Live Code: Reflections on Twelve Notational Practices

Twelve hours. Twelve scenes. (Scene I: 10:00) Open public space; a makeshift stage for action. A lone woman reads philosophy, tapping notations along the limits of her own body with the tooth of a single piano key, cut off from the crowds that mill behind her, immersed in her appointed task. (Scene II: 11:30) Somewhat embarrassed, the tutor apologizes for the missing model before returning naked to resume his class, simultaneously exposing and breaking the rules in this seemingly innocuous move. The latent power relations of the life class are forced to the surface; observational drawing revealed as a never neutral act. (Scene III: 12:00 noon) A dancers body submits to the demands of a live score; her audience is invited to modify and change the rules. Both parties test the body according to the logic of instructive code; scored operative and scoring operator implicated within the performance, the line of separation between increasingly blurred. (Scene IV: 14:00) Speaking and coding unfurl within a shared time-space; theory performed as a choreography of consonants and vowels enunciated in the mouth, whilst coded phrases animate in the cursors flashing beat, the rhythm of one ever-interrupting the logic of the other. (Scene V: 14:45) The artist speaks in tongues, which to the novice might appear as impenetrable as encrypted code or lovers babble. To practice garbling returns archaic sense to the term less a form of confusion as one of sifting, the selection of choice fragments akin to the sieving of spice from refuse or from sand. (Scene VI: 15:30) Performance on paper: the pages surface like the bodys skin, the drawn mark navigates the live(d) line between seeing and thinking, between exterior and interior worlds. (Scene VII: 16:00) Intimacy is taken as substance for a solo performance; the constructed nature of the encounter affords surprising depth of connection, the tense togetherness of shared time. (Scene VIII: 19:30) Code manifests in dense veils of sound and colour; individual threads of data woven and collided to produce deep vibrating drones, the dissonant pulse of improvised, overlapping rhythm. (Scene IX: 20:00) One system is transformed into the language of another: code to sound; words to colour, image converted to a score. Layered sound waves are replaced by thin, pigmented veils worn as a shroud, the performers palette of pale pinks, oranges and indigo blue recombined over and over against the diagrammatic imperative of images scattered on the floor. (Scene X: 20.30) Combinational procedures yield complex assemblages through the play of addition and subtraction, of backtracking and reactivation. (Scene XI: 21:00) Command keys operate as invocations code, the converts spell or sermon, a means of summoning forms and forces from beyond the limits of the screen. (Scene XII: 21:30) Intervening into the space of anothers practice, each performer strives for connection yet disrupts the unfolding of action into which they reach programming is relational, to affect is also to be affected back. Twelve fragments from twelve scenes. Fragments gleaned over twelve hours, partially recollected. On the 27th July 2012, the Live Notation Unit staged a symposium and series of performances at Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, to test and question what the term live notation might signify. The Live Notation Unit is an emergent research collective established to examine the shared vocabularies that might unite two radical performance practices: Live Art and Live Coding. The research project was initiated by live artist Hester Reeve and live coder Alex McLean, working in dialogue with an international network of artists, coders and theorists including Brigid Mcleer, Dave Griffiths, Kate Sicchio, Geoff Cox, Maria X, Sam Aaron, Andre Stitt, Thor

Magnusson, Yuen Fong Ling and Wrongheaded. Twelve scenes. Twelve hours. Twelve practices. It would be foolhardy to imagine that consensus might be reached in relation to the proposed term live notation. The attempt was not to homogenize or flatten the concerns of such diverse practices into agreement, into accord. Both live art and live coding speak in a language that is not easy to translate into other vocabularies; moreover, the nurturing of bespoke language operates as a constitutive act, cultivating nascent discourse specific to these still emergent practices. The intent then is not simply to use the language of one for describing the other. Interdisciplinary exchange does not just involve the trade of terms and phrases, a bartering across borders in which new vocabularies are begged, borrowed, thieved. Rather perhaps, the attempt is to speak in a more provisional voice, searching for a language provoked by the encounter of interdisciplinary exchange, not wholly belonging to either side. Rather than focusing on the specificity of individual practices, this text offers a more propositional response, elaborating on some of the interweaving issues and ideas provoked by the Live Notation Unit event as a whole, identifying the possibility of shared principles that might resonate with the concept of live notation.

Exposing the hidden workings / Capacity for transformation

To describe a practice as revelatory is not to offer judgment on the nature of insight afforded therein but rather signals towards the possibilities of revealing, exposing or of bringing something hidden to the surface, operating at a more tactical level. Revelatory practices strive to shed light on the hidden workings of thinking and making, unveiling the decision-making processes, the unfolding of labour. To expose the inner workings of a practice is to foreground process, emphasizing the methods and mechanics of production, the durational taking place of something happening (live). Live notation might refer to the methods used for externalizing and articulating this unfolding, a means of expression that remains faithful to the process rather than performed in search of finished form. The unseen thinking within the event of reading is materialized as a system of strokes and taps, thinkings invisible rhythms rendered palpable as coded idiolect akin to the dots and dashes of Morse. Or else, the artists actions might interrupt the habitual rhythms of a given scene, momentarily illuminating the codes and rules operative therein, drawing attention to their scripted nature. Social situations are choreographed through complex scores of learnt behaviour, drummed into the body, practiced until naturalized. Class conventions are disrupted by the presence of the master naked; the coded rules that tacitly underpin the event of looking, of regarding the other, brought into sharp relief. The revelation of digital code through the performance of live programming involves showing and sharing the unfolding logic of a language so instrumental to contemporary life, but in which so few are fluent. That which is unreadable can easily become hidden, concealed. Code is an operating language: learn the language of the operator (programmer or code-writer) or be forever operative (subject to anothers code). For every operative there is someone pulling the strings; the rules by which the body bends have been drawn by other bodies, we are each complicit in devising and performing the laws that bind. To reveal the relation between operator and operative problematizes the nature of this bond, the play of power within. Yet, revelation involves more than critique of hidden structure; it has a transformative potential. No longer working behind the scenes, the operator is witnessed in the process of devising the rules, whilst witness to the implications of their own actions. Action is shown as never neutral, no action truly without consequence. Real time feedback creates the opportunity to amend ones action live, in order to change or modify the trajectory of

an unfolding sequence of events. To witness the impact of ones actions renders visible the logic of cause and effect, at the same time as creating a momentary gap in which to conceive things as otherwise.

Negotiable rules / Interpretative interference

It is tempting perhaps to view the role of operator (code writer) as one of power and the operative (written respondent) as subordinate, where the former writes the rules whilst the latter must only follow and obey. However, whilst rules and codes can function as a means of limitation and constraint, they can also be productive, generative. Sticking to the rule can yield surprisingly creative results; coded logic can be pushed beyond its limits, pressured to reveal unexpected possibilities therein. Moreover, rules and codes are not always passively endured. At times, submission to the imperative of instruction operates as a willful tactic for evacuating personal expression from a practice, a voluntary abdication of individual creativity within the creative act. Surrendering to the logic of a rule can involve the loss of control, of ones agency, authorship or authority. Rule-based practices can attempt to knock back or dampen the habits and hang-ups of the structural self; artistic ego bypassed or sidestepped by giving oneself up or over to the unfolding conditions of a given code, script or score. The artist becomes a functionary charged with an operation to complete, a task to perform. In one sense, the artists body might be conceived as a processing machine, acting out algorithms, performing code. Yet, human inflection occurs within even the most banal task, the most prescriptive operation. Even the simplest sign is subject to interpretation, its meaning unstable, rarely fixed. There is no single system of code or notation to which the body responds; instructions are thus apprehended according to different, even contradictory, operational keys. Words can be comprehended at a level of both linguistic signification and formal shape; the curve and line of letters readable in alphabetic terms or simply mimicked as directional contours. The same words can be processed as instructional code or as poetic provocation, a diagram or map. Instructions can travel at different speeds depending on whether they are seen or heard. While (exhausted! = true) if (landed) {jump}. The body stammers, not fully knowing which system of translation to deploy. Even given the strictest instructions, the body is often prone to embellish, unable to resist adding its own mark. Live notation thus refers to the unfolding of a score, and the scored marks of the operative performed in response. Yet, for the human operative, codes and rules function as points of leverage or pressure against which to work. They have the capacity to be tested or negotiated rather than simply and obediently followed. Rules can be reviewed or dismantled once they begin to stifle action or no longer offer provocation, once they fail to create tension or have become dull. Live notation documents these moments of resistance, refusal and reworking of the rules, the moments of experimental interference, discrepancy and excess.

Intervention / Invention
Performing code might operate less in terms of an obedient following of a codes logic, with the attendant loss of agency often associated with operating according to preprogrammed rules. Rules can be accepted electively, approached in the spirit of a game or play. Rules can be changed even whilst working within their frame, instructions modified even as they are followed. Performing a score involves rewriting the rules through the vocabulary of the body. The operative can also write their own rules or code; at times, the roles of operator and operative become indistinguishable, practiced as one. The generation of code or rules can be taken as a creative starting

point, comprehended as the ground upon which to work, the germinal conditions into which further action is subsequently written and performed. Writing the rules creates the system within which to then work. One instruction sets up a rhythm, which then might be intercepted or deviated in its course. The first line of code creates a loopstitch; a further decision is needed to draw the next line through. The writing of code never begins with a truly blank screen, much as the stage of performance is never truly empty. Both are haunted by previous iterations, the trace of earlier actions. Every newly conceived line is written upon the ground of preceding inscription, inserted into an already existing system of notation. However, existing rules and codes are not to be taken as given (as fixed or unchangeable) but rather taken-as-given, appropriated as a found material with which to work, rework. Here, the writing of code (of rules, script or score) is not conceived as an algorithmic operation whose logic is simply set in motion and allowed to run its course; code has the capacity to be unraveled and rewritten as events unfold. Live notation reveals the rules or codes even as they are being amended, revealing the decision-making processes within even the most coded practice. Analogous to the pulsing live body within performance, the flashing cursor marks the point of decision-making of consciousness perhaps within the live programming of code. The cursor is the threshold where human and machine touch, entangle; it is the line separating what exists from what is still yet to come. The cursor is the location of action and retraction, of cut and paste, of deletion and erasure, insertion and manipulation. Live notation might unfold recursively through looped repeats and circuitous returns, at times un-writing the rules in order to move forwards. The performer navigates a course of action by intuiting when to yield to the rule or code and when to reassert control, when to respond and when to interrupt. One force must give way to allow for the emergence of another; action can soon falter in the absence of the decision taken to stop or switch tack. To improvise within a given structure requires skillfulness and attention, a capacity for biding ones time and knowing when and how to act.

Simultaneity each producing the other

Rules can be written as a test or challenge, as a frame or constraint within which to work. Repeatedly pushing at the limits of a rules logic can create moments of elasticity within its law, revealing momentary openings or loopholes from within which new lines of action might materialize. The rule can become a space of rehearsal for exercising ones capacity to improvise within its seemingly closed terms, a limit against which to practice the search for new openings, new ways of operating therein. Artists can work with the creative pressure of rules encountered within the public realm or met upon the surface of a page or stage or screen. Live notation involves the cultivation of a vocabulary for describing the experience of working with something, of working something through. It is a form of notation intent on observing and documenting the conditions of its own coming into being. Live notation seemingly involves working with the terms of an existing language or notational system, in order to move beyond it, in order to craft a new vocabulary, which alone is adequate to the task of describing that endeavour. Live notation might be considered as the devising of a system of notation through which to articulate the experience of such a quest. It involves devising the rules or score through which to bring something about, something into being, at the same time as devising a new form of notation for describing the nature of the new being called forth. An attempt is made to bring about something unexpected, something truly improvised or experimental, without then capturing that thing too hastily, naming it through the language of what is already

named and known. Within live notation, a language of description emerges simultaneously to the experience it tries to account for, where one produces the conditions for the other. In this sense perhaps, live notation cannot be located as either prior to or after the event of a performance, but rather happens within and through it. Live notation describes a form of imminent (and immanent) invention performed at the brink of experience, a means of articulation emerging simultaneous to (unique and in complete fidelity to) the emergent ontology that it attempts to describe.1 As such, live notation cannot be crystallized as a fixed and repeatable language, since the ontology it describes is ever restless, always disappearing even as it is coming into being, endlessly necessitating new live forms of notation.
Copyright Emma Cocker, 2013 Text commissioned by the Live Notation Unit in response to a symposium and series of performances at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol on 27th July 2012. No part of this text should be copied or reproduced without the authors permission. See http://not-yet-there.blogspot.co.uk/

1 This conceptualization of live notation draws on Antonio Negris notion of kairos, the restless
instant where naming and the thing named attain existence (in time). See Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, (New York and London, Continuum, 2003). The kairotic dimension of live notation will be further developed as part of an extended article, Live Code: Notations on a Kairotic Practice, proposed for a forthcoming issue of Performance Research, Vol 18, No.5. On Writing and Digital Media.