Live coding's online-performance culture long predates the 2020 pandemic

TOPLAP, the organization behind live coding, celebrated its sixteenth anniversary at the Eulerroom Equinox in 2020 — placing its founding around 2004. The orientation point is that when other music communities were ‘suddenly discovering the fragile nature of our world’ and scrambling online in 2020, live coders already had a mature, road-tested culture of remote, livestreamed performance: established channels, event formats, and community norms with ‘a significant head start’. Live coding is therefore not a pandemic-era novelty but a practice with roughly two decades of history behind its online performance.

Examples

The Equinox simply reused the community’s existing streaming channels (YouTube, Twitch, Facebook) rather than building a new online-concert format from scratch, precisely because those channels had been in use for years.

Assessment

Roughly what year was TOPLAP founded, and name one way that a long-established online-performance culture gave live coders an advantage over communities going remote for the first time in 2020.