If at Sónar+D we celebrate the ways humans interact with machines through artistic practice, we cannot leave aside live coding: it is the only way the computer truly becomes an instrument. When you use DAWs like Ableton or Logic you are not making music with the computer, you are making music with instruments that live inside the computer.

That is why we have invited Roxanne Harris (@alsoknownasrox), artist, researcher and musician programmer. With a degree in Computer Science and Music from Yale, active member of Livecode.NYC and fellow of the Processing Foundation, where she has developed Ephemeral Experiments, a tool to capture and analyse the process of live coding that turns every keystroke and every mouse movement into 3D visualisations of creative decisions in real time. Because live coding is by definition ephemeral: you spend the night building something that will never exist again in exactly the same form.

At Sónar+D her session unfolds in two parts. The first frames programming as an embodied and improvisational practice shaped by constraints, affordances and emergent system behaviours. The second moves into a live performance in which the processes that usually remain hidden (signal flows, algorithmic decisions, networked interactions) become perceptible as sound and image, treated as malleable material.

It is a demonstration of how art can be made from vulnerability, with the code visible to everyone and no safety net, and at the same time a deeper question: where does agency reside within technologically mediated systems? What remains of human expression when it is routed through code, infrastructure and data streams?