Livecoding is of course what a lot of people focus on in your work. But what’s the significance of code as the interface here? How important is it that it’s functional coding?

It’s inspired by [Alex McLean’s sound/music pattern environment] TidalCycles — the idea of taking a simple concept and working from there. In Tidal, the base element is a pattern in time, and everything is a transformation of that pattern. In Hydra, the base element is a transformation from coordinates to color. All of the other functions either transform coordinates or transform colors. This directly corresponds to how fragment shaders and low-level graphics programming work — the GPU runs a program simultaneously on each pixel, and that receives the coordinates of that pixel and outputs a single color.

I think immutability in functional (and declarative) coding paradigms is helpful in live coding; you don’t have to worry about mentally keeping track of a variable and what its value is or the ways you’ve changed it leading up to this moment. Functional paradigms are really helpful in describing analog synthesis – each module is a function that always does the same thing when it receives the same input. (Parameters are like knobs.) I’m very inspired by the modular idea of defining the pieces to maximize the amount that they can be rearranged with each other. The code describes the composition of those functions with each other. The main logic is functional, but things like setting up external sources from a webcam or live stream are not at all; JavaScript allows mixing these things as needed. I’m not super opinionated about it, just interested in the ways that the code is legible and makes it easy to describe what is happening.