What now, what next—kairotic coding and the unfolding future seized

ABSTRACT

Drawing on my experience as a critical interlocutor within the AHRC research projects Live Notation: Transforming Matters of Performance (2012) and Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves (2014–2016), in this article, I propose a conceptual framework for considering the challenges and opportunities for kairotic improvisation within live coding, conceived as an embodied mode of imminent and immanent intervention and invention-in-the-middle, a practice of radical timing and timeliness. Expanding my previous reflections on kairotic coding [Cocker, Emma. (2014). “Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice.” In Performance Research Journal, on Writing and Digital Media, edited by Jerome Fletcher and Ric Allsopp, 18 (5), 69–76. London: Routledge; Cocker, Emma. (2016). “Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 12 (2): 102–116. Cocker, Emma. (2017). “Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos.” Textile 15 (2): 124–141], in this article, I address the kairotic liveness within live coding’s improvisational performance by identifying two seemingly contradictory tendencies within this burgeoning genre. On the one hand, there is a call for improved media technologies enabling greater immediacy of semantic feedback supporting a faster, more fluid—perhaps even virtuoso—approach to improvisation. Alongside, there remains interest within the live coding community for a mode of improvisational performativity that harnesses the unpredictable, the unexpected or as-yet-unknown. Rather than regard these two tendencies in antagonistic relation, my intent is to invite further debate on how the development of intelligent machines might better facilitate improvisatory flow, without eradicating the critical intervals and in-between spaces necessary for creative invention and intervention, without smoothing away the points of technical resistance and intransigence which arguably form a part of live coding’s performative texture.

KEYWORDS:

• Live coding
• kairos
• thinking-in-action
• thought-in-motion
• improvisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield, UK and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Her recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

ORCID

Emma Cocker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Notes

1 This article has been shaped by ideas emerging through collaborative discussion with Alan Blackwell, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson as part of the publishing project Live Coding: A Users Guide, and informed by a series interviews that I conducted with Sam Aaron, Benoît and the Mandelbrots, Shelly Knotts and Alex McLean as part of the research for this project. I am very grateful for the reviewers’ comments that prompted a more nuanced line of exploration within this article.

2 See Emma Cocker (2016) for more on the relation of ‘thinking-in-action’ to live coding.

3 See International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Live Coding 12 (2), 2016, eds. Thor Magnusson and Kate Sicchio.

4 See also Luria (1973).

5 See also Tom Hall’s Slow Code Manifesto, http://ludions.com/texts/2007a/.