Project Description

The Long Now is a subproject of Spirits in Complexity - Making kin with Experimental Music Systems (funded by the Austrian Sience Fund FWF AR-821).

The Long Now delimits the perceptual space and explores the materialities used (code, sound, image) in their temporal dimensions in order to understand an experience of time as an introspective, mental and, at the same time, physical experience: an intra-active flowing with the algorithmic other.

While performing, our two custom live-coding systems communicate with each other. This means that the audio level is informed by the visual level and vice versa; they are, so to speak, entangled or form entangled agencies: the two sides do not exist before their intra-actions.

In the context of performing with algorithmic agents or other non-human technological entities, we can observe a mutual and reciprocal adaptation that takes place in a constantly evolving feedback loop. This loop leads to the emergence of properties that could neither be designed nor invented from an external perspective of control or analysis. Our project aims to make this emergence potential artistically tangible.

Live coding emerged in the context of club music in the 1990s and describes a performative practice in which the performers create and modify their software-based instruments during the performance and make them accessible to the audience through video projections of code. The idea is - to put it very simply - to give the audience an insight into what is happening on stage (Zmölnig 2016, McLean 2010). Understood as an intermedial, generative art practice, live coders question the distinction between traditional forms of composition, interpretation and instrumental design (Zmölnig 2006), both on an auditory and visual level.

Live coding is a versatile and open paradigm that is not bound to a single genre or aesthetic niche (Vasilakos 2021) and pushes the if-then thinking of computer logic towards the what-if thinking that is crucial for a speculative, radical experimental art practice.

It is never about formally working something out in advance (Manning and Massumi 2014) - the potential lies in a thinking-in-action, so it can be seen as a form of artistic knowledge activated in and through practice, a knowledge-in-action. This makes it a suitable approach for radical and risk-taking sonic and visual experimentation processes without the fear of irregular, uneven, distorted and incoherent results. Even more, the practice of live coding inherently implies an artistic willingness to face unpredictable events (de Campo and Rohrhuber 2004) and to accept the supposedly ugly or unfamiliar (Collins 2003).

The writing of code (the notation) is not to describe a desired process or outcome, but to take the next step in an open-ended exploratory process. Rather than reducing the role of the human operator or artist, live coding requires a higher level of attention and tactile intelligence. It is a practice of timing and timeliness, of kairos, i.e. finding and recognizing the right time to act, which is a practice of tact (Blackwell 2022).

The intrinsic experience of liveliness during live coding is often described as flow or a flow state. Flow here describes a hyper-focused state of total engagement in the process of an activity. An intrinsic value is attached to the process itself. This flow state is also based on a concrete experience of close interaction with an Other, an interaction that creates a rare sense of unity with these normally alien entities (Cskszentmihlyi 2002).

While short, concise - often club-oriented - sessions usually predominate in this young media art practice (digital art), in The Long Now we want to favor the state of flow, of being in the moment and stimulate contemplation over many hours, a contemplation about and in code. Last but not least, this aims to address the reality of our lives, implicitly or explicitly dominated by algorithmic actors, in artistic form.

Barad, Karen. 2007. “Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.” Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Collins, Nick and Alex McLean, Julian Rohrhuber, Adrian Ward (2003). “Live coding in laptop performance”. Organised Sound, 8, 321-330.

Cskszentmihlyi, Mihaly. 2002. “Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness”. London: Rider, 2002.

de Campo, Alberto and Julian Rohrhuber. 2004. “else if – live coding, Strategien später Entscheidung“. In: Medienkunst als Schnittstelle von Kunst, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Heidelberg: Whois, 2004.

Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi. 2014. “Thought in the act: passages in the ecology of experience.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McLean, Alex et al. 2010. “Visualisation of Live Code.” Proceedings of Electronic Visualisation and the Arts 2010, 26– 30.

Vasilakos, Konstantınos. 2021. "Exploring Live Coding as Performance Practice," Porte Akademik, vol.21, 21-37.

Zmölnig, Johannes. 2016. “Audience perception of code”. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 12:2, 207-212.

Zmölnig, Johannes and Gerhard Eckel. 2007. “Live coding: an Overview.” International Computer Music Conference, ICMC 2007, 295–298.