Abstract
Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human–technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human–technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human–technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms.
Highlights
At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed as a technologically mediated production that has a creative author or agent in control of output
In a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed as a technologically mediated production that has a creative author or agent in control of output. It is authorial or creative output and agency that is celebrated, whilst code and software are fetishised. These accounts are problematic for us as feminist scholars, not least because they bolster normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that in turn feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic, whilst negating embodied experience, not to mention many other bodies, expertise and histories
At a space in between, little bits of code are used and worked with to form something new by layering it up, by iterating, deleting and moderating. This means that the ‘practice’ of live coding differs, with some live coders generating sounds using mixtures of samples, audio hardware or software synthesisers
Summary
In a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed as a technologically mediated production that has a creative author or agent in control of output. The excerpt below sets the scene, detailing the complexity of human–technology relations, as well as a range of power relations, imaginings and feedback that complicate the dominant notions of live coding discussed above: as some sort of technologically enhanced ‘performance’ where an artist—through their enhanced digital expertise and artistic vision—transparently executes ideas to produce a material output for an audience to interpret: 4 This project was led by Alex McLean and Renick Bell, supported by the Daiwa Foundation, the Sasakawa Foundation, Arts Council England and the British Council.
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