ICLC 2025 Catalogue

Transduction in Action - Live Coding from a Simondonian Perspective

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Was presented at:

Abstract

This paper applies Gilbert Simondon's relational ontology to the artistic practice of live coding. I examine how Simondon's concepts of individuation, transduction, metastability, and transindividuality illuminate live coding as a process that enables multiple entities (code, sound, performer, audience, and technical environment) to undergo simultaneous transformations through shared memories and mutual encodings. Simondon's concept of transindividuality provides a powerful lens for understanding how live coding creates a complex interrelation between individual participation and collective experience, revealing the simultaneous unfolding of interior psychic structuration and the emergence of collective meaning. Building on these theoretical perspectives, I analyze traditional live coding methods and propose a novel approach using SCTweets as algo-sonic individuals in dynamic feedback networks, where techniques of self-modulation, hetero-modulation, and coupling create complex systems with emergent behaviors. This framework reconfigures the relationship between creator and sonic artifact, allowing musical manifestations to occur outside anthropocentric intention while providing a reflexive distance to experience both humanity's innate technicities and the human presence latent within algorithmic structures.