Introduction:

The Unknowing Side of the Algorithm: Decolonising live coding from Latin America

“…That is why it is more likely to find sonic manifestations, where ‘logics of superfluity and abandonment’ (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 16) of bare life ( homo sacer as Agamben also calls it (Laclau 2008: 110)) and neo-colonial logic predominate, in which cruder extractivist social formations can be traced than in the centre, where, for example, ‘rivers become spaces of contestation against forms of dispossession and epistemic violence’ (Blackmore and Gómez 2020: 7). In this sense, for the study of live coding in LATAM, more complex contexts must be considered, where different logics predominate and in which social agents may be ‘neither subject to direct rule nor recognised as full members of the states’ system’ (Hindess 2005: 246).…”

“…This is so also because, on the one hand, sound can not only be thought of as the ‘energy of any noise … proportional to the squares of the heights’ (ibid. : 190) that are dissipated in a physical medium, but sound can and should also be thought of beyond its physical properties as something that, in fact, does not dissipate but ‘as a kind of connective tissue, a socio-sonic accumulation ’ (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 16).…”

“…In this sense we should think about the sound also beyond the human correlate and not tie it only to the perception of the biocentric human. Instead, we should think about the thresholds to which the very agency of the sonic phenomenon directs us or follow the instrument rather than the actor (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004: 639; Steingo and Sykes 2019: 17–18). In such a way, for example, geontologies extend the life to many entities such as the rocks ‘Two Women Sitting Down’ and ‘Old Man Rock’ that are catalogued by the original population as alive and in that geotology the life/non-life distinction is extended (Povinelli 2016: 36–44).…”

“…Similarly, the study of live coding has been largely centred around European and American institutions, as evidenced by most publications on the topic in the conferences and reunions of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) (where live coding is a boosted practice) (Martinez et al 2022). Furthermore, in the West, sound has been conceptualised as a secularised autonomous object, isolated from other senses (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 7) and individualised by the introduction of technological devices in the Western popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Großmann 2008: 123). NIME, in particular, has been characterised by a technological fetishism that prioritises ‘cutting-edge technologies (such as maker processes, high performance computing, machine learning)’ (Morreale, Bin, McPherson, Stapleton and Wanderley 2020: 162) 1 .…”

“…Live coding serves us as a probe to compare the way in which sound is theorised in the Global North and South. Live coding also allows to look ‘at how “global” technologies are localized’ (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 14) in the South. We hold that there is no line of continuity between the use and praxis of the same technology and programming language in LATAM as in the West.…”