Don't Touch My MIDI Cables

Gender, Technology and Sound in Live Coding

Bibliographic Data

ID4973993
AuthorsJoanne Armitage (0000-0002-5533-197X), Helen Thornham (0000-0003-1302-6579)
Year2021
Volume127
Issue1
Pages90-106
Publication date2021-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0141778920973221
OpenAlexW3136243705
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological-human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human-technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human-technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human-technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed 'becoming with' or 'making kin'. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms

Aesthetics · Kinship · Sociology · Anthropology · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Gender Studies · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Music Technology and Sound Studies

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