HistoricalPerformances

Some notable historical performances are mentioned here with archive footage links where available. Feel free to contact us to tell us of any missing ones- we'd especially like documentation.

Projection era

The languages have proliferated...

• 20-22nd July 2007 - LOSS Livecode festival - about 25 livecoders meet up in Sheffield. Friday evening they rig up a pub with headphone distribution amps and projectors and hear meditative live patching by Ross Bencina, and well practiced beer influenced SC livecoding by RedFrik. PowerBooks UnPlugged then distributed themselves around the pub and did some classic network based livecoding. Saturday evening they play into the night in a local club with livecoding to silent films by Modern Times, desiredata patching by Robert Atwood, surrealist live coding by Les Duchamps, ChucK melodies by Graham Coleman, livecode backed IXI UI soundscapes with Thor Magnusson, Yee-King livecoding with one hand and triggering drums with the other, Andrew Sorenson making live funky techno with Impromptu, rounded off with a rousing gabba set by Slub expanded with Sick Lincoln. (who did I miss?)

• 19 May 2007 - PLOrk Ge conducts the first known instance of Orchestral Live Coding in a piece called "TBA" - 15 live coders split into three squadrons, directed by a central live coding conducting via text and code. Audience observes commander screen and experience ensuing soundscape and music.

• 10 August 2006 - Lusco-Fusco at Birmingham SuperCollider symposium: Paul Dirac Party

• 14 July 2005 - aa-cell (Andrew Sorensen & Andrew Brown) first perform using a very young impromptu at ACMC 2005 in Brisbane Australia.

• 7th February 2005 - Ten members of TOPLAP jam together at Club Transmediale, Club Maria, Berlin. Represented environments and languages include ChucK, JITLIB, Pure Events, Musique Literale, SuperCollider, feedback.pl, Perl, The Thingee and Lingo. images

• November 2004, ICMC, Audicle: a Context-sensitive On-the-fly Audio Programming Environment presented, Ge Wang, Perry Cook, Ananya Misra, Philip Davidson

• 26th August 2004 = TOPLAP live coding jam of audio and visuals (Perl, SC3, MAX/MSP, PD, fluxus, The Thingee), Aarhus, Denmark. http://projects.dorkbot.org/rd04/wiki/MediaFiles?action=AttachFile

• 17 July 2004 - London Placard Headphone festival. Live perl coding and drumming duet with Table, and some live lsystem grammar coding by nebogeo. http://state51.org/placard/

• 14th February 2004 - Betalounge, Hamburg. JITLIB based live coding network jam over laptop speakers as part of the changing grammars symposium. TOPLAP is born that evening in a smoky downtown bar (Zoe)

• 14th November 2003 ChucK double projection duet, premiere at Princeton. http://on-the-fly.cs.princeton.edu/listen/

• September 2003, ICMC 2003, ChucK: Concurrent, On-the-fly Programming Language presented, Ge Wang and Perry Cook

• Friday 20th June 2003 Royal College of Art, London. Live coding duet (SuperCollider 2), Nick Collins and Fabrice Mogini.

• June 14th 2003 University Of Communication, Sarajevo: code as a cinematic experience, Julian Rohrhuber

• Oct 2002 Kule Club, Berlin: Elevator Music, Julian Rohrhuber

• 7th September 2001 Julian Rohrhuber jitlib live in NY: "west nile" in polar bear club, subtonic

• Feb. 2000 "remote control lounge" network installation by J.Rohrhuber - James Mc Cartney sends open sound control code from Austin to Hamburg and changes Pattern parameters together with local participants. http://telenautik.hfbk-hamburg.de/remote.htm

• 17th June 2000 slub premiere hoxton foundry, london - antispod

80s FORTH era

• George Lewis claimed that live programming was a frequent activity in this period; though not an audience focus. I don't know of any projection of live code pre slub / rohrhuber ...Documentation is scarce. Please tell us if you have any archived sources!
• The Hub were using FORTH and the audience could wander around their computers, however they did not modify code live.
• A slashdot comment by an anonymous poster talks about a project called "masked men" which involved coding lisp live on stage in 1987.
• The earliest documented performance of live coding we know of right now: 1985 Ron Kuivila STEIM Amsterdam
• HMSL, the Hierarchical Music Specification Language, was widely used for composition and live performance. It was a Forth-based object-oriented music language with time-stamped MIDI input and output. DSP 56000 tools were added around 1990. HMSL also had cross-platform GUI tools similar to Java's AWT, but more primitive. Coding was often done while the audience was taking their seats and during intermissions. Live coding was common during informal presentations.
• PSIBER Space Deck, an interactive postscript debugger made in the late 80s, with startling code visualisations. Ahead of its time.

Walking in the presence of giants here. Cool thnkiing all around!

Earlier still (before interpreted languages)

• Text pieces, happenings in the 60s-70s? A specific example was provided by Click Nilson Click Nilson's text piece

• Renaissance maths tournaments. Fior vs Tartaglia on the cubic equation (not actually peformative unfortunately, this public competition took 40-50 days!)

• Greek philosophers debating. Not sure if this is coding, but who knows?