Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective

Performance/mathematics: a dramatisation of mathematical methods

This essay conceptualises the notion of performance mathematics in terms of a paradoxical relationship with the constructed notion of truth, which is shared by theatrical and mathematical performance. Specifically, I argue that these two disciplines can and cannot be reconciled with truthfulness. Grounding my comparison on the notion of an axiomatic method common to both disciplines, I argue that theatrical and mathematical performance can speak of truths only when these truths are properly staged or methodologically grounded according to the internal rules and conditions laid out by each discipline. But in the same way that these truths can be constructed, or they can be done, so they can be undone. Arguing that mathematics can be described as a performance of specific outcomes involving abstract objects and functions, I trace a cross-disciplinary comparative analysis of performance elements (especially axioms and functions), drawing on a number of theatre and mathematical theories. Some suggestions are also put forward in terms of the connection between the performance of mathematised texts and computational mathematics, particularly in terms of an inherent poetics and theatricality inside the performance-oriented, mathematised languages of digital computing

Culture et cinéma

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Psychologie de l’artiste

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Les fonctions individuelles et sociales de l'art

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Objet et méthodes de l’esthétique

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Psychologie de l’artiste

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