Hi Alex,
Just to play devil's advocate (and to tease out even more nuanced differences between code and text), i would argue (following Bakhtin), that reading any human language text is an utterance event. So in this sense, anyone who has ever written anything (code, a shopping list, a sonnet) is a future typist, recording their utterance into a time-shifted medium that awaits any number of future readings (utterances/run-time events) in any number of unforseen affective, real-time, historical contexts.
And any live jazz sax performer is involved in similar experiential feedback loops that live coders experience.
Which is not to say there aren't important salient differences. But i don't think that mere time-shiftedness or performative feedback loops are necessarily unique to code.
Maybe a way at it would be to take up Paul's provocations regarding something like max/msp/jitter. So what are the qualitative differences between real-time creation and modulation of a max patcher to compse/perform audio (always feels more deleuzean to me) VS something like livecoding in a command line programming language (which i imagine as somehow more derridean)? Based on your experience livecoding, what would you say?
Best,
curt
On Mar 4, 2014, at 3:09 PM, alex <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> A performative utterance is where you say something that *does*
> something. Classic performative utterances are “Guilty as charged”, “I
> forgive you”, or “I promise”. Computer programming is when you type
> something that does something in the future, when the program is run,
> a kind of promissory performative. Programmers are basically future
> typists, making promises which get fulfilled more than once, maybe a
> million times, toying with the lives of different kinds of people,
> sensing whatever the future state of the world is and doing different
> things in response. Einstein described the wire telegraph (a
> prototypical Internet) as a very, very long cat, where you pull its
> tail in New York and its head meows in Los Angeles. Programming is
> like that but in between pulling the tail and the cat meowing, its
> front half might have moved somewhere else, maybe even Sittingbourne,
> or maybe splitting into a million catty tendrils across the
> four-dimensional space-time of Kent. These are the kinds of problems
> that programmers have to deal with all the time. Worse, programmers
> don’t get to actually travel with their code into these multiple
> futures, there are many sad stories where programmers do not see their
> work being used, and the users might not register that their software
> was made by a person at all.
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