 Welcome everyone to the third day of the live program conference. We have keynote Professor Salidjane Norman, Professor in Performance Technologies. So if the first thought was about live coding and the second about maybe computer science and coding, now we focus on the liveness, I guess. And Salidjane is at the University of Sussex, part of the new Sussex Humanities Lab and works at the music department as well in the School of Media, Film and Music. A long history of doing interesting things in various European institutions. But I guess I'll hand over to you. Thanks Thor. Thank you. Well thanks Thor and Alex for this wonderful opportunity. It's a really fantastic event and I feel very privileged. And of course, as is the kind of classic formula on the third day, not quite dead, but there's been a lot that's come through that I'm going to try and bounce off of rather crudely. So this is going to be something of a mishmash and I would like to keep it tight time-wise because I would really like to try and allow some time for conversation. I think this will spark some discussion. Also it's formidable coming up on the back of... I can't do anything like what I did yesterday and I certainly can't do what Julian did the day before. But I'm going to try and take you into perhaps more my performing arts and theatre side of the story. So please wave at me if I'm going too fast because it's gibberish although speed might not be a problem in that case. And I will try and rip through some material that hopefully isn't too dense. So my work as a performance theorist, sometime practitioner, historian, deals with embodiment, expressive gesture, staging and framing techniques. And I define theatre very broadly and Orthodox theatre scholars quite blasphemously as being an arena for projecting and poetically modelling all kinds of liveness. So this ranges from the artificial lives coming through ancient techniques like puppetry, juggling, magic. I'm very interested in instrumental dexterity in these questions of cognitive load that Tim referred to wonderfully yesterday. But I'm also interested in artificial life and theatre as a kind of an arena for exploring artificial life in terms of software, hardware, wet wear and their hybrids. So I try and write in these different areas and it's very uncomfortable but I think I'm drawn to the discomfort zones of these things that kind of fall between the cracks. I'm not going to try and define liveness, it's a can of very live worms. But Alex yesterday mentioned the Icelanders' liveness performance in a mediatized culture which I think is relevant to some of the exchanges we're having here about the different degrees of presence and mediatization at work and our concepts of liveness especially dealing with performance media. And I would also suggest that Stanier can pick a paper on deadness technologies of the inter-Mundane is a really interesting one which perhaps raises some of the criticality that Jeff was itching towards yesterday. They talk about the capitalist cashing in on performance necro worlds. This is a way perhaps that we might sharpen our reflection on the liveness of live coding. We're not just resuscitating dead performers, we're doing something that is inherently non-capturable, perhaps. So there's an interesting discourse that Stanier can pick about the status of accelerationist post-industrial cultures and what this is doing to our readings of liveness. The mastering of liveness, literally post-production mastering, I mean that is as deadly as it gets. So are we looking to try and offset live coding as an act of defiance or resistance in that it does perhaps have a unique vitality, it playfully messes with temporal systems that elsewhere are driven by very different profitability goals? Or are they so different after all? And this is another critical question that we need to be raising. And I'll flip to her, I've quoted a colleague and she's an artist and she's a coder. She created a wonderful piece of distributed creative software called Keyworks. So this is perhaps the critical slant that it's interesting to bear in mind, that the playfulness of out-and-design research creation, this is for you Alan, has much to offer in the open discourse and shared praxis between rigorous scientific methodologies and the crapshoot of entrepreneurialism, too early in the morning to pronounce that one, but that same playfulness, the dynamic relations that emerge through interplay have already been subsumed by the system and are driving it. So we need to be alertly aware that the ontology of play and interplay in this uncommon ground we have to be aware that it's shifted and that's an important thing to bear in mind. So just quickly, a couple of words about where I'm coming from apart from the theoretical practices or discourses that I'll allude to. I've been exploring performance and expressive gesture for a couple of decades and I look at it as a means to creatively flesh out digitally extended spaces. So I work, as I said, with puppeteers, with musicians, with dancers. I'm interested in specific corporeal skills. And my first motion capture workshop, which is of course not live coding, this was at the International Institute of Puppetry in Chalville, Mezier, which is on the French-Belgian border in 1994. Wow. And basically at that time, puppeteers were using motion capture to generate what one might call digital shadows, electronic shadows. So it was a rudimentary form of mirroring. Of course you could play with the shadows, you could extend them, you could slow them down, you could speed them up, but it was a deforming mirror process. But then, and I've been doing these kinds of things over the years, so that's another one from Chalville. So we used optical and magnetic motion capture systems so that we could compare the infrastructural differences and nuances of technical systems. But this one, sorry for the quality of the photos, but this is kind of archaeology. I was a research associate on European framework projects for three years at ZKM, and I managed to pull together a workshop with EU funding, looking at these questions of real gestures in virtual environments. So always these notions of hybridization. And here, the flower that's up there, this computer graphics flower, has been designed by a guy called Linterman, who is a procedural kind of expert. He works on modeling natural growth systems. So he's a usual SIGGRAPH contender for the best morphogenetic systems. Genetic algorithms basically used to emulate and drive kinds of natural processes. And this flower then has been mapped to the puppeteer, his motion capture points, so he's able to manipulate it. But Burnt in real time is sitting on the stage as well, and he's actually tweaking the points of the template, the flower points of the template, so that he's giving them more or less autonomy while Ramon the puppeteer is working. So there's a very interesting relationship happening here. The flower is a static entity. Burnt does morphogenetic stuff, but if we tried to do that in 1998 with what was actually an evolving flower, we'd have really blown the system. But what's interesting is that there was a very different dynamic of interplay between the manipulator, the human animator, actor, and this entity that had its own life. And what that created was not a mirroring, but actually a whole range of dramaturgical possibilities that went from emulation enslavement through to dramaturgical partnering, through to risk, through to conquest, through to threat. So there was a completely different kind of terrain that was opened up by ascribing more autonomy to this computer-driven entity. The other area that's influenced my work a lot is Steim, the studio for electro-instrumental music in Amsterdam. I was artistic co-director there from 98 to 2000, but I worked with Michel Weiswitz more or less until he died in 2008, unfortunately, and also with Joel Ryan. And Steim, as many of you will know, has always been obsessed with this question of creative embodied ways to explore hardened software potentialities. And Mariah, who works there, I think, gave us probably the best possible example of what I see as the Steim ethos and philosophy yesterday. So this is the perspective from which I'm coming at generative arts practices. I was at the Transmediala Toplap panel in 2005, and I was delighted by the range of stuff that I encountered. And for me, I just thought, oh, God, this is all about extensions to theatre. This is performance and performativity growing. And of course, if you go back to traditional theatre technology, we've been moving from static light and sound systems through to kind of fairly pedantically preset systems, through to on-the-fly controllable systems, through to systems that we can give more or less autonomous behaviors in live performance contexts. And this is, you know, thousands of years of theatre technology history. And the other thing that we've always done, and which I think is really relevant here, is that we've been upscaling and downscaling spaces and times. That's what theatre is for. That's what it's about. It's a place where you can mess around with scales. And this, I think, responds to a very basic urge or yearning that my friend, Louis Beck, calls our yearning as creative extremophiles. Human beings are creative extremophiles. I think the best of us are. We push the edges, but we push them in creative ways. So of course, we know that computational entities have long flourished in performance. Again, this is not live coding, but it's worth remembering. So there's sound and light, but there are also choreographic notation systems like this one, Rudolf von Laubens' system, has been a very strong basis or framework for software like Tom Calvert's Lifeforms. This goes back to the 90s. It was developed with the dancer, programmer, Teckler Schipholst at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, which next month is hosting the Movement and Computing Workshop. Last year's edition was at Eacom. This year's is at Simon Fraser. And so this whole arena of movement and computing and of Lifeforms-type software exploration is a very, very vigorous one. And I think there'll be a lot of live coding in Vancouver as there was at Eacom. This has inspired work for Merce Cunningham. Oh, this is, sorry, that's from Lifeforms. So you've got templates. You've got possible geometries and parts of the anatomy that you can recompile to perform impossible gestures because we have gestural thinking that comes through what we normally do. If you want to do something that you don't normally do, throw it at a computer, recompile yourself, and it will come up with things that you would never have dreamt of. So this is what Merce Cunningham did with Lifeforms. And he developed a whole new choreographic syntax and vocabulary. This is Paul Kaiser's work for Cunningham using Lifeforms animations that are projected on a scrim in front of the dancers. And, of course, this technology has also influenced William Forsyte. He did the CD-ROM called Improvisation Technologies, while I was at the ZKM in the 90s, using Laban notation systems, so to look at questions of gestural amplitude and speed and the ergonomic qualities of gesture, if you like. And then more recently, did this wonderful piece called Asynchronous Objects. This is a dancer, right? But this was done with Ohio State University and Forsyte basically spawned a whole bunch of different sorts of declensions of what choreographic movements could be if they were given different kinds of computational renderings. 3D, 2D, whatever. This is a person who's done some interesting work in what that's Synchronous Objects again, sorry. So that's a group of dancers. And if you go on to the Forsyte website, the Motion Bank, you can see the different types of readings and renderings that we have of life movement through this particular choreographic work. It's fascinating. Jean-François La Pointe. No, it's not Jean-François. Sorry, that's wrong. It's François-Joseph. I'll have to change that. There's one guy who's been building this thing called Choreogenetics for the last 10 years. So he's been developing generations of in-silico dancers. And their movement sequences are subjected to simple algorithmic processes. You can see them here. Repetition, translocation, and conversion. And this builds increasingly complex choreographic mutations. So I'm not trying to pass this stuff off as like coding, but what's important about it, I think, is that it provides new ways for us to write and manipulate movement instructions. So this opens up potential for live coding processes or live coding type processes. Performance systems I see as being unique kinds of exosomatic organ spaces. So this is a term I'm borrowing from the philosopher Robert Innes. It's quite a useful concept, I think, to strap on to the wonderful work by Perry Cook and by Don Ide. In fact, last year at the live coding event at Sussex, David Ogborn gave us a fabulous kind of overview of these different approaches to extended biological, anatomical, and cognitive selves. But I like Innes's notion of the exosomatic organ, which he describes as a device that substitutes for, extends, and compensates for natural powers of the human body. So it can be manifest as a microscope, a computer, a language, a loom, an airplane, an institution. And exosomatic organs, I'm quoting Innes, have their own trajectories. They have their own dynamic logics or vectorial paths. They define and pre-define the grounds for the historical variability of consciousness and forms of perception and apprehension. So exosomatic organ spaces extend our senses. They ground our perceptual schemata and our co-evolving motor skills. And, of course, there's a very strong iteration between these perceptual and motor skill developments. They construct as much as they construe what Innes calls the world at the end of the cane. This is the blind man's cane. And its materiality, its rigidity, its weight, its texture serves as both probe and filter. I would suggest that as a performance practice, live coding's exosomatic world at the end of the cane is characterized by unique temporal dynamics. And we've had some really exciting insights into these temporalities. Thank you, Stephen. And I think it's interesting here also to explore something that Jeff Cox pointed to yesterday, Shintaro Miyazaki's micro-temporalities. His algorithmics defined as the interleaving of concepts of algorithm and rhythm. But also we can look back to the founding rhythm analysis of people like Henri Lefevre, which is, you know, it's a political agenda. It's an agenda of social tuning. And this is part of what we're doing as well, I would suggest. And then there's work, obviously, on the cultural industry's takeover of our temporal consciousness, the good old Adorno-Horkheimer stuff, and more recently Bernard Stiegler. I think this kind of reflection is all relevant to our exploration of different rhythmic modalities, different forms of communitas that are being generated through live coding performance. So to create spaces for developing and collectively appreciating these performance practices separating them out from everyday contingencies, we've been designing containment systems for thousands of years. It's a slightly brash term, but, you know, I worked for a few years in an industry where containment systems were actually quite important. And I think it usefully demarcates realms of autonomy where we can co-mingle or control human and non-human actions. It's cultural apparatus. So I'm coming back to Barad's definition, again, that Jeff used yesterday of an apparatus, not as a mere static arrangement in the world, but as a dynamic reconfiguring of the world. So the characteristics of these containment systems, these apparatuses, their scale, their level of detail, their means for separating contents from environment, their observer positionings, these obviously affect the ways that liveness can be projected. And in turn, the very liveness of the phenomena they contain challenges their own boundaries. So this is a process of ongoing feedback. And I think we need to be looking at this containment system when we're trying to define where is it that a live coding performance starts and starts? Where is it that the infrastructure starts and stops? Where is it that our literacies and our social conditionings are brought to bear in our appreciation of a live coding performance? So this feedback thing, it's something that live coding specialists and the ones I'm referencing are mostly in the room, have called, they've classified into nested loops that include feedback between source code and running process, raising kind of event and concurrency questions, manipulation feedback between the programmer or artist and the work in progress, performance feedback, which involves obviously the external outputs, the display systems or sound protection systems, display we use too idly as being an exclusively visual term, but of course deplicari means to unfold. I think it's really unfortunate that displays being monopolized by visual culture. It's a wonderful term for sonic and all modalities of sensory experience. But anyway, and then there's social feedback which encompasses audience or co-performers in a distributed system. So I want to step outside, radically outside informatics-based practices to see how other kinds of adaptive performance systems might be seen as being open to runtime interventions and generating real-time live feedback that affects their evolution. So if I apply for example these categories to emerging academic canons in the European performing arts, I might view 17th century royal choreographer Pierre Beauchon who was actually inventor of the classical dance framework as being engaged in manipulation feedback. He was devising the code, he had to make it usable for and co-developal with performers including Beauchon himself. So it was constantly being refined keeping with the performance feedback loop. And then of course social feedback was crucial especially at the French court. It upheld relations between the dancers, fellow dancers and audience. So this is a scale question but basically if you do some transposition, if you do some extrapolation you can map these notions of feedback across to very different historical phenomena. This is not actually a Beauchon piece. This is slightly earlier, this is late 16th century but it gives you an idea of the arena within which these different sorts of feedback were engaged. Here's the king of pieces, La Place du Classe, but the aristocrats, the spectators who really have to see the stuff, he doesn't really have to see it because he is it. They have to see the stuff but they have to see whom. But basically what they're seeing is on this ground level. So court dancers were actually interpretations of instructions that were governed in part by obvious corporeal, biomechanical limitations. There's a limit to our gestural amplitude, to our speed, to our precision. And they were also pushed to their limits in the name of innovation. Court spectacles were luxury goods. They were only performed once and that meant that they had to be very, very strong in terms of their innovation. They were free from the imperatives of reproducibility. You just had every single time to be absolutely brilliant. No pressure. And then there were kind of hardware. This is one of the remappings that Margaret McGowan, a scholar of Court Ballet, has done where she's shown some of the incredibly elaborate kinds of patterns. These were monographs that were read by people in the galleries. So this is reading movement, right? This is reading code. Sometimes these were the royal monogram and that's where everybody just swooned and applauded, of course. Otherwise you were beheaded. And then there are the hardware limitations. Here's Louis at his best. You try and do it pirouette in those shoes. Of course in those days it was a very gentile and gracious turning on one's own axis. But these kinds of things really influenced the flexibility and the vocabulary that people could use. The Sun King was the ultimate live coder because he was a star, as his name suggests. Even if he totally fudged the vocabulary that his poor courtiers were trying to develop as a basis for a transmissible, transferable, knowledge transfer type of programmatic language. There was a notation system that was based on Beauchamp's work. Here's some examples. This was published in 1700 and this dominated classical dance for over 150 years. So that thing that with historical hindsight we look on as being very rigorous and congealed and frozen. It must have actually been quite adaptable and open in order to last for 150 years. And the early notations systems were mere floor plans although gradually, so here is some more, gradually as you move towards the 18th century and human beings come more sensibly into the picture they get brought into the engravings. Reproduction techniques, of course printing techniques have a lot to do with this as well. We're in an ecology of resources that is well beyond the actual performance space per se. Yet all of these traces and we've got quite a few of them won't ever let us know how easily dancer choreographers really rework the classical code. And I think it's difficult today by the same token to see how freely live coders develop and navigate their programming languages. Or how distinctive their respective systems ultimately are. Nick Collins yesterday came up with this wonderful Codio morphology term borrowing from Dennis Smalley. I'm waiting for a Codio-Rodio, Alex. But I think that Nick talked about a taxonomic approach to live coding practices. We've got a corpus now that allows us to devise this. And if we look at what we've seen over the last two days, we've seen stuff that's based on games, we've seen models that draw on tangible interfaces, repurposed instruments, we've seen a whole range of stuff. And I think a taxonomic approach to this would be quite valuable. And this would perhaps help us to see that canons or academic implications or reproducibility imperatives are kicking in, if they are. They may not be, but let's not kid ourselves. So whether we're dealing with the 17th or the 21st century, in either instance how far can artists depart from recognised frameworks whilst ensuring compelling legibility as opposed to bloody boring legibility of dynamic processes for their own engagement and for their audiences and which audiences are we talking about? Are we talking about code literate audiences? Are we talking about general cultures? What are we talking about? How conditioned are feedback loops by performance infrastructure, by the types and emplacements of the projection systems, the display systems, the audience positioning? I thought that the stained glass figure probably had the best view of all the other night at the left bank. And a few of us commented on that. Why is this being influenced by the specific socialities of practitioners and publics, including the fact that we take into account the fact that there's a guy up there or a reproduction of a guy watching all this going on? And we're not oblivious to it. It's not innocent. There's nothing innocent about this. So I want to turn to some more recent pre-computational still performance work by a Bauhaus artist, Oscar Schlemmer who lived from 1888 to 1943, sadly died too young. But Schlemmer drew on mathematical, experiential and affective principles to create choreographic programming that some people have described as corporeal calculus, which is interesting because calculus is the mathematical study of change. And he built these kinds of systems and Schemarta, so egocentrischer arm lineature is when the figure is generating its own space. Whereas, this one, figure arm lineature, the figure is subservient to the vectors and the prescriptive characteristics of a mathematical space. Schlemmer was always torn between these two models and I think they're quite interesting to look at. But he also, so here's a real live example because sometimes when you just see this, you think, oh yeah, that's easy to do, it's a pretty picture. But actually this guy, Werner Siedhoff is a really amazing dancer. He wasn't just a pretty picture. And there was an incredibly tight correlation between what Schlemmer was doing diagrammatically and what people were doing physically at the Dessau Bauhaus. And then he devised these kinds of typologies, these gestural typologies and these bear their own kind of movement vectors. They have their own kind of propensities for certain kinds of linear movement. They can be deployed, they can be modulated, they can be combined and they can express new kinds of movement potentialities. So a lot of the experimental work that Schlemmer did involved taking movement sequences and literally processing them through these different types of figures and seeing how they were deployed, how they were modulated. He was building up vocabularies. So they were movement sequences that were constructed and reconstructed in the course of their execution. Which uncannily aligns with some of the things we say about live coding. And again, not just pretty pictures. Using extensions, using prostheses, whether they're sticks or hoops or a mixture, these all inflect our movements. These are strong theatrical examples. But let's think about the perhaps more subtle theatrical examples that we're sometimes blind to. They're up there on the stage when somebody is doing a live coding performance. There are what John Bowers calls instrumental ecologies. There are playful ecologies that we use and that we operate. And it's good to be perhaps aware of these. And Schlemmer also worked on the influence of materials on movement. So this is the metal dance which had a very specific kind of gestural pattern to it. It was a metal gesture. It was a heavy metal gesture. And this is glass dance. And this was all tinkling. I mean, it's interesting because basically going through geometries, going through materials, there is a kind of a dictating or a prescription or at least a suggestion of constraints and codes that are just there to be played around with and eventually to be broken. The other thing about Schlemmer that I think is really important and I'm glad that these photos I think show it better than the diagrams that some people remain completely obsessed by and they forget about the human realities. Schlemmer's dances were fluid human elements and he was very attached to that. A lot of his colleagues were working on mechanical, strictly mechanical theater and dance. And Emma Cocker has talked about the artist's body which might be conceived as a processing machine acting out algorithms and performing code, but like the artist's body that Emma whose arbitrariness and whose idiosyncratic behaviors Emma emphasizes Schlemmer insisted on the non-fixedness of human engagement, its openness to connection and interpretation. And actually Slub talk about the human thread you even talk about the homemade quality of the music and one of the texts which I really love which is granted by expressive control over the software and I think this is quite an analogous situation. So basically Schlemmer's performances are devised and often improvised with corporeal grammars modulated by a whole bunch of factors. We've seen some of them they can be exogenous factors coming in from the outside or they can be ascribed or innate gestural typologies group interactions they can evolve freely their cues are partly programmed these might be learned or scripted gestural sequences they might be kinetic behaviors dictated by geometries or materials and there are also partly spontaneous responses to programmatic constraints this is improvised and directed programming however much Schlemmer may have rehearsed some of his pieces and he did and his performance notation systems were inspired by I'll get there shortly by corp ballet patterns that were read from raised viewing galleries he knew his history so he used color codes and diagrammatic marking for floor trajectory notations that resemble actual motion traces so this is the triadic ballet which is one of his most famous pieces so all of the costumes were basically dictating the gestural and kinetic typologies of the dancers and here you can see the kind of work that went into looking at how graphically these systems were going to unfurl their innate mathematics and here's some of the notation stuff so Schlemmer actually conjectured about notation which was made by trails deposited by the dancers feet and he also talked about space that was filled that might be spilled with a soft pliable substance in which figures generated by movements might harden as negative sculptural forms producing 3D relics he likened to technical organisms very similar to what Foresight's managed to do with contemporary technology and again I point to Emma's work which I think is really wonderful on new notational systems and the need for us to actually evolve and devise notational systems that actually meaningfully convey what are novel types of gestural practices gestural practices that involve extremely hybrid environments and agencies alien agencies as Chris Salter calls them so these notation systems of which Schlemmer could only dream and that are now fully instantiated that mobilize ideas of live capture or sampling of physical activity per se comprise something that Brian Rotman described as a symbolic writing he contrasts this to the symbolic writing of alphabetical or mathematical systems Rotman is a philosopher, mathematician and semitician he he talks about trace and residues this is a writing that has to do with trace residues, echoings and ghostings it has to do with second and third and nth degrees of what I call registers of presence which I think are needed to capture something of the complexities of live performance as a crucible for temporal meltdowns and the notion of the theatre as a crucible is a very a rto notion he talks about a place where we trample the traditional systems of disparate and discreet bodies and languages and we put them into this we throw them into this crucible they are dismembered and re-membered so live coding performance is productively caught between the manipulation of symbols alphanumeric character command lines and physical corporeal interventions and I think Mariah and Chris have shown us this beautifully so maybe Rotman's reflection on symbolic and asymbolic systems and on what he calls gestural haptics might help us think through the embodied specificities of live performance so if you're editing a source code to modify a running process this obviously means that you're using a formal language a symbolic system in short whose grammatical structure embeds syntactical and semantic requirements that's easy to say Nelson Goodman compares the semantic and syntactic properties of analog notation systems his example is a gauge whose needle rotating clockwise over a non-differentiated surface roughly indicates rising pressure so he contrasts this system with digital systems and takes the example of a gauge that records the successive insertions of coins in a toy bank or what he calls a dime bank so this is from his languages of art and I'm wondering whether the exosomatic organ space of live coding doesn't mobilize both kinds of systems in other words the abstract autonomously evolving processes are necessarily and excitingly entangled with human input that cannot be reduced we know to the strictly computable or computational so when code is deployed or transduced by programmed sensor laden physical objects kind of exclusively by a computer keyboard and screen this further highlights the ergonomics aspects of the relationship and maybe this is where Steven I was very taken with your evocation of secondary syntax and I was wondering whether we we mightn't be thinking about nested language loops and nested linguistic modalities as well as nested feedback loops the great linguist compares existential modalities of the schema a fixed form realized and viewed in the same way as an object with ritmos which designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving mobile, fluid the form of that which does not have organic necessity sorry organic consistency it's the form as improvised commentary, changeable so there's something very close here to the kinds of language that we've been using to describe live coding it seems there are lots of wonderful reflections and I'm cutting this very very short on the language or the languages of liveness Richard Doyle's book on beyond living rhetorical transformations of the life sciences talks about the curious chiasmus or folding between vitality and textuality that accompanies for example the emergence of DNA code it's a fascinating thing to look at as a parallel perhaps to some of the notions of liveness we're trying to associate with live coding performance so I think that these kinds of differentiating concepts or frameworks I've been looking at them to look at gesture it's eventual preservation or it's vital non-preservation they've got a lot of scope for development in the live coding domain philosopher etienne Souriot and I'm sorry to be throwing all these names at you but I will write them down has written about the need for us to get beyond thinking in terms of exclusivist, hierarchised modes of being and instead to embrace ideas of existential pluralism and I think again Stephen this was something I thought I was hearing coming through your beautiful conversations of temporal structures and so these etienne Souriot's existential pluralism foregrounds the relational dynamics that operate across different modes of existence rather than discretised existences or modes of existence as such and I think this notion on the relational dynamics is a really valuable one so to conclude as a performance to conclude as a performance historian I see live codings striving for rhythms and patterns ever closer to the bone of that thing we call real time striving for creative fusions of flesh and symbol or what Guattari calls machinic processuality beautiful term that comes out of chaos I see this as part of an archaic yet very vibrant theatrical quest we're a pattern hungry species and we're forever searching for signals for frequencies and scalabilities that can extend our exosomatic organs which are having to deal with a very steeply evolving environment so for me live coding is about creatively engineering our relations to time it's an activity at the core of all live art practices perhaps if nothing else to bluff the intractable linearity of our own lifelines and of my own 30 minute intervention I'll leave it there here are some of the people I've quoted and I should really very strongly acknowledge all of the people especially who were at last year's Sussex Symposium who were wonderfully rich source of information for me but so many of you in this room as well so thank you really rich, thank you very much I really love talking to reading so much in there and I found it very helpful I think this idea of an entanglement between symbols and action I think is very helpful I guess you could think of it as a continuum where people are moving in different directions in their practices software developers who want to connect more collaborate more with people or musicians who want to explore happening in a symbolic way and so I think bringing body into the discussion like balances it in a way and allows us to understand each other help us resolve these little conflicts which is always the same so yeah I've got a question well, thank you Alex I mean I feel as though the movement, this feedback movement between the kind of performance that I'm dealing with and the levels of coding skills and performances that people here are dealing with is an incredibly productive iterative kind of system because I feel as though my probably very clumsy and totally non-computational and non-discretisable notions of time have just taken a very healthy hammering by reading and re-reading and re-reading work that a lot of you people have produced I think we need it, we need it from both ends but I do think it's very much to do with coming to terms with this exponentially rescaled hybridity and entanglement's a good word Barad uses it, it's actually the subtitle isn't it, of her book Meeting the Universe Halfway the entanglement of quantum mechanics or something and then Chris Salter's entangled performance book which is a really interesting one as this is Alien Agency's book so I think there are valuable kind of metaphors that you can hang your hat on or at least get to work on we have a question out of there isn't Kate there I just wanted to add to that with the Rotman reference because I was looking at topology as we described before I did that like if we stop changing something then we frozen in time and it's not longer like this idea of largeness like we use almost I'm sort of extending this a bit but that's like another really nice way to start eventing what Rotman is actually his performance work is people vamping topology they have to non-geometry and geometry in this way to start relationships with time and making symbols yeah and I think Shashin Wei there's a scholar working he's founded a topology research lab in Concordia he's now at Arizona State but he's a mathematician working on these kinds of concepts as well and he's coming up with new terms to talk about neosemic systems where we're actually trying to devise vocabularies and languages that are of a totally different semi-nature to what we've encountered previously and I find that really useful in the role of the document or even the kind of the relationship between the idea of largeness and the relationship of uniqueness presence and whether or not and I'm curious where you might be in that debate but I mean also if that's extended out there is perhaps an assumption that greater levels of largeness greater levels of realtime necessarily somehow in advance and yet there are these models and it's a good point and I think that's why something like the Staniak and Pieckert text on deadness is really useful because I think we are obsessed, I don't want to quote the accelerationist manifesto it drives me nuts but I think we are obsessed with this kind of catapulting thing that you've referenced and a few of your questions already faster, quicker, leaner, meaner when buto can be one of the most powerful communicators of largeness through its stillness and working with people like Tadius Conto on the theatre of death where he says we read largeness in theatre by putting basically totally mechanised dehumanised dead actors on stage and that makes the audience aware of how alive they might be you know and yeah, I think it's good to be challenging the premises whereby liveness is a superlative that is just kind of scrapped onto a bunch of existing adjectives because it may be the exact opposite that's required Alan, have a question I'm not asking a question about something that seems to be inviting in plain sight and a lot of the work that we do here my direction into this of course is come as a technologist certainly in tactile and tangible systems and working with dancers for many years and those experiments clearly challenge the attempt to embody our experiences at a time through competition but one of the things that was most disconcerting and what I did with the project actually was where we introduced computers into a dance studio in order to find another layer of abstract thinking about the process and what was really problematic for those dancers was the physicality of the devices we introduced into the studio and I think what hides in plain sight is that we talk about computation as an abstract whereas in fact the average performance we've had here at this conference is a model of people opening their laptops at stage I can't even think of the number of keyboards that gesturally and in the involvement of that but you haven't shown us any pictures of computers and you haven't said anything about the embodied action of using a laptop or a touchscreen or a mobile phone I wonder if you have any comments about those things well yeah I think I've shown you one no good point and agreed okay lots of computers here lots of cables yeah no mobile phones in 94 but actually what was really interesting about this first workshop and it's something that stayed with me since I'm grateful for you to raising that point is that I recruited 15 puppeteers from all over the world and they were the best in their respective puppetry techniques and they came, they didn't know anything about digital spaces and they came with these illusions of its unencumbered joyful platonic weightlessness and transcendence and they were confronted with the irritation of what were then very short so polymers cables really nasty primus technical university delft is great but these were clunky systems calibration tea posers forever you know and the whole we kept all of the computational stuff and in all of the workshops I've done we've kept that stuff very visible because it is part of the wider performance ecology and I think it's really important it does drag it drags on the system but it can drag in very productive ways it's not exclusively to come back to Emma's point it's not a negative drag coming to terms with the different temporalities of the processes that you're engaging with creatively it can spark a completely different reflection on your own processes so yes it is really important and next time I'll show more slides with messy stuff well I think sadly we have to get into the paper session but that doesn't mean that we have to end right now because I know there's a question here Nikolai and the first presenter you could come up and Seligene could you just continue did you have any questions? I did thank you very much Steven one of the lessons you have for us that lightness has been in performance all along we're just struggling because the technologies where you've been using computers have this barrier to lightness for a long time the fact that we have to write these programs are only gradually overturning I'm just testing the sound for this yeah absolutely I mean I think one of the reasons that I started experimenting with motion capture and then worked with people who were using robotics and stuff on the stage is because there was a possibility for deploying computational lightness in a slightly more livable real time way so it is frustrating but I think there's a lot that's been done in a few decades and I think that live coding performance has a very specific contribution to make to the analysis and the discourses building up around those typical fantasies I'm really really excited by what is going on here Thank you Alex, did you have a last comment? I was just going to ask a question about mediatisation what does it mean in a notation written in the way we have built an output it's an internal speaker you have an only sound flow you need to tell if you have mediatisation that's the line in terms of house language so I'm only understanding something here no, I mean Auslanda was very useful for looking at the traps of playback and the entertainment industry I think he did a very good job in 1999 you know and it's I think it's just my computer and these kinds of constructs of people who were not really live or who were being presented were not really there were questions of authenticity associated with mass mediatisation and the entertainment industry I think that the mediatisation that you're talking about and the one that I'm trying to get my head around but at the moment it's still really really messy in writing, language, notation syntax, grammar the rigors to use Auslanda's word are formal structures in generating something operates a a sweat and blood being it's of a very different order and I don't know I don't know whether the language associated with a bit of code is a question of your capacity to read it to read the language in it it's a literacy question as much as anything in the beginning of writing