Open-source, Custom Interfaces and Devices with Live Coding in Participatory Performance

Abstract

This paper will discuss the use of open-source, custom interfaces and live coding in artworks and performance practices, using emerging devices that focus on revealing hidden, intimate and sensuous code of the body for manipulation and play. This paper review the new landscape of open-source artworks, with recent examples of such artworks, as well as one by the author, resulting in a new performance aesthetic that uses ‘hacked’ commercial, mobile and gaming devices for live coding, performance and interactive artworks. It discusses how dancers, live artists, musicians and others are participating in the DIY and ‘Maker’ movement, to create exciting wearable electronics and mobile applications for performance enhancement. The author will consider the possibilities of playful, expressive, gestural, and live coding, as well as using the DIY Maker ethos in multi-sensory particpatory performances with new devices. The author‘s own artistic research has involved re-combinatory practices and hybridisations of participatory performance, mobile media, wearable biofeedback sensors and live database interaction in a recent performance project MINDtouch. Her new collaborative work Hacking the Body, is about making participatory performances and interactive dance pieces that expose ‘code’ of the inner body.