Hi Alan and all,
the conversations were taking place between Kurd Alsleben and the computer (and Cord Passow), so "in private". For Alsleben, this was the starting point of his development of the art form of "conversational art", where conversation (between humans involving machines or not) is the main subject matter. These conversations have a semiofficial character ("offiziös") - so as an art form, the idea is to get rid of a classical audience in a way.
The news on the early history are really very refreshing and interesting.
In the toplop community, we've always had a practice of being deliberately unsharp about the definition of live coding. This has the advantage that it widens the view on the subject and that it makes it impossible of writing a naive historiography of "firsts". There are many of these, in particular in conversational and interactive programming, as we discussed in Dagstuhl.
One can make out a number of aspects that came together when the concept "live coding" was formed, which then serve as a way to retrospectively see the history. All these aspects however are best described as contradictions (or spectra, if you wish).
- public vs. dialog (projection, audience, displacements such as pubs or living rooms, and "private" or semiofficial dialog)
- pro-gramming vs. immediacy (algorithms, formalisms, languages, but then also tweaking of parameters and direct intervention)
- improvisation vs. reproduction (public reasoning, improvised responses, but also preplanned code narratives and schedules)
I don't think that Turing-Completeness is necessary, I could imagine a live coding performance in simply typed lambda calculus, or an embedded finite automaton.
If I were trying to be narrow and separate "interactive computing" from "interactive programming", I'd say that the delegation of actions and reasoning fore and back between program and human is necessary. If I were trying to separate "interactive programming" from "live coding", I'd say that it must be a performance of some sort (whatever that may be). If I wanted to separate "live electronics" from "live coding", again the first distinction would come in. I find this somewhat inadequate with regards to the dynamics of the subject, however and potentially excluding interesting ideas.
On 04.12.2014, at 09:32, Alan Blackwell <afb21_at_cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Thanks Julian - very interesting.
>
> Did those "conversations" take place in private between Kurd Alsleben and Cord Passow, or in front of an audience? (I followed links, but my German wasn't up to it).
>
> I'm interested in how the conversation, as a creative process, was manifested in the reception of the work (if you like, it is "show us your code" for the analog era).
>
> Alan
>
> On 4 Dec 2014, at 08:20, Julian Rohrhuber wrote:
>
>>
>> On 03.12.2014, at 11:04, James Noble <kjx_at_ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
>>
>>>> Are there examples of people live coding analog and mechanical computers?
>>>
>>> I guess the question is where do you draw the lines. Turing completeness?
>>
>>
>> Possibly conversational programming (or programming conceived of as a dialogical process). An early protagonist of that for analog computing would be Kurd Alsleben in Hamburg of course:
>>
>> http://monoskop.org/Kurd_Alsleben
>> --
>>
>> Read the whole topic here: livecode:
>> http://lurk.org/r/topic/2iXnsE8SzZDZpLcPIcRogZ
>>
>> To leave livecode, email livecode_at_group.lurk.org with the following email subject: unsubscribe
>
> --
> Alan Blackwell
> Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge
> Further details from www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Read the whole topic here: livecode:
> http://lurk.org/r/topic/6ruW0L3iVLlP1H4lSeMwQZ
>
> To leave livecode, email livecode_at_group.lurk.org with the following email subject: unsubscribe
--
Read the whole topic here: livecode:
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Received on Thu Dec 04 2014 - 11:10:20 GMT