The TOPLAP manifesto demands transparency — 'show us your screens' and 'obscurantism is dangerous'

At the 2004 Changing Grammars meeting in Hamburg (attended by Alex McLean, Nick Collins, Julian Rohrhuber, and others), TOPLAP drafted a founding document — the ‘Read Me,’ a loose manifesto articulating the live coding ethos. Its two most-quoted principles are ‘show us your screens’ — the code and the act of writing it should be visible to the audience, typically by projecting the editor behind the performer — and ‘obscurantism is dangerous’ — hiding how the music is made is treated as an ethical violation. A third often-cited line, ‘live coding is not about tools; algorithms are thoughts, chainsaws are tools,’ reframes the practice as a cognitive and expressive one rather than a technology showcase. Together these principles set the aesthetic and ethical norms of the community, and the screen-projection requirement is what distinguishes a live coding performance from an electronic set that merely happens to use a laptop.

Examples

At an algorave the performer’s code editor is projected large behind them, so the audience can read (or try to read) the code while dancing to the music it produces. Covering the screen, or pre-running hidden routines without showing them, violates the ‘show us your screens’ ethic.

Assessment

Explain the practical meaning of ‘obscurantism is dangerous’ in a performance context and give a concrete action that would violate it. How does projecting the code change the performer–audience relationship compared to a conventional DJ set?