Future Sketches @ ICLC 2025
Char Stiles and Jessica Stringham from the Media Lab's Future Sketches group presented work and performed at the 2025 International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Barcelona this May.
ICLC is a conference focused on the practice of liveness in symbolic abstractions and its consequences. It is part academic conference, part performance arts festival.
This year, the prompt was liveness, to "reflect about liveness and its many forms and consequences within live coding. We believe the tension between what is live and what is not is a key element of live coding. What effects does it have on the processes, technologies and forms in the performance? How do the many forms of liveness impact and transform the hybridization between the digital/algorithmic and the material? How does liveness relate to and/or define the socio-cultural aspects of live coding communities."
Char Stiles presented both a paper and performance on Fantasy IDEs, which considers new interactive development environments built for creative coders, and in this case for live coded visuals.
Jessica Stringham presented Murrelet, a live coding framework built in Rust that features touring parameter spaces using expressions and external input. Jessica also performed visuals "in dialog" with Katarina Hoeger, who played the flute and manipulated in a system built in Max. This was done "in dialog" by having Jessica and Katarina's programs communicate to each other via OSC.
In addition to ICLC, Jessica and Char participated in ErrorCamp near Sheffield, UK, with live coders and artists.