Decoding Tendencies in Live Coding

February 23, 2026 Summer 2025

Over ten weeks this summer, we approached code as notation, examining how live coding aligns with and diverges from other forms of making and from longer histories of notational systems and computational practice. In live coding, we enact thought in real time, unfolding partial expressions, revisions, and fragments. This process reveals tendencies that emerge when thinking through pattern and highlights the embodied, temporal, and performative dimensions of reasoning through code. By treating code as provisional, participants explored the cognitive and temporal dynamics of live coding, observing how language design and system architecture shape thinking and expression as processes evolve.

Live coding emerges as a culturally situated practice that enacts encoded intentions while connecting to longer symbolic systems and embodied reasoning. When reading through Live Coding: A User’s Manual, we saw how practitioners often negotiate shared conventions that shape expectations around terseness, readability, optimization, and temporal awareness. They cultivate sensitive systems for real-time exploration, developing intimate knowledge of their programs; as familiarity grows, so do expressive and conceptual capacities. By thinking in public, practitioners make computation tangible, revealing its poetic and performative potential.

Live coding treats code as a malleable, sculptural medium that materializes thought across multiple temporal scales. It functions as both representation and realization—expressing intentions while enacting them, making ideas perceptible and actionable. Human and machine temporalities collide: the system clock ticks steadily, the program counter moves instruction by instruction, and sequential logic enforces strict order, while perception, attention, and decision-making flow more flexibly. These durational registers converse across micro-, meso-, and macro-scales, revealing moments of alignment and tension between precise machine timing and human subjectivity.

Navigating these scales—debugging, processing, and responding to output—can be challenging, yet this tension becomes generative: a productive friction that exposes the labor of mediation and breaks open the black box of computation. Its temporal elasticity lets us perceive patterns, strategies, and tendencies as they emerge, situating durational practice within wider cultural, performative, and temporal contexts.

To ground these concepts, participants engaged in hands-on exercises. We began by analyzing Steve Reich's Clapping Music arranged in multiple live coding languages, relying solely on visual cues. By shifting focus away from technical mastery, participants encountered code as visual material—revealing what the code itself makes visible without prior familiarity or context. They observed how language syntax, abstraction, and prior experience shape engagement: what feels intuitive in one language can seem opaque in another. Using the vocabulary of the Cognitive Dimensions of Notation, participants learned to read software aesthetically and performatively, seeing language features as generative constraints that structure what can be imagined, articulated, and performed.

Reflections, demos, workshops, and co-coding planted seeds for exploration. Drawing on the proceedings of Algorithmic Pattern Salon, participants traced symbolic lineages—from Andean quipu and loom drafts to braid diagrams, crochet patterns, Islamic geometric designs, and musical scores—while engaging both technical and expressive dimensions of notation. Participants worked across several live coding languages, particularly Sonic Pi, Strudel, and Hydra, using comparison to surface how different environments shape musical, visual, and temporal thinking. Additional systems—from ORCA and TouchDesigner to custom-built environments—expanded this notational ecology, making key theoretical concepts legible through practice. Guest speakers DJ_Dave and c_robo_ further grounded these explorations by sharing how such tendencies manifest in their own live coding practices.

Variables carried memory and intention, functions acted as verbs, and parameters shaped nuance and expression. By prioritizing openness over rigid definitions, participants activated the expressive potential of code across multiple notational variants, working with rhythmic patterns, visual motifs, and algorithmic transformations to foreground algorithmic expression as an artistic engagement.

By the end of the summer, participant projects reflected live coding as an ongoing negotiation between human intention and machine execution. They mapped patterns onto musical systems, transformed text into algorithmic performance, developed improvisational compositions, and built multisensory interfaces. Examining code through notational perspectives challenges assumptions about what code is and how it functions, creating space for sustained algorithmic curiosity. Prolonged engagement within this collaborative environment supported iterative learning and collective exploration, allowing participants to encounter live coding as a durational, participatory practice rather than a fixed process. This first iteration underscored the value of supportive spaces in which critical conversations about live coding can unfold and its larger ontological and conceptual implications can be explored.

Looking ahead to Winter 2026, Are.na will serve as a shared platform for readings, references, and student projects, with participants deciding whether their contributions enter a public-facing archive. Class time will emphasize peer-to-peer learning and collective inquiry, balancing core materials with optional resources for deeper exploration. Rather than presenting live coding solely as individual virtuosity or technical mastery, the course will continue to focus on methodology, theory, and discussion around live coding as a cultural and notational practice. Demos and technical workshops support collaborative exploration, highlighting moments that emerge from shared troubleshooting, collective listening, and the vulnerabilities inherent in coding live.