Cicla Por Segundo / Cycles Per Second: livecoderA Praxis And Reflections
Laura Balboa“A livecodera is a code worker (which is never neutral) who has to fight for her rights on several spaces. Daily she faces different types of gender violence (symbolic, psychological, economical, physical, sexual), but she debates them in order to mend it collectively.”
-Quote from the livecoderA manifesto
Live coding can be roughly described as the artistic, creative, performative, and audiovisual practice that occurs with the improvisation of computational source code operations. The code is written and compiled serially, generating or processing live visuals, sounds, music, or all at once while projected for the audience to see. Live coding has been translated into Spanish as “código vivo” and “código al vuelo” (from the term on-the-fly programming) to contextualize localized practices. In turn, from the perspective of feminisms, and as a node of the international live coding community, livecoderA is a group that defines itself as an international collective of female live coders or live coding women who first published their activities online on March 8, 2022, established by the United Nations as International Women's Day.
From my practice as an autonomous researcher on experimental sound and music related to Mexico, I encountered the livecoderA community as a collective to investigate further since it coincidentally connected with past and present practices in my profession. From 2007 to 2010, I worked in one of the most relevant art and technology centers in Mexico City (The Multimedia Center/Centro Multimedia, referred to as CMM), where I learned about technology usage and development through collaboration and sharing. This enabled me to establish a close relationship with the open-source community I maintain and work with until today. With these touchpoints, I started to create contextual and historiographic documentation with a critical analysis of the origins of live coding in Mexico and its connection with Latin America. This work was proposed and pitched to the director of the CMM after she commissioned me to create an event related to women in live coding. The initiative was named “Cicla por segundo: praxis y reflexión livecodera” (Cycles per second: Livecodera Praxis and Reflections) and it included events that took place from December 7th to 10th, 2022: live performances, a series of online talks, and concerts at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, also known as CNA). It is worth mentioning that this project aimed to become the start of more events alike with a clear gender perspective, interwoven with the history and records of CMM and in conjunction with members of the live coding community. Strangely, it was the first time such an event was organized in the institution, and I hope this continues and does not become an isolated event.
The live performance and panel programs were co-curated with Alexandra Cárdenas, Malitzin Cortés, Marianne Teixido, and Libertad Figueroa, all active live coders. The online panels took place on December 7th with two connected sessions in which I created a historical-contextual review with a gender perspective of the origins and community practices of live coding in the CMM and a transfeminist techno-critical reflection on the aspects of computational technologies and software development connected to global south people.
The panels included two topics and were streamed on Centro Multimedia's social media channels:
a. () Community praxis: Reflections and Interactions Within the Live Coding Communities. Participants: Malitzin Cortés, Alexandra Cárdenas, and Iris Saladino. Introduction and Moderation by: Laura Balboa
b. Compiling: Development, Embodiment, and Incarnation1 of Code. Participants: Marianne Teixido and Celeste Betancur. Introduction and moderation by Laura Balboa.
Given my role as a facilitator and moderator of these conversations, in this essay, I will focus mainly on what I consider the key contributions of the participants due to their importance in diversifying thought and creative endeavors from female-identified, queer, trans, and non-binary people who use and develop technology in Mexico and Latin America.
() Community praxis: Reflections and Interactions Within the Live Coding Communities.
In an initial account of her practices and after many years of living in Mexico, Colombian composer, musician, and livecoderA Alexandra Cárdenas (currently based in Berlin) mentioned how she fortuitously encountered an ad offering free of charge assistance for sound artists and musicians at the Taller de Audio (Sound Department) of the CMM. The department's team consisted of Ernesto Romero, Ezequiel Netri, and Eduardo Meléndez. As a reference, around 2004, the Taller de Audio became very politically active and self-defined as a knowledge-generation space for artistic creation using free and open-source software and hardware.
At the CMM, Alexandra witnessed the contrast between the academic environment she came from (majoring in Musical Composition at the Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia) and the community practice of free and open source software culture where the main values are based on freedom of access to study, share, modify and improve the design, code, and implementation of software. Alexandra recognized that she could not explore musical ideas, practice, and present her work as a composer before she incorporated the computer as her main instrument and became part of the community.
She also described the normalized discrimination suffered by women in music conservatories, using as an example an opera that she composed for almost three years and that she never got the opportunity to present. Using a computer, beyond being a direct outlet to show her work, emancipated her as a composer. This is how the live coding community provided her with a sense of belonging, presence, and most of all, visibility and inclusion.
In turn, the creative programmer, Argentine composer, and livecoderA, Iris Saladino, based in Buenos Aires, mentioned that she consciously wanted to have an influence away-from-keyboard in the formation of the Argentinian live coding community. Iris built a community through workshops, meetings, presentations, and meet-ups in the technology industry, the music media, and electronic arts spaces. In addition, she participated in the creation of an initiative driven by opening a public Telegram channel called CLiC (Live Coders Collective)2 with the participation of around 500 people with a clear policy of inclusion, codes of conduct of respect for diversity, leaving aside competition and the authority of knowledge and focusing on the non-utilitarian to debate and generate collective knowledge. Iris describes CLiC as a self-managed entity that generates links of collaboration and cooperation for the strengthening of the social fabric.
Consecutively, the musician, architect, creative technologist, and livecodeA Malitzin Cortés ponders the importance of communitarian coexistence and how affective ties are created between women, thereby referring to Alexandra Cárdenas and Iris Saladino. She alluded to the fact that there are diverse opinions but that the community is constantly updating itself and self-defining based on constant dialogue, even at an international level.
Moreover, Malitzin confirmed my hypothesis (presented at the introduction of the panel) about live cinema as a practice that preceded live coding in Mexico. For example, she mentioned Sandra Real (also known as VJ Chana) and her study of the history of Mexican Live Cinema3 as relevant work to support this theory. In addition, she recalled a conversation with the artist and collaborator Iván Abreu on the term live cinema coding, where they recognized traits and similarities in the performative and operational nature of both practices. She highlighted the role of the CMM as a seeding ground for live coders4 where practices and communities spread and pollinated other centers and organizations, both institutional and independent.
By the end of the segment, the three panelists agreed that the live coding community has its values in the philosophical, ethical, and humanistic openness to sharing knowledge and caring for an inclusive and safe environment for people who participate regardless of their age, gender identification, educational background, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or origin. Specifically, Alexandra mentioned her experience forming the livecoderA group as a conversation with the composer, academic, and improviser Shelley Knotts, with whom she was planning an International Women's Day event. For Alexandra, live coding is a feminist and decolonial practice; an event on that day would make it openly visible. She recalls that around 80 people participated in the event, producing, networking, and organizing over two months on a bilingual Telegram channel in English and Spanish.
Concerning a gender perspective, Alexandra mentioned the existence of a much more equitable status quo today. She noted the importance of not fetishizing technology, not objectifying people, and the human values that the musician, programmer, and academic Alex McLean has generated from within the community. Alexandra affirms that music is a collective artistic practice at its core and that the stereotype of the composer or musician as a recluse is contradictory. For her, live coding also brings back the enjoyment of music and art through instantaneous sharing, counteracting the idea of genius and perfection propagated by music conservatories.
Iris complemented the statement by mentioning the isolation she felt during her academic training. She realized a systemic problem exists where competitiveness is reproduced and reinforced to measure people’s knowledge and translate creation as hierarchical power. In addition, she said, this can be amplified by gender discrimination and become very violent towards women. Forging resistance to that system is crucial, which is why the role of live coders is so important to her.
To conclude their participation, Iris and Malintzin made a relevant connection to the second talk by elaborating on the context of contributions made by programmers in Latin America. For example, when Iris wanted to do remote sessions with live coder Rangga Purnama Aji from Indonesia, they decided to use Estuary5, a live coding platform to create sound, music, and images from a web browser, but latency and low bandwidth became an issue. Iris looked for other methods, such as using a local network tool to connect multiple live coders and allow collective coding in a common text editor from multiple computers called Troop6. Since Iris insisted on having remote ensembles and because the biggest problem was the lagging of audio rendering, the group concluded that a stable, collaborative browser-based code editor was needed to manage multiple algorithms in a peer-to-peer system, and this is how a new tool was born: Flok7.
Flok was developed in Argentina by Damián Silvani with open-source contributions from developers on the Internet. This tool facilitates collaborative code editing, enables cross-platform remote coding in browsers, and is compatible with Tidal Cycles, Hydra, FoxDot, and SuperCollider, among other programming environments. This online editor improves the operations for code reception, algorithm execution, and audio rendering, making the workflow more efficient to avoid latency problems.
At the end of the panel, we concluded that the ideas coming from the challenges faced in Latin America, such as precarious infrastructures, have generated a development practice that should be recognized as important contributions in the field.
Compiling: Development, Embodiment, and Incarnation of Code
Digital artist, researcher, musician, and cultural mediator Marianne Teixido recounted her presence at CMM to do community service at the Laboratorio de Imágenes en Movimiento (Moving Image Lab), where she witnessed the political use of free and open-source software from the neighboring lab, the Taller de Audio, by then renamed as The Audio Laboratory.
Marianne struggled to pay for proprietary software licenses and discovered other ways to create from open-source software by learning Tidal Cycles and Processing. She was a student of Alexandra Cárdenas and recognized how this participation expanded her collaboration networks. Marianne defends the value of friendship in feminist practices and defines conviviality as a technology in itself. She explained how in her early days using computers, she felt uneasy with the fact that many core developers were mostly men fitting certain stereotypes. To change the status quo, she learned to code and trained herself to contribute to a better gender distribution. Through these collaborations and friendships, she formed the PiranhaLab8 Collective.
Marianne's work has an important social, critical, and techno-feminist component, and, in her recent practice, she brings forward a cyber-hack feminist approach. In one of her projects, she works with processing and re-signifying data fetched from digital networks, especially social media. The project “Notes of Absence” 9 seeks to redistribute and increase the visibility of data published on Twitter (now X) related to violence against women who disappeared, especially during the pandemic. In addition, it explores producing a collective feminist artificial intelligence by providing intelligences that reflect on how technology is used concerning culture.
Marianne has forged projects for the creation of what she calls “feminist artificial intelligence systems in (de)construction” with the work of the R.A.M. collective [Redes Autónomas de Memoria] or (Autonomous Memory Networks)10 which she formed in 2022 with multimedia artist Milena Pafundi11 and programmer and livecoderA Florencia Alonso12. Another example is an event held in Calafou13 in Catalonia, Spain, called the 4th TransHackFeminist Convergence (THF!) 2022, where R.A.M. developed “Can machines speak?”14, a project that critically analyses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to rethink its use for feminism and transfeminism.
For Marianne, collaborations are important. She narrated her experience during a series of workshops she gave in Colombia in 2017, where the audiovisual collective RGGTRN15 (that she is part of) had valuable participation with the local scene. They experimented with conceptual exercises of creating languages based on esolangs or esoteric-exotic programming languages conceptually used to create epistemological programming paradigms. These languages are creative exercises focused on pushing the boundaries of conventional functions in computational and binary language design. The events gave birth to some important software projects that were mentioned in the panel and that I will provide context for later in this text.
While writing an academic paper, the Colombian multi-instrumentalist, artist, programmer, and livecoderA Celeste Betancur collaborated with the Estuary team and developed CQenze, the first language external to Tidal Cycles, which at that time was the main environment in use on the Estuary platform. The study explains how CQenze places the user at the tool's core. This mini-language transforms the symbology and sampling structure of Tidal Cycles to give full agency to the user to define the symbols on their own. At this point in the panel, Celeste Betancur mentions her connection to Marianne.
As a result of the sessions in Colombia, Marianne, Celeste, and Jessica Rodríguez17 were interested in processing live video in the same manner as in live coding, which gave birth later to the CineVivo18 project developed by Celeste Betancur. This application is described as a conceptual tool for live visual presentations where artificial language (code) can become a second layer of communication and visual information.
To contextualize the thinking behind Celeste Betancur's projects, in this text, I have to develop how she conceptually connected the development of CQenze with CineVivo, where she stated that we are facing an evident socioeconomic problem in Latin America. Celeste mentioned that the activity of hacking in Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil (and throughout Latin America) arises from the resolution of problems through the use of technology from precariousness. This is how free and open-source software bears fruit in these geographies due to the lack of monetary resources to acquire proprietary tools. Celeste began developing software out of the need to crack applications because licenses cost more than ten times the minimum monthly wage in Colombia.
Celeste defines "personal environments" as the spaces that separate us from devices we adapt to, such as mobile phones, which we adjust to through our use of them. She noted, "The mind is also shaped to consider how these devices work. This means that the designer of that device makes a significant political impact on its users." She pointed out that we are very protective of our physical boundaries; we do not permit others to touch us without consent, and we request personal space. However, when it comes to conceptual intrusions, we tend to be more lenient because these intrusions are more abstract.
Based on this reflection, CineVivo was designed to transform the way of thinking of those who use it through syntactical customization as a personal model for recreating the programming source language. CineVivo's binary language can be modified to use other types of symbols other than the traditional 0s and 1s. There is no practical reason for this, but there is a decolonial and epistemic reflection on how the conventions of computer languages were generated in the history of Western technology.
It is important to note that Celeste's proposal expands the concept of freedom beyond the four principles of free software. She emphasizes that true freedom is not just about easily accessing an application or contributing to its source code; it also encompasses freedom of thought. This is why modifying the underlying language is essential. Deep freedom involves opening up the source code and altering it to express one's voice. A notable example of this is Jessica Rodríguez, who symbolically and syntactically reconstructed CineVivo into her response, CineCer0. Celeste mentioned that she achieved her goal with CineVivo, even with just a single user.
Celeste cautioned against the tendency to idealize tools and idolize their creators—often men from the Global North who dictate restrictions on the freedoms of those who use these instruments. This issue is especially problematic in cases where technology has widespread reach. To counter this, she highlighted the political practice adopted by PiranhaLab in its workshops, where participants hack, dismantle, and repurpose tools through a process of cannibalization, all while engaging with the original developers.
Celeste described two types of communities in terms of collectivity:
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**Homophonic communities**: In these communities, individuals sing to the same rhythm for the common good. However, over time, this can erase individual identities, making people feel replaceable.
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**Polyphonic communities**: These groups embrace diversity, consisting of multiple voices, each with its own unique identity.
She also suggests moving beyond the mere goal of learning a specific tool and challenging the limiting notion of a homogenous community by fostering individual empowerment in tool creation. She stated, "These are the bodies (individuals) involved in development, and they wish to be heard." For instance, Celeste points out that the live coding community exists on various platforms and becomes more intricate because it is polyphonic, decentralized, and uncontrollable. In this environment, everyone "expresses and embodies their freedom as they see fit," particularly in the development of their tools.
To conclude the panel and return to the community proposal from the livecoderA group, Celeste remarked that the project evolved quickly and emerged from the community due to the absence of a centralized control, editing, or censorship process. Marianne agreed and added that it's also essential to develop problem-solving models that can be created outside traditional computers, emphasizing the need to rethink concepts of memory and computation. Celeste echoed this sentiment by suggesting we should desacralize computers, coding, and computational technologies and look beyond our social, affective, and intellectual relationships.
In conclusion, based on cycles of reflection and action (←→), I can state that both livecoderA, Cicla por Segundo, and several other proposals from its participants represent branches of gender-perspective epistemes and non-Western critical technology practices. There is a shared foundation where we collectively generate the potential for community and individual emancipation. This process allows us to form identities, raise important questions, and create technological development proposals that each person can embody in their way.
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1 The term "incarnation" was added to "embodiment" in the English version as a more accurate translation to "encuerpamiento" to illustrate better the relationship between technology and labor (human bodies), extending beyond merely providing a physical form to an abstract concept.
2 https://colectivo-de-livecoders.gitlab.io/ Website for the Colectivo de Live Coders (Live Coders Collective, accessed June 22, 2022).
3 https://livecinema.mx/ Website of the documentation project on the history of live cinema in Mexico curated by Sandra Real Quintanar (accessed December 2, 2022).
4 http://www.hernanivillasenor.com/archivos/html/livecoding.html Article on live coding by computational musician, artist-researcher, improviser and live coder Hernani Villaseñor Ramírez (accessed November 2, 2022). 5 https://estuary.mcmaster.ca/ Website of Estuary, a collaborative platform developed at McMaster University in Canada by David Ogborn, with the contribution of Luis Navarro Del Angel and Jessica Rodríguez as PhD students (accessed May 3, 2021).
6 https://github.com/Qirky/Troop Repository for Troop, a tool created by Ryan Kirkbride, alias qirky (accessed December 15, 2022). 7 https://github.com/munshkr/flok Repository for Flok, a tool developed by Damián Silvani, alias munshkr, with contributions from the software community on the Internet (accessed December 15, 2022).
8 https://piranhalab.github.io/ Collective formed by Marianne Teixido, Emilio Ocelotl and Dorian Sotomayor (accessed on December 2, 2022). 9 https://notasdeausencia.cc/memorial/ Web project carried out by Marianne Teixido in conjunction with PiranhaLab (accessed December 2, 2022).
10 http://ram-lab.glitch.me/index.html Autonomous Memory Networks, Redes Autónomas de Memoria (R.A.M.) website (accessed November 2, 2022).
11 https://www.milenapafundi.com/ Website of the Argentine visual artist, communicator, and audiovisual producer based in Mexico (accessed November 15, 2022).
12 https://flordefuego.github.io/ Website of the Argentine artist and live coder currently based in Germany, known as flor de fuego or flor de fuega. 13 https://calafou.org/web/index.php/inicio Website of the Postcapitalist Eco-industrial Colony or Colonia Ecoindustrial Postcapitalista (Calafou) (accessed December 15, 2022).
14 https://gitlab.com/ram-lab/ram-init Repository of the Transhackfeminist Meeting 22 (accessed December 2, 2022).
15 Collective formed by Marianne Teixido, Luis Navarro Del Ángel, Emilio Ocelotl and Jessica Rodríguez.
16 https://github.com/celestebetancur/CQenze CQenze tool software repository (accessed December 2, 2022).
17 https://github.com/jac307 Software repository by Jessica Rodríguez, audio-visual artist, designer and researcher, PhD candidate in Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. 18 https://www.celestebetancur.com/code.html#video3-4 CineVivo project website (accessed December 2, 2022).
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This essay was initially published in Spanish in Sonic Ideas Issue 28, Year 15, January - June 2023 by Dr. Jorge David García Castilla as the main guest editor and with Ana Alfonsina Mora Flores, María Emilia, Bahamonde Noriega, Carlos Alberto Hernández Navarrete, and Rossana Lara Velázquez as co-editors.
Sonic Ideas is a bilingual publication of the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts CMMAS (Centro mexicano para la música y las artes sonoras).
English translation: Laura Balboa
Copyright © 2023 by the Mexican Center for Music and Sonic Arts.