Thoughts on reading from ‘Live-Coding: A User’s Manual’.
The reading
My favorite is the “thinking in public” definition.
I like to interpret this as working through problems while the audience has transparency to what you are doing. If there isn’t the observed tackling of an issue, then it’s just the performance of a known process (which itself is also interesting… I love process videos on instagram that document cooking or carpentry – however I think these process videos aren’t live-coding if you aren’t allowing the audience to see the process in real-time). [For this reason I often like to incorporate a constraint or a challenge during my devised live-coding performances, because I want the audience to see me struggle in the process.]
Relating to dance
Despite being a performance art, is dance the most-divorced-from-realtime art? I think it’s a contender for the most misleading in terms of the audience:professional gap for not understanding the time it takes to develop a skill (think of ballet dancers starting at 3 years old, or the hours of time it took to nail a trick the audience doesn’t understand the technicals of).
Another way of saying this is – I [personally] think the potential for failure or the observation of the artist’s recovery of failure is the most interesting part of live-coding or improvisation.
My main apparatus for aerial is multicordes, which I often describe as “predicament” performance: this is largely because the high number of cordes increases the potential error or variance in the apparatus (i.e. the propensity for a cord not behaving as you intended).