Hi Amy,
On 16 Dec 2014, at 06:03, Amy Alexander <amy_at_plagiarist.org> wrote:
> I think what confuses audience members is the part about understanding the
> performance. Someone may not know how to play the violin, but there's a
> direct visual -> auditory connection between bowing & fingering and the
> sound that's produced. Wind instruments are arguably more complicated to
> understand because it's harder to correlate fingering to pitch - but people
> generally don't care because the direct correlation is still there. With
> livecoding the correlation is a little more complicated - the text doesn't
> usually change in sync with the sound.
I usually think of it slightly more generally: Things like playing the piano, violin, electric guitar, or even the contrabassoon have in common with live coding that there are aspects of those activities which remain largely opaque to audiences. Classic cartoons in which a conductor changing her or his gestures results in different pieces of music show how shallow the actual understanding can be for many audience members. The difference, however, is that those are what we might call received sorts of performance, and are considered self-evidentally performative.
When I first saw projected live coding, what very much surprised me was how much of a performative activity it seemed to be, in contrast to so much laptop performance. The fact that it was in a language that I didnt know, and therefore couldnt entirely understand, was not a particularly important factor. What was important was that it *was* obviously performative, and even dramatic. That it could become a received form of performance seemed clear!
One contrast with much music was the obvious aspect of more extended preparation for events, but that made it more performative to me, not less. There is an arc of expectation as a live coder gets ready for her next execution! So showing code was not about facilitating understanding from my perspective that didnt matter so much but more about making it more self-evidently a performance.
S.
--
Read the whole topic here: livecode:
http://lurk.org/r/topic/1HDTrGqI8Zk67qXLcfbP5K
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Received on Tue Dec 16 2014 - 11:27:13 GMT