and here's a later one, even more extreme. the final slot involves strangers walking up to laptops and joining in, with the whole table and room working together, and many more from around the world

The first LIVE had collaborative live music jams

To me the current LIVE call reads as focussed on solo interactive debugging but in practice I understand is open to collaborative live interaction topics as well

OH! looking closer I see the different code pads are doing different things - sound, visual,...? Anyway, would still love more details, but it makes more sense now, Thanks for sharing, very cool. I wish I had this back when I was running a coder dojo!

update: I'm still writing it

The main band I have in mind is powerbooks unplugged (sometimes later "powerplugs unbooked") - they rejected the idea of stage and the separation of audience and performers in general, and used their laptops as acoustic instruments, i.e. unplugged and using the laptop speakers. From "Purloined Letters and Distributed Persons": "The name of this ensemble may be read as an allusion toward the power games of pop bands and orchestras: Who writes the song, who plays the quietest instrument or the longest solo, who cannot adjust their tuning to the others? And the order of the stage: who stands back? Realising that as algorithmic performers, we are as much listeners as the audience, and we know as little as the audience, we decided to rid ourselves from some obstacles that seem often enough just be the historical remnants of display of power: the stage, amplification and artistic individuality. Having abandoned the stage, sitting amongst the audience instead, with laptops14 connected by wireless network, we write and modify sound synthesis routines that can be heard through the pleasantly narrow band of built-in speakers. Using text as sound source only, every program becomes an open letter to the others, who may (or may not) read it, copy it and modify it further. A single, often random or algorithmically generated number in the code specifies for each sound event on which of the computers it will sound. In this way, a double delocalisation takes place: anyone’s algorithm may become active on anyone’s location, and, at the same time, anyone’s algorithm may be copied by anyone else: Both sound and text stray about." Their system is called "The Republic" with a slightly more recent version "Utopia", emerging more from a background of media philosophy than music or computer science. Two of the members (Renate Weiser and Julian Rohrhuber) hosted the first live programming meeting in Hamburg in 2004 where TOPLAP was founded, so I'd say this reimagining of musical activity as distributed code was the main context for that.

There's a kind of documentary online, quickly you will see it was a different kind of energy to pastagang!

and a totally different time - creative coding culture didn't have any recognition outside of niche communities like the demoscene etc and any use of computers on stage was generally hidden, or quietly derided

That's one example, but there has been loads of experimentation around these ideas in different places. Nudel is based on flok which comes out of the Argentinian scene, I've not visited but imagine all kinds of things happening there - we should be careful to acknowledge any European/North American gaze on this. There have been a lot of experiments in shared memory e.g. in impromptu.

The "Network Music Festival" brought together a lot of experimentation around this in three editions from 2012, including hosting "The Hub", a network music band that formed in 1986

All that said pastagang has a lot of rich aspects too it and is unique

and it would be interesting to ask kraftwerk members what they think about this!

I've not actually been to LIVE but I think Lu is referring to all the live coders at the first one, including a network music band

I was lucky enough to meet Alberto who co-wrote that quoted paper and I got to ask him all about powerbanks unplugged! one of the things i asked him was how they dealt with sync (ie: laptops going out of sync) as it's something we've really been struggling with and he told me they "left that to the human ear"(!!!) less than a day later all syncing code was removed from nudel and it became ten times better and i think we grew in confidence with playing out of multiple laptops at once even though they're out of sync, see: [park jam](https://mas.to/@TodePond/114605772327720227) i also got to meet th4, who started the WeekendJam which continues to happen each week after many years, and to hear the story behind that

and i saw many many examples of collaborative coding, like Timo and Lina at the algorave, like toplap athens, like Martin's exquisite corpse tool it saddens/humours me to see so much of this ignored by HCI people for whatever reason "it's just art" "i don't like screens" or whatever it is

and nudel came about from getting to know flok better, and learning more from Damian about his vision for flok, ie: to be used with multiple clients. nudel is actually forked from the super simple template that Damian made to demonstrate such a thing. I'm sure there's much more we could learn still from him and the Argentinian scene

Yes I met one of the Argentinian crew at ICLC, it was quite late at that point but I'm pretty sure they were telling me about a live-codeable penis they were making

If the Fear of Clicking community is going to connect more with music culture it might need to adjust that..

I think it found its way into tech CoCs from the once widespread practice of including misogynistic imagery in conference presentation slides