Please allow me to inject my ceterum censeo of "please look to the music
side using technology" and the long tradition of creating tools,
reflecting on their use and the reciprocity of tools and "time-based art"
- where I assume that if you are speaking performativity you take the
time-basis of it as a major parameter (and be it only on the level that
code can only be executed on a time-line).

 
Barbara Lattanzi mentions MAX/MSP and Jitter - two programs which indeed
started out in the world of music (Miller Puckette at IRCAM for MAX, and
then him moving on to Jitter).

MAX is named for Max Mathews who did not only write the first "music
compiler" in the second half of the fifties, but pursued interactive
performance systems all his life, starting with the GROOVE system in the
sixties:

Laurie Spiegel on http://retiary.org/ls/btl/groove_quick_description.html :

"In principle GROOVE was the ultimate synthesizer. It allowed the
arbitrary interconnection, via user-programmed logic, of analog and
digital input, output, hardware, and software modules, including
ever-accumulating numbers of library-resident code modules written by
users over the years, and increasing numbers of gizmos built mostly by Max.
Unfortunately the real world implementation of this outstanding system
design was subject to the hardware constraints of the day (starting late
1960s), most limiting of which was not the mere 32k of RAM or the slow (in
retrospect) CPU, but the bottleneck of too few DACs and other converters
for translating data between its digital and analog forms for use by
various modules."



And then the explosion in the field of music taking off in the late
seventies.


Ever since the close intertwining of code, real-time control and
execution, their implications for and in performance (and maybe
performativity, depending on how you like to see this term's linguistic
and philosophical aurae) has been a major, major part of practice,
discussions, lectures, papers and books in the field of music. And then
certainly in the other domains of time-based arts as they expanded in
their integration of digital technology.


My ceterum censeo is that I find it time and again amazing how the
ubiquitous use of the same technical foundations and actually often
concrete tools, concepts and processes still allow us to stay in our
ghettos of analysis, reflection and perspective and actually build our
walls of perception stronger and higher in our endeavor to stake our
claims.

Every individual reading this note is certainly excepted from this last
sentence - it's more a comment on flocking algorithms :)


Johannes