Oops? Interdisciplinary Stories of Sociotechnical Error| Uncertainty as Spectacle: Real-Time Algorithmic Techniques on the Live Music Stage

Abstract

When performing live, musicians often tread on the verge of messing up to entice their audiences. The audiences’ expectations of failures serve as the backdrop against which musicians enact the spectacles of suspense. By explicating the techniques of live looping to live coding, this article excavates how real-time algorithmic techniques refashioned conceptions of musicianship, wherein musicians come to embrace the speculative possibilities of failures against the ontological uncertainty inherent to these algorithmic processes. Drawing on the indeterminate nature of these algorithmic techniques in real-time operations, this article sketches out a reorientation toward an ethics of algorithms that anticipates and prepares for failures as always probable.