This is a short paper that proposes an approach to the activity of live coding as an artistic configuration constituted in a creative practice from improvisation, openness and constant exploration. I just want to share some thoughts about sociability in live coding, in terms of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) to address this collective aspect.
The approach is anthropological, through ethnographic field work from which the method seeks to explore some combination between a scope, actors and activities and a cut of reality that encompasses practices, values and formal rules. The aim of the ethnography is to address the distinction: “between the real and the ideal culture, between what people do and what people say they do, and hence between the field of practices, values and rules” (Guber 2001).
This work seeks to provide some characterization of a collective artistic expression in constant process, which mediates and constitutes sociability and subjectivities in a sociotechnical context.