I was particularly interested in point which Geoff raised around the ‘body’. For quite a while, the absence of the body was problematised, perennially, in all discussions of performance of digital music (how can you be virtuosic/ expressive/ engage the audience/ not look like you’re checking your email etc. etc. if you’re just tapping away with limited-degrees-of-freedom-controllers). This is one of the (many) things I find so refreshing about Live Coding: The disembodied aspect is not a loss, but an interesting new direction: suddenly the relationship between music making and thinking is brought to the fore.

During the discussion session, Geoff raised the issue of bodies in performance, and the different connotations of the Body in live art and live coding. From a live art/ critical theory perspective, you (Geoff) seemed to imply some negative connotations of body: body as site of attack; body as the ‘other’ etc. I confess to being pretty naive wrt critical theory, so am not sure where these conceptions derive from, but would be v. interested to know if I misheard, or if not, then to know the origins of these conceptions. From a Cognitive Science perspective, the connotations of body are rich, lively and all together positive: the physical form in which our mind/ brains are embodied and hence situated in the world; the site of nourishing interactions with Everything Else, of potential, rather than a site of vulnerability or attack.

I am particularly interested as I am currently playing with some ideas (in a slightly absurd, non-conventional way) of what ‘situated’ could mean for (computational) algorithms and sound, beside adding a mic input and listener module to some code inside a machine. I share an interest in open ended computation, but perhaps in writing Lively code, rather than Live code, by which I mean digital procedures which I don’t actively re-write whilst they are running. This is partly v. practical (I play ‘cello so pursue a ‘hands free’ approach, which negates the re-writing of scripts at performance time by a human) and partly conceptual (I was raised in an Alife environment, so am interested in the gap between digital computation and open ended biological processes).
I am approaching this by unpacking the metaphors / conceptual models which accompany the reconceptualisation of cognition within the cognitive sciences – i.e. computationalist to embodied views – in the context of music/ sound. I’ve love to discuss all of this with anyone with an interest, but for now would just like to re-visit the “Concept of Body” in Live Art (critical theory ?) vs Live Coding (cognitive science ?) …

Hope your further meetings go well and I look forward to seeing/ hearing about the outcomes of this collaboration.

Best,
Alice