I’ll present a keynote at the International Conference on Live Coding at NYU-Shanghai on June 1st, called Live Coding in the Wild: On-the-fly Programming in a Broader Musical Ecosystem:

20 Years after the founding of TOPLAP, with hundreds of algoraves presented, (now!) eight international conferences, articles in the most significant journals in the field, coverage on the BBC, etc. etc., is live coding still ‘a new direction in electronic music and video’, or merely a well-established and accepted interface for artistic creation? Are the ‘old guard’ still sceptical of laptop performance, or has it been rendered dull in its ubiquity? And after two decades of proselytisation by movement founders – still dressed in t-shirts and sneakers though increasingly grey-haired and grizzled – who even is the old guard now, anyway? Is it time to finally abandon ‘drafting’ the Manifesto, and instead contemplate the practice of on-the-fly programming with a mind to not only its commonality, but its integration within a broader toolbox of music and art making? This talk attempts to answer all these questions (and more!) while reflecting on the strengths and limitations of live coding as a technique/interface/philosophy, alongside how and why it’s subtly insinuated itself into the wider artistic practices of so many.