act of epistemic non-violence. So a liminal time which is half outside and half inside something like presence also would be interesting. We know all that. So that would be a little bit about public thought. So changing laws would be a way to think about the problem of time. So in a way you can say that life coding has always been a critique of real time with a means of real time but it has also been a critique of course of the timeline and all that. But I think the critique of the liveness as now is very strong and has been strong from the very beginning. Because if you look at the papers about time that have been published in computer science or for music or at the ICMC or so, it's all about real time and that was of course fascinating. Computers can suddenly be faster than the sound they need to produce. That was a very important moment without doubt but it kind of encapsulated the thinking of music in terms of parameter changes. You set up an architecture and then you change parameters in it. And life coding was a break with this setting up of parameters. It's the re-factorising of structures and even structures and so on rather than just a structure where you change the parameters live which is what a lot of live electronic music was before exclusively. So how does time enter into algorithms? I think that's an interesting question because algorithms can be thought of as timeless in a certain way or unfolding in logical time in mathematical time, not a physical time. So there is a double meaning in the word program which I like. I mean program is a written program or a specified program but it's also a running program. That's weird but I think we all get used to it. Now I think one says app, right? Unfortunately it doesn't work really well. So in terms of the computer science part of it, at the bottom of course you can always have systems that are partly kind of provable in terms of consistency and also well they are incomplete in such a specific way that you kind of never have a problem with them but certainly in the moment of construction when you think about or think with a programming language or so you always encounter something like a kind of a debugging because something is not as you expected it. So there is an internal openness or also a contradiction in them but you can suspend the error in a certain way and life coding does suspend the error by simply putting exactly the time variable or the suspense, the waiting time in the place where you normally have a contradiction like in the loop. I mean just leave away the weight or something in a loop and you get exactly what the holding problem in a sense means. Not really but that's enough. So the other thing is that programs kind of always do slightly what you didn't expect because they unfold in time and the effects are not really predictable in a certain way. Of course with experience you can know but in terms of an attribute if you look for a certain sound attribute for example you cannot prove that it would be there because it's just not complete in that sense. So you encounter an algorithm in its unfolding so it's always something of the past that you once planned, a past future that's what's called ontology a past future before so programs are late in the sense of dead and so realisation is a retrospective one in a sense. So there is a thing that I always use for showing why life coding is kind of impossible. This is the simplest possible function you can have just a linear function imagine on T0 you start a process say it's a rising frequency or something and at C1 you suddenly have some reason some situational reason or internal reason in the system to say no actually it should rise at a different rate the steepness should be different so at this point you have a decision to do it differently so now you rewrite the program to change that but now actually you have the choice to either follow the lower line and that means your description your text doesn't correspond any more with your signal I mean you suddenly have a signal that's like this and your code says f of x or 80 or something like that or you do it differently and you say I should have written it from the very beginning so you have to do the unfolding again and I just realised that the diagram is wrong just imagine the dotted line to be moved to the red line that would be the other action so in a sense life coding has this kind of transparent relation between text and processes there's something impossible about it and I would claim that this impossibility is what really drives life coding and makes it interesting so a good example for a similar thing I was skeptical in the beginning but the longer I look at it the better it seems to be although it's still an open question whether it's the idea of complementarity that comes from originally Heisenberg and Bohr and it's a complicated question because it's fully embedded this term of complementarity it's fully embedded in the struggles within the philosophy of quantum physics which I don't want to touch now a little bit later but in general there's an interesting story that I already know about Wiena perhaps but actually then Lande and Stuart and Gabor have created a theory of sound which is strictly, formally analogous to quantum mechanics and Curtis Rhodes has written a book basically inspired by it which is the Microsoft book so in roughly in quantum mechanics you have a causal picture I use these terms which are not totally common but they have been used in a picture where you have some causal relation that you can talk about it's like momentum or something and you have a state picture which tells you that a particle is in a certain state in a certain moment and those two pictures don't fit together at the same time so you can either do this or that but not both at the same time and the big question of course is does the world really have these properties these contradictory ones In acoustic sound that's pretty simple you have the same thing of course you can make a time point of a waveform at any time but when you want to know what sound is there at that point you're kind of at loss because there is no sound at that point in a certain sense if you mean a spectrum or something so in the extreme picture you can say a pure frequency in terms of the Fourier spectrum does simply not exist in one time it does not even exist in a limited time but it only exists in infinity so you have these two complementary pictures and formally you can translate them into each other so that was Gable's suggestion to have this elementary logon this kind of minimal frame where you have a compromise between frequency and time which he then moved to information theory I mean the whole paper is on information theory and he tried to see what information is actually contained we can forget about this whole information stuff I think because that's very much into in the telecommunication and cybernetics of the 50s or 40s in this case just see it conceptually for a moment and what you can see here and I think what I would like to point out is that there is an F parameter there and a T parameter so depending on what way you look at it T of time and frequency are really symmetrical and for Gable he was inspired by this whole frequency modulation thing and he said that the idea of frequency is totally wrong in the sciences I mean in mathematics not but in the physics because a changing frequency is kind of an inconsistent concept and so he never really asked the question what about the time so actually the time point is just as inconsistent in a certain way as the frequency it's totally symmetrical I mean just formally it's just the same so I would like to just keep that symmetry the time point is just as open as the frequency so presence is not existence that is one of the central thesis I think in the philosophy of time in the second half of the 20th century in a sense or partly also in the first but I think it's a good thing to understand that what exists does not necessarily exist now it's just a kind of mental picture one can try to cultivate so just to compare it with something someone told me oh yeah magenta doesn't exist I was like oh it doesn't exist that's really strange why does it not exist there well I mean it's not part of the colour spectrum well is that true well actually no actually the spectrum exists but there's no line no single line that is magenta obviously okay but why doesn't it exist so why don't mixtures or spectra or multiplicities in general exist that's a very strange assumption actually but it's very widespread so we should be a bit aware of that background assumption that's kind of a very crude empiricism that doesn't really work so just another quote from Time Today which inspired us for the article algorithms today because it is absolute the presenting present cannot be grasped it's not yet or no longer present it's always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it such as the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event that something happens the occurrence means that the mind is disappropriate so this disappropriation, this alienation somehow comes from time itself so of course the question is whether time does that to us while time is this union of things or whether time is itself kind of A in A that's a question that I will leave open here so the same thing I think we can say for algorithms on a different time scale we don't have to go into this small time scale micro sound or anything we can just add algorithmic complementarity to the picture in a sense that in algorithms you also have a causal picture which is kind of the prescription it's the program as description and you have a state picture which is the process as it goes like the state in a certain kind of moment and these actually have the same kind of complementarity but the funny thing is that it stretches out in any time scale you want and it has to do with laws that exist over time and that actually that are laws for things to happen like gravity but there are other laws like smaller laws if you want that are more local that are kind of laws of the situation I would say laws of the situation they can change but it's interesting why like why they are stable and it's also interesting what happens when they change because at the same time somehow the past has changed so what started off as a discrepancy in the first place when you suddenly think I should change that or a reason for intervention that's a certain state in a certain moment there's a state that causes you to change something you hear something that may also come from the past you know just kind of smear it all over the place but there is some state picture that causes you to make an intervention and then on the other side your causal picture gets fragmented necessarily to a certain degree and I think there are many many different solutions also to that to make that not a total irrational thing but to make that a kind of interesting thing that this happens and to make that still thinkable I mean even controllable but also passively interesting that you experience it in an interesting way so yeah the question is time now really self-alienating you know like is it time that is alienating itself or is it just the processes or whatever that happened in time or even others so again this picture we have all this with the idea of passage and the state picture we have the whole picture which is more like an encounter I guess you can also switch them around that thought about it doesn't work that way you know sometimes symmetries are dangerous but it's not really clear whether you know it could be a real dilemma well it's interesting intrinsic to what where does it where is it then it could be a thing of technology particularly or it could be a misunderstanding on my side that would be also possible perhaps or something even you know something else so yeah maybe this will help us to think about it so yeah I would like to pass the word to the audience and make comments you know also questions but not only questions but comments I don't know how much time we have left I have no clock yeah yeah that would be nice don't worry doesn't have to be you know it can be very very simple can you talk to how that relates to what you were saying I mean the basic question is always at least when you zoom out it's always the question whether you know we perceive these things so because our neural the work of the constitution makes them so actually it seems that they're different or whether things are whether our neural apparatus is an adaptation to that fact and it could be in my projection so we need that retention really trivial what is not so trivial is to give these these side-sequels right in terms of ontology to say that they bring between them even if they are contradictory because I mean I think you know that the world without contradiction has been quite a very kind of stabilizing picture so ontology give it up but on the other hand what contradiction will be also but in terms of conceptions for space problems there is a lot of music that consciously plays and there is also a kind of knowledge if you have a lot of I was curious how do you see a difference between live coding and undeterministic future within the water and what do you see a difference between live coding and just pushing the play button because you could say with your arguments that playing the song is not going to be deterministic because it's not happening yet but somehow it's still going to happen pushing a play button and listening to the a total like unpredictable thing are kind of one ends of a spectrum you can still can still imagine that as possible practices of live coding I would say it's not forbidden but I mean the whole tension appears elsewhere where laws actually are taken seriously as existing and you experiment with laws not just with total indefiniteness often freedom has been intuitively characterised with its total openness towards a kind of a noise background of the universe something like that and maybe that doesn't really exist in that sense maybe it's more that different laws contradict each other and so you cannot bring them in one picture and so switching from law to law is something far more interesting and I think that would be more my picture of live coding how are laws that have no law of laws second order law related anyway I'm wondering if that word is stronger than that of the actual because we're always asking what is still the program and so it's almost like you need to question what you're doing I'm wondering I used the word as a technical term almost in philosophy thought has a very strong touch to it it's like politics it's something not just thinking along and dreaming it's really engaging in thought and it has this kind of very strong dialectical and very strong questioning character in it so that's why I kind of used it but then in a sense like stepping one step back and relaxing a little bit from that strong position one can think what is really like the typical thing about thinking and this separateness from direct experience this indirectness is probably an interesting way to still keep a specificity of thought while allowing it to spread all over I mean you can say a gesture is a thought but only under the condition that it makes it has a very specific kind of non-immediacy or non it must have some kind of indirectness you know what I'm saying people like the thing take over the machine it's time for me I come more from in that sense more from but you and for me the machine is just as much discourse as I tend not to in the German media theory I think not German media theory but in the technological a priori which is just a small part of German media theory it has a very and I have to understand that the Kittler was very important for him to make the statement very strong because he was in a total like arrogant surroundings of humanists who just studied languages if it were just about reading the understanding the deeper meaning and so on totally ignoring anything like technology so of course you need to make technology strong but then I would say even if I look behind it I would say technology is interesting because it's an indirect means I mean it's media in the sense that it's transparent also so definitely I totally agree that discourse is not everything in the strong sense that's why I asked my question about time in an ontological way but I think the answer is not to study technology but to use technology to study time or something like that or study being and there's I think there's a misunderstanding about this horizon there are people who have moved this Kantian horizon basically to technology and I mean there's actually in the Kittler's text you can see it in the early text there's a switch between contingency to technology in a certain moment and I think I would rather stay with a contingency as a stronger point and to say no let's stay with situations and study them carefully with whatever means available like not a priori make technology here and discourse there because I mean how to separate them it's all in a sense ideology if you want but also it's not so there is a weird intermediate field that gets lost if one kind of makes a strong technological a priori because it's an anthropological horizon in the end it's a historicism which I find a bit dangerous thank you