[spectre] live coding alternatives - workshop - aarhus2015

[Geoff Cox]

CALL - Live Coding Alternatives Workshop

Call for position papers and performances
as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference
http://aarhus2015.org/
17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark
http://www.livecodenetwork.org/live-coding-alternatives/

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic.

Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked?

We welcome analytical and theoretical papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes. 

Initial areas of interest might include: 
* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices 
* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics
* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production
* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research
* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding     
* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies
* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website (http://www.livecodenetwork.org/).

Important dates:
Proposals due: 20 May (email abstracts/proposals to gcox at dac.au.dk)
Results made known: 31 May 
Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus

Organizers:
Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK).
Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK). 
Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK).