Live coding applauds errors. The personal computers that many people use every day are built to conceal their inner workings. Live coding resists this by making the process of writing and editing code visible—including mistakes.
At live coding performances, the ‘show your screen’ mantra celebrates the process of creating music and visuals in real time. Sometimes live jam performances will be created from scratch, which means starting from a blank screen and making it up as you go. The only rule is that the audience has to clap at the end.
Code is a creative medium. It’s more than a set of instructions. For me, these gatherings symbolise acts of radical computing, where coding feels accessible, liberating and imperfect, and all you need to join in is a computer.