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Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice

Emma Cocker
Published online: 13 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Emma Cocker (2013) Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice, Performance Research: A Journal of the
Performing Arts, 18:5, 69-76, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.828930

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 Live Notation – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice
EMMA COCKER

Witnessed. Twelve practices. Twelve hours.
Twelve fragments from twelve scenes; fragments gleaned over
twelve hours, partially recollected. 27 July 2012; approximate
times. Bristol – locations varied.
(Scene I: 10.07 a.m.) Open public space; a makeshift stage for
action. A lone woman reads philosophy, tapping notations along
the limits of her own body with the tooth of a single piano key,
cut off from the crowds that mill behind her, immersed in her
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The Live Notation Unit (LNU) is a research collective that was
established in order to examine the shared vocabularies that
may unite two radical performance practices: live art and live
coding. It was initiated by live artist Hester Reeve and live
coder Alex McLean, working in dialogue with an international
network of artists, coders and theorists, including Sam Aaron,
Geoff Cox, Yuen Fong Ling, Dave Griffiths, Thor Magnusson, Brigid
McLeer, Kate Sicchio, Andre Stitt, Wrongheaded and Maria X. On
27 July 2012, the Live Notation Unit staged a symposium and

appointed task. The unseen thinking within the event of reading series of performances at Arnolfini (an international arts centre
is materialized as a system of beats and strokes. and gallery) in Bristol to test and question what the phrase
(Scene II: 11.36 a.m.) Somewhat embarrassed, the tutor ‘live notation’ may signify. I was invited to participate in the
apologizes for the missing life model before returning naked to Live Notation Event as critical interlocutor or witness. I am an
resume his class, simultaneously exposing and breaking the rules art-writer engaged in various performative modes of writing
in this seemingly innocuous move. The latent power relations of about, in parallel to and as art practice, but perhaps importantly
the life class are forced to the surface; the coded rules that tacitly without specialist expertise in either live art or live coding.
underpin the event of looking are brought into sharp relief. This article operates both as a response and a proposition, for
(Scene III: 12.00 noon) A dancer’s body submits to the demands elaborating (tentatively) on some of the shared vocabularies and
of a live score; her audience is invited to modify the rules. emergent tactics encountered within the event.
Both parties test the body according to the logic of instructive
code; scored operative and scoring operator are implicated
within the performance, the line of separation between them
increasingly blurred.
(Scene IV: 2.21 p.m.) Speaking and coding unfurl within a shared
time–space; theory is performed as a choreography of consonants
and vowels enunciated in the mouth, while coded phrases
animate in the cursor’s flashing beat, the rhythm of the one ever-
interrupting the logic of the other.
(Scene V: 2.50 p.m.) The artist speaks in tongues, which to the
novice may appear to be as garbled as encrypted code or a lover’s
babble. To practise garbling returns an archaic sense to the term;
it becomes a process for sifting choice fragments that is akin to
the process of sieving of spice from sand.
(Scene VI: 3.33 p.m.) Performance on paper: The page’s surface
is like the body’s skin. The drawn mark navigates the live(d)
line between seeing and thinking, between exterior and
interior worlds.
(Scene VII: 4.03 p.m.) Darkness. Images are projected onto the
back of her hand. Intimacy is taken as substance for a solo
performance. The constructed nature of the encounter affords
surprising depth of connection, the tense togetherness of
shared time.
(Scene VIII: 7.38 p.m.) Code manifests in dense veils of colour and
sound; individual threads of data are woven and made to collide.
Deep, vibrating drones – the dissonant pulse of improvised,
overlapping rhythm.
■■Brigid McLeer and Kate Sicchio, The Triumph of Crowds: a score for decapitation,
(Scene IX: 8.12 p.m.) One system is transformed into the rotation, two trumpets and organza (after Poussin), 27 July 2012. Documentation of a
language of another – layered sound waves are replaced by thin, performance at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows Creative. Courtesy of the artists.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18·5 : pp.69-76 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 69

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 pigmented veils, worn as a shroud, the performer’s palette of pale
pinks, orange and indigo blue recombined over and over against
the diagrammatic imperative of images that are scattered on
the floor.
(Scene X: 8.42 p.m.) Combinational procedures yield complex
assemblages through the play of addition and subtraction,
of backtracking and reactivation. Single letters modify in
unexpected ways.
(Scene XI: 9.03 p.m.) Command keys operate as invocations –
code, the convert’s spell or sermon, a means of summoning forms
and forces from beyond the limits of the screen.
(Scene XII: 9.37 p.m.) The artist’s hand physically interrupts
the command line of code’s execution, leaving rocks in its way.
Intervening into the space of another’s practice, each performer
strives for connection yet disrupts the unfolding of action into
which they reach – programming is relational; to affect is also to
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be affected back.1
Exposing the hidden workings: Notation revealed, performed
Live notation is a practice that is alert to the live circumstances
of its own making, capable of simultaneously creating
the conditions for while documenting the unfolding of its
emergence. Within live notation, the production of a code, rule
or score temporally shifts; it is not considered simply as the
script for a performance (that precedes action) nor a form of
documentation (that follows), rather it is produced simultaneously
to (and often as) the performance itself. Live notation is
a revelatory practice, showing its source code or operational
principles as they are being written. To describe a practice as
revelatory is not to offer judgement on the nature of insight
afforded therein but rather signals towards the possibilities of
revealing, exposing or bringing something hidden to the surface,
operating at a more tactical level. Revelatory practices strive
to shed light on the hidden workings of thinking and making,
unveiling the decision-making processes, the unfolding of labour.
To expose the inner workings of a practice is to foreground
process, emphasizing the methods and mechanics of production,
the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live). Live
notation may refer to the methods used for externalizing and
articulating this unfolding, a means of expression that remains
■■Sam Aaron, Isomorphic Algorhythms, 27 July 2012. Documentation of a
performance at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows Creative. Courtesy of the artists..
70 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18·5 : ON WRITING AND DIGITAL MEDIA
PR 18.5 On Writing and Digital Media.indd 70
The event at Arnolfini formed part of a wider research project
entitled Live Notation: Transforming matters of performance
that was funded within the UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council’s (AHRC’s) ‘Digital Transformations’ theme, for exploring
the possibilities of relating live coding (performing with
programming languages) and live art (performing with actions).
The Live Notation Unit event was intended as an ‘experimental
laboratory’ in which to ‘approach programming as performance
art, performance art notation as code, code as speech, bodies
as interpreters’, involving ‘improvisational sound works (where
computer code and the artists’ bodies become instruments),
site-specific time based art works (where notation becomes the
“piece” as opposed to its recording device)’ alongside a series of
position papers.2 While some contributions included explicatory
elements, offering insights or even working definitions relating
to the respective fields of live art and live coding, the LNU’s
intent seemed rather more towards opening up both fields
to new ways of thinking enabled by the shared phrase ‘live
notation’.3 In the same spirit, this article avoids proposing
definitions for demarcating the territories of either live art or live
coding as such, but rather speaks in a more provisional voice,
searching for a language that is provoked by the encounter of
interdisciplinary exchange.
A common language for live notation may begin with the
slippery notion of liveness. Alex McLean and Hester Reeve assert
that
live notation is an intrinsic part of live work – for both body and
code. In this we consider notation as not being something that
precedes, defines or is created by a performance, but as activity
that resonates within a performance.
(McLean and Reeve 2012)
Reeve argues that in live art practice ‘there is a conflation
between authoring and performing’, acknowledging her own
interest in examples that are ‘decidedly anti-theatrical, site-
specific and performed once only’, where ‘the action risks
unfolding live over time un-rehearsed’ (2012). Here, ‘live’
refers to the durational, embodied, non-repeatable moment
of performance. However, the liveness of live notation is not
simply to do with the performance of notation live, but rather,
a kairotic species of liveness (that I elaborate later) where the
form of articulation is produced as a live event simultaneous
(and in fidelity) to the experience it attempts to articulate.
Perhaps it is this sense of reciprocity that connects the phrase
‘live notation’ to performance writing, described by Ric Allsopp
as an ‘unstable and exploratory term that attempts to hold in
tension both writing and its performance, performance and its
writing’ (Allsopp 2003: 120). Live notation is composed in front
of the audience through its performance, unlike conventional
forms of scripting for performance that are ‘decomposed’ or
that disappear as they are performed, as John Hall asserts
(Hall 2007: 6). The performance produces its own score, during.
In live coding, the writing of code is undertaken live as a means
for making improvisational sound, with the code itself often
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 faithful to the process rather than performed in search of finished
form. Or else, the artist’s actions may interrupt the habitual
rhythms of a given scene, momentarily illuminating the codes
and rules operative therein – drawing attention to their scripted
nature. The revelation of digital code through the performance
of live programming involves showing and sharing the unfolding
logic of a language so instrumental to contemporary life, but in
which so few are fluent. What is unreadable can easily become
hidden – concealed.
Code is an operating language; learn the language of the
operator (programmer or code-writer) or be forever operative
(subject to another’s code). For every operative there is someone
pulling the strings; the rules by which one body bends were
drawn up by other bodies. To reveal the relation between
operator and operative problematizes the nature of this bond,
that is, the play of power that exists within it. Yet, revelation
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involves more than the critique of hidden structure; it has
a transformative potential. No longer working behind the scenes,
the operator is witnessed in the process of devising the rules
while witness to the implications of their own actions. Real-time
feedback creates the opportunity to amend one’s action live, in
order to modify the trajectory of an unfolding sequence of events.
■■Kate Sicchio, Drawing/Hacking, 27 July 2012. Documentation of a performance
workshop at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows Creative. Courtesy of the artists.
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visibly projected in front of an audience. Cox et al. argue that
code may be considered akin to poetry, which is neither to be
‘reduced to audible sounds (the time of the ear) nor visible
signs (the space of the eye) but is composed of language itself
… written and spoken forms work together to form a language
that we appreciate as poetry’ (Cox et al. 2000: 2). They assert
that ‘like poetry, the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution,
not simply its written form’ and that ‘we need to “see” the code
to fully grasp what it is we are experiencing and to build an
understanding of the code’s actions’ (Cox et al. 2000: 5).
Accordingly, for live coders including the collective slub (Alex
McLean, Dave Griffiths and Adrian Ward) ‘the preferred option for
live coding is that of interpreted scripting languages, giving an
immediate code and run aesthetic’ (Collins et al. 2003: 321). Here,
audiences encounter projected code as a running command line
while it is being modified and rewritten by the programmer and
in some instances by the code or interpreting system itself. As
Cox notes: ‘[R]unning code is also able to edit its own source
code … That these self-modifications happen directly to the
code being edited in real time puts the code visibly on the
same level as the programmer’ (Cox 2013: 61). He asserts that,
‘self-modifying code blatantly breaks the determinism of code
and makes its explicitly performative’ (2013: 61). For Cox, code
‘says and does what it says at the same time. Such utterances are
not conventional but performative’ (2013: 35– 6). Rather than
‘users’ of existing software products (whose source code remains
undisclosed), for live coders the production of the program is
often an intrinsic part of practice. Implicitly political, live coding
takes back the power to write rather than be written.
Live coding focuses on the real-time production of the
program for code writing simultaneous to its use – the role of
programmer and performer are both conflated and concurrent.
As Collins et al. note, live coders ‘work with programming
languages, building their own custom software, tweaking or
writing the programs themselves as they perform’ (Collins et al.
2003: 321). Code is written as it is performed – a practice often
referred to as ‘coding on the fly’ or ‘just-in-time coding’ (or what
I would propositionally name ‘kairotic coding’). Live coding is
performed as a ‘recursive loop’, as Cox asserts, where ‘notation
and execution are collapsed into one thing’, breaking down the
‘false distinction between the writing and the tool within which
the writing is produced’ (2013: 21– 22). He points to the Fluxus
performance score of La Monte Young’s Composition 1961 No. 1,
January 1 as operating in analogous terms: ‘Draw a straight line
and follow it.’
The foregrounding of notation in the form of a code or rules
extends the legacy of Fluxus scores, conceptual art instructions
and the prevalence of algorithmic procedures within computer
art, where code or rules become generative strategies for
producing outcomes supposedly autonomous of artistic control
or agency. Here, as Sol LeWitt remarks, ‘To work with a plan
that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity’ where ‘all the
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 To witness the impact of one’s actions renders visible the logic of
cause and effect, at the same time as creating a momentary gap
in which to conceive of things as otherwise.
Following the rule: Algorithms for practice
Paradoxically perhaps, to perform according to a rule can be
a liberating experience; where there is constraint freedom can
exist. Sticking to the rule can yield surprisingly creative results;
coded logic can be pushed beyond its limits, pressured to reveal
unexpected possibilities therein. Moreover, rules are not always
passively endured. The act of following the imperative of an
instruction is adopted as a wilful tactic for evacuating personal
expression from a practice, a voluntary abdication of individual
creativity within the creative act.
Surrendering to the logic of a rule can involve the loss of
control, of one’s agency or authorship. Rule-based practices can
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attempt to knock back or dampen the habits and hang-ups of the

structural self; artistic ego is sidestepped by giving oneself up or
over to the unfolding conditions of a given code, script or score.
The artist becomes a functionary, charged with an operation to
complete, that is, a task to perform. In one sense, the artist’s body
may be conceived as a processing machine, acting out algorithms,
performing code. Yet, human inflection occurs within even the
most banal task, the most prescriptive operation. Even the
simplest sign is subject to interpretation; its meaning can rarely
be said to be fixed. There is no single system of code or notation
to which the body responds; instructions are thus apprehended
according to different, even contradictory, operational keys. The
human stammers not fully knowing which order of translation
to deploy. Words can be comprehended at a level of linguistic
signification and at a level of formal shape – the curve and
line of letters readable in alphabetic terms or simply mimicked
as directional contours. The same words can be processed as
instructional code or as poetic provocation, a diagram or a map.
Even given the strictest instructions, the body is often prone to
embellish, unable to resist adding its own mark. Live notation
thus refers to the unfolding of a score, and the scored marks
of the interpreter performed in response. Yet, for the human
operative, codes and rules function as points of leverage against
which to work. They have the capacity to be tested or negotiated
rather than necessarily being simply and obediently followed.
Rules can be reviewed or dismantled once they begin to stifle
action or fail to offer provocation or once they have become
dull. Live notation documents these moments of resistance,
refusal and reworking of the rules, the moments of experimental
interference, discrepancy and excess.
Intervention/Invention
It is tempting perhaps to view the role of operator (code-writer)
as one of power and the operative (‘written’ respondent) as
subordinate, where the former writes the rules while the latter
must only obey those rules. However, the performing of code
may operate less in terms of an obedient following of a pre-set
score – with the attendant loss of agency often associated with
performing according to the logic of pre-programmed rules.
Within live notation, the operative can also write their own rules
■■Thor Magnusson, Live-Coding the Drone Machines: The System as a Musical Piece,
27 July 2012. Documentation of a performance at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows
Creative. Courtesy of the artists.
planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution
is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes
art’ (LeWitt 1967). Certainly, in some of the practices encountered
at the LNU event, notation seemed to be performed in machinic
terms, for example, in Yuen Fong Ling’s ‘Delete/Copy/Paste’
workshop, where a line of easels were assembled as a ‘drawing-
machine’ so that fragments of drawn line could be relayed
between individuals operating as receivers and transmitters of
‘bits’ of information. Or else, in the ‘Drawing/Hacking’ workshop,
Kate Sicchio performed as an interpretative device, actualizing
movement against an unfolding code, written and amended by
her audience.
However, while the machine executes the coded command
rather than understanding the nature of its instruction, the
human interpreter arguably tries to understand first, before
deciding how to act. For Sicchio, the question seemed one of
how to interpret code, an act of reading and translation more
than obedient execution. Indeed, while live notation practices
foreground the use of rules, the intent is not to rule out the
agency of the artist-performer who retains the right to change
them. In live coding, the running code provides a live context
into which the performer wilfully intervenes. For Collins, the
‘human operator’ within live coding acts reflexively, where the

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 or code; the line between the writing of code and the writing
(of a body) produced by and in response to code often appears
indistinguishable or is practised as one. Rules can be accepted
electively, approached in the spirit of a game or play. Rules can
be changed even while working within their frame, instructions
modified even as they are followed. Performing a score involves
rewriting the rules through the vocabulary of the body. Writing
the rules creates the system within which to then work. One
instruction sets up a rhythm, which then may be intercepted in
its course. The first line of code creates a loop-stitch; a further
decision is needed to draw the next line through. The writing of
code never begins with a truly blank screen, much as the stage of
performance is never truly empty. Both are haunted by previous
iterations, the trace of earlier actions.
Every newly conceived line is written upon the ground of preceding
inscription, inserted into an already-existing system of notation.
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However, existing rules and codes are not to be taken as given (as
fixed or unchangeable) but rather taken-as-given, appropriated as
a found material with which to work and rework. Here, the writing
of code is not conceived as an algorithmic operation whose logic
is simply set in motion and allowed to run its course. Live notation
may unfold recursively through looped repeats and circuitous
returns, at times un-writing the rules in order to move forward.
Like Penelope’s weave, code has the capacity to be unravelled
and rewritten as events unfold. Live notation reveals the rules
even as they are being amended, revealing the decision-making
processes within even the most coded practice. Analogous to the
pulsing live body within performance, the flashing cursor marks the
point of decision making – of consciousness perhaps – within the
live programming of code. The cursor is the threshold where the
human and the machine touch and become entangled; it is the line
separating what exists from what is still yet to come. The cursor is
the location of action and retraction, of cut and paste, of deletion
and erasure, insertion and manipulation. The performer navigates
a course of action by intuiting when to yield to the rule or code and
when to reassert control, when to respond and when to interrupt.
Different pressures compete for attention as one force gives way
in order to allow the emergence of another, as the rule created
in order for something to begin is superseded by another that
allows it to continue to develop. An outcome can only ever be
predicted and can easily turn. The force that initiates a process
has the capacity to destroy it also; production can become
entropic in the absence of the decision that determines when
to stop or change tack. To improvise within a given structure
requires skilfulness and attention, a capacity for biding one’s time
and for knowing when and how to act.
Simultaneity
Rules can be written as a constraint within which to work.
Repeatedly pushing at the limits of a rule’s logic can create
moments of elasticity within its law, revealing momentary
openings or loopholes from within which new lines of action
may materialize. The rule can become a space of rehearsal for
exercising one’s capacity to improvise within its seemingly
closed terms, a limit against which to practise the search for
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‘more profound the live coding, the more a performer must
confront the running algorithm, and the more significant the
intervention … the deeper the coding act’ (2011: 209). Within
live notation practices, live coder and live artist appear to write
code or set rules as the initial ground upon which to work;
code’s scripture creates a germinal field into which further
interventional action is subsequently written and performed.
Live notation practices may be described as akin to Umberto
Eco’s phrase ‘open work’ (Eco, 1989), which as Thor Magnusson
notes offers ‘a system that enables the interpreter to actively
engage with the score itself, reinterpret it and appropriate it
to the context in which it is performed’ (Magnusson 2011). In
doing so, Magnusson asserts that, ‘a feedback loop has been
introduced between the performer and the score; an idea that
(strongly amplified) becomes a central feature of live coding
performances’ (2011). Indeed, as N. Katherine Hayles argues,
‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that
produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative
world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as
a physical presence’ (Hayles 2002: 25).
Within live notation, rules are accepted without obligation.
Running algorithms have the capacity to be interrupted,
their course changed. However, this optionality should not
be confused with opting out, the blunt refusal to perform
according to the terms of the rule or code. To commit to a rule
voluntarily is in the end a critical and ethical decision; it is to
make a commitment to something by one’s own volition. While
certain rules and frameworks can be affirming and productive,
others only serve to limit or constrain. The elective rule offers
a reminder that many of the rules by which we live our lives
may in fact be flexible and negotiable. For Gilles Deleuze, ‘it’s
a matter of optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules
at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute ways of existing or
styles of life’ (Deleuze 1995: 98). Within live notation, the artist
navigates a course of action between different and competing
forces of production, by intuiting when to yield to rule and when
to reassert control. Deleuze names the power to affect other
forces ‘spontaneity’ and to be affected by others ‘receptivity’
(Deleuze 1999: 60).
Live notation emerges somewhere between spontaneity
and receptivity, somewhere between control and letting go,
somewhere between affecting and being affected. Here, the
artist neither pushes nor pulls the direction of action, but tries
to create the framework wherein things may remain aleatory.
Rather than giving over responsibility to the inevitability of
a rule’s logic, within live notation practices the artist consciously
adopts a medial position, actively maintaining the conditions
that will keep the unfolding of action dynamic. Debra Hawhee
conceptualizes the medial position of ‘invention-in-the-middle’
as a kairotic movement involving ‘simultaneous extending
outwards and folding back’; it is a space-time which marks the
emergence of a pro-visional “subject”, one that works on – and is
worked on by – the situation’ (Hawhee 2002: 18). Live notation
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■■Dave Griffiths, Alex McLean and Hester Reeve, The Hair of the Horse, 27 July 2012.
Documentation of a performance at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows Creative. Courtesy
of the artists.
new ways of operating therein. Artists can work with the creative
pressure of rules encountered within the public realm or that
are met upon the surface of a page or on a stage or a screen.
Live notation involves the cultivation of a vocabulary for
describing this experience of working with something, of working
something through. It is a form of notation intent on observing
and documenting the conditions of its own coming into being.
Here, notation does not follow (come after) an existing reality,
but it is initiated instead (in the performative manner of a spell
or invocation) in hope of making manifest what could not have
been conceived of at the outset nor planned for in advance.
In withdrawing from the pressures of representing something
else, live notation attempts to contemplate the terms of its own
coming into existence.
Live notation involves working with the terms of an existing
language or notational system in order to move beyond it,
in order to craft a new vocabulary that alone is adequate to
the task of describing that endeavour. It involves devising the
rules or score through which to bring something new into
being, at the same time as devising new forms of notation for
describing the nature of the new being called forth. Within live
74 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 18·5 : ON WRITING AND DIGITAL MEDIA
PR 18.5 On Writing and Digital Media.indd 74
often involves this feedback loop of working on while being
worked by; it is a practice intent on observing and documenting
the conditions of its own coming into being.
Live notation may be conceived as a kairotic practice based
on principles of intervention and invention-in-the-middle.
Kairos is an Ancient Greek term meaning a fleeting opportunity
that needs to be grasped before it passes. It is not an abstract
measure of time passing (chronos) but of time ready to be
seized, an expression of timeliness, a critical juncture or ‘right
time’ where something could happen. Kairos has origins in two
different sources: archery, where, as Eric Charles White notes, it
describes ‘an opening … through which the archer’s arrow has
to pass’, and weaving where there is ‘a “critical time” when the
weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily
opens in the warp of the cloth being woven’ (White 1987: 13).4
Yet, the opportunity of kairos has little power on its own; it
requires the perceptions and actions of an individual capable of
seizing its potential. As Hawhee notes, ‘kairos entails the twin
abilities to notice and respond with both mind and body … the
capacity for discerning kairos … depends on a ready, perceptive
body’ (Hawhee 2004: 71). For White, kairos involves a ‘will-to-
invent’ or form of improvisation, which necessitates ‘adaption
to an always mutating situation. Understood as a principle of
invention … kairos counsels thought to act always, as it were, on
the spur of the moment’ (White 1987: 13). Moreover, he argues
that ‘the fluid and relative moments of the immediate situation
would be constitutively involved in the invention process … (an)
attempt to “make do” with whatever is conveniently at hand’
(White 1987: 13). For White, ‘Kairos stands for a radical principle
of occasionality that implies a conception of the production of
meaning in language as a process of continuous adjustment to
and creation of the present occasion, or a process of continuous
interpretation in which the speaker seeks to inflect the given
‘text’ to his or her own ends at the same time that the speaker’s
text is ‘interpreted’ in turn by the context surrounding it’ (1987:
14–15).
White refers to Gertrude Stein’s writing as an example of
such occasionality, a form of ‘speculative thought alert to its
own occasion’, which in Stein’s terms involves a ‘decentering
of attention’ within which ‘talking and listening’ might occur
simultaneously, at the same time (Stein 1935: 180). My assertion
is that live notation practices (especially live coding) share
this performative ‘principle of occasionality’, an improvisational
capacity ‘alert and able to adapt to the present occasion’ where
‘the writing subject must always be in the act of creating
itself anew’ (White 1987: 54–55). While live notation practices
seemingly work with or within the logic of a rule or code, the
kairotic approach adopted is necessarily interventionist and
inventive rather than obedient. The seizing of opportunity is
based on cunning intelligence and propitious timing, on the
kairotic art of knowing when as much as where. For the Ancient
Greeks, the term mêtis described a form of wily intelligence
capable of seizing the opportunities (kairos) made momentarily
visible as the prevailing logic within a given structure or system
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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 10:57 08 October 2014
■■Dave Griffiths, Alex McLean and Hester Reeve, The Hair of the Horse, 27 July 2012.
Documentation of a performance at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo Farrows Creative. Courtesy
of the artists.
notation, a language of description emerges simultaneously
to the experience that it tries to account for, where one
produces the conditions for the other. In this sense perhaps,
live notation cannot be located as either prior to or after the
event of a performance, but rather happens recursively, within
and through it. Live notation describes a form of imminent (and
immanent) invention performed at the brink of experience,
a means of articulation emerging simultaneous to (unique and
in complete fidelity to) the emergent ontology that it attempts to
describe. As such, live notation cannot be crystallized as a fixed
and repeatable language, since the ontology it describes is ever
restless, always disappearing even as it is coming into being,
endlessly necessitating new live forms of notation.
CO C K E R : L I V E N OTAT I O N – R E F E L E CT I O N S O N A KA I ROT I C P RACT I C E
PR 18.5 On Writing and Digital Media.indd 75
yields. Mêtis is the art of preparing for what could not have been
anticipated or planned for in advance; it the same skill used in
catching the force of the wind or the turn of the tide, which as
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant note is ‘as prompt as
the opportunity that it must seize on the wing, not allowing it to
pass’ (1991: 15). Harnessing the properties of dexterity, sureness
of eye and sharp-wittedness, mêtis ‘attempts to reach its desired
goal by feeling its way and guessing’; it is a ‘type of cognition
which is alien to truth and quite separate from episteme,
knowledge’ (Detienne and Vernant 1991: 4).
Live notation is the kairotic or kairic event of creating an
adequate form of articulation simultaneous to the experience or
ontology that it attempts to describe. Elaborating the rhetorical
dimension of kairos, John Poulakos notes that kairic ‘speech exists
in time and is uttered both as a spontaneous formulation of and
a barely constituted response to a new situation unfolding in
the immediate present’ (Poulakos 1995: 61). For the philosopher
Antonio Negri, kairòs is the ‘restless’ instant where naming and
the thing named attain existence (in time), for which he draws
example from the way that the poet ‘vacillating, fixes the verse’
(Negri 2003: 153). For Negri, ‘kairòs is the modality of time
through which being opens itself, attracted by the void at the
limit of time, and it thus decides to fill that void’ (2003: 152).
Negri conceives the limit experience of kairós as one of ‘being on
the brink’, as ‘being on a razor’s edge’ (Negri 2003: 152). Here, ‘the
brink’ refers to a quality of imminence as much as immanence, to
a point of criticality or crisis, of necessary decision. In this sense,
kairós involves the art of brinkmanship, the capacity for pushing
both self and situation beyond habitual limits, for tolerating the
vertiginous experience of the limit’s edge. The pulse of a body
in space or of a cursor on screen can be conceptualized as the
brink of being operative within the live situation of writing,
the location of decision making within live notation and its
attendant performance. Significantly, kairos manifests as a form
of power en acte that emerges in relation to the specificity of
each situation, and exists as power only therein. It is close to
the immanent ‘intensification’ that philosopher Alain Badiou
(following Nietzsche) asserts ‘is not effectuated anywhere else
than where it is given – thought is effective in situ, it is what …
is intensified upon itself, or again, it is the movement of its own
intensity’ (Badiou 2005: 58). This may be seen in the writing
of certain live coders, who rather than working towards some
teleological endpoint, attempt to begin and end with nothing;
code is woven only in order to be unravelled. Live notation is
thus less about approaching the situation with ‘a code prepared
in advance’, but rather may be practised as a practice, a form
of notation (to borrow from Luce Irigaray) that is ‘constantly
in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly
embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid being fixed,
immobilized’ (Irigaray 1980: 103).
75
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 REFERENCES
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pp. 119-123. Originally published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
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Badiou, Alain (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Collins, Nick, McLean, Alex, Rohrhuber, Julian and Ward, Adrian (2003) speech and code to its limits’; V. ‘Double Agent’ by Hester Reeve, exploring the term
‘Live coding techniques for laptop performance’, Organised Sound 8(3):
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Collins, Nick (2011) ‘Live coding of Consequence’, Leonardo 44(3): 207–11.
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1
The fragments refer to: I. ‘Virtuoso (dismembered sonata for Hannah Arendt)’, a
performance to camera by Hester Reeve; II. Yuen Fong Ling’s ‘Delete/Copy/Paste’
workshop, a ‘reconfigured life class using live mark making as the conduit to
question authorship, ownership and originality … by switching roles, hierarchies
and the nature of production between the artist, model and tutor’; III. ‘Drawing/
Hacking’ by Kate Sicchio, a workshop performance that ‘explores live coding as a
floor pattern for choreography’; IV. ‘Speaking Code’ by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, a
‘performance lecture … combining human and machine voices … to undermine the
distinctions between critical writing and coding practices to push the analogy of
‘live notation’ in relation to ‘un-institutionalised forms of creative labour and to
the “un-economic” of the “extended body”’; VI. ‘Live Notation & “Live” Drawing’,
Andre Stitt’s exploration of drawing and painting as live notation; VII. ‘Notations of
Intimacy’, a one-to-one performance lecture by Maria X; VIII. ‘Live-coding the Drone
Machines: The system as a musical piece’ by Thor Magnusson, a live coding
performance using ixi lang, a bespoke live-coding system ‘that exists at the border
of being a score, a musical piece, and a system for musical expression’; IX. ‘The
Triumph of Crowds: A score for decapitation, rotation, two trumpets and organza
(after Poussin)’, where Brigid McLeer’s translation of Nicholas Poussin’s painting
The Triumph of David (1631–3) as a series of drawings and instructions was
confronted, interpreted and performed live by Kate Sicchio; X. Sam Aaron’s
‘Isomorphic Algorhythms’, a live coding performance weaving synthesis, structure

Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 1972–1990, New York, NY: Columbia and symbolism through abstract and hand-crafted visual form; XI. ‘The Gospel
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The relation to weaving is especially pertinent given that the jacquard loom is
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Negri, Antonio (2003) Time for Revolution, New York, NY & London:
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Poulakos, John (1995) Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece, Columbia, SC:
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Stein, Gertrude (1935) Lectures in American, New York, NY: Random House.
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