Live coding's defining conviction is that code is written and projected in front of the audience in real time

Live coding is not a tool or a musical genre but a set of overlapping convictions: that code should be written in front of people, that sound or visuals can emerge from logic in real time, and that the process of thinking and typing is itself worth watching. Its practice is radical transparency — the performer’s editor is projected publicly, exposing the code being typed, the errors, and the machine’s internal logic. This is what separates a live-coding performance from an ordinary laptop set, where the means of production stay hidden behind a finished interface, and it also answers the ‘laptop performer problem’ of having no visible gesture. Crystallised by TOPLAP’s motto ‘Show us your screens’ (Spanish ‘Muestra tu pantalla’), the projected screen is more than a spectator aid or a display of typing speed: it is read as a critical, materialist, and political gesture — granting access to the means of production and ‘making software strange’ against a paradigm that designs computation to be invisible. A common misconception treats live coding as a style; it is a performance orientation that spans clubs, classrooms, galleries, and universities.

Examples

A performer sits at a laptop with code projected large above the dancefloor, evaluating patterns live while the audience watches the logic unfold, errors and all. Slub (Adrian Ward and Alex McLean) projecting their SuperCollider code at the Foundry pub as an assertion of creative agency. Cárdenas projecting code onto tiled metro walls as passersby stop to watch. The TOPLAP line: ‘Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens.‘

Assessment

State the core convictions that make a performance ‘live coding’ rather than an electronic set that merely uses a laptop, and explain why the same label covers both an algorave and a school classroom. Then articulate two distinct interpretations — didactic vs. political — of what a projected screen communicates beyond the music.