Livecoding As Realistic Artistic Practice. By Rob Myers on February 5.
Realism in art is the absence of sentiment. Livecoding is writing software in public while presenting the source code and its output along with the programmer as a kind of performance. Hacking (computer programming) is usually a solitary activity and hackers (computer programmers) rarely get to hack on (program) software that they themselves will use for their own ends or benefit directly from. Livecoding turns hacking into a public, social, self-directed activity by turning it into an artistic event. By doing this livecoding briefly restores the kind of shared social context and the relationship of hackers to the fruits of their labour that Richard Stallman described in his account of life in the MIT AI Lab of the 1970s[1]. As Simon Yuill points out[2] about this account, Stallman describes the proletarianisation of hacking as business interests took over from pure (state funded) research. If livecoding romanticised hacking or was simply an exercise in professional nostalgia for a lost age of authentic relations between hacker and machine then it would be sentimental. Sentimentalising hacking would add nothing to culture or to the socioeconomic situation of hackers. It would mis-represent its subject to its audience. It would be distraction, a comforter, spectacle. more... http://robmyers.org/weblog/2010/02/livecoding-as-realistic-artistic-practice.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
