Publisher's Synopsis
Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice gaining attention across cultural and technical fields-from music and the visual arts through to computer science. Live Coding: A User's Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multi-authored book-by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers-provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice's future forms. Series Overview: The Software Studies series publishes the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at once culturally and technically literate, reflecting the reality of today's software culture. The field of software studies engages and contributes to the research of computer scientists, the work of software designers and engineers, and the creations of software artists. Software studies tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society. It does this both in the scholarly modes of the humanities and social sciences and in the software creation/research modes of computer science, the arts, and design.
