The Living Code: Hyperspace Live Coding Festival

The Living Code: Hyperspace Live Coding Festival

Live coding has become a significant practice within contemporary digital media culture, intersecting with generative art, electronic music, sound synthesis, noise and immersive audiovisual performance. While often associated with European creative contexts, live coding has developed distinct and diverse trajectories across Southeast Asia, where artists are pushing the form in unexpected directions.

Designed as a platform for artistic exchange, professional networking and creative collaboration, the Melbourne edition, ‘Hyperspace Live Coding Festival’ invites artists from Southeast Asia, Germany and Australia to participate in a program of workshops, performances and panel discussions. The festival marks the beginning of a series of events that will be followed by editions in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in 2026 which will explore the possibilities of code as a live artistic process.

Curated by Christopher Taudt (harte echtzeit), the festival runs across two days at RMIT and Miscellania. The artists and participants will explore how live coding can deconstruct and reconnect ideas of space, time and place. The festival will move between local, global and virtual spaces and time zones, creating opportunities for artists to exchange methods, develop new collaborations and experiment with unfamiliar tools and approaches.

The program is open to beginners, experienced coders and anyone curious about the possibilities of live coding. Workshops, performances and panels at RMIT are free to attend, with RSVP essential due to limited studio capacity.

The festival culminates on Saturday night 7 November with an Algorave at Miscellania, bringing together many of the invited artists for a night of algorithmically generated music and audiovisual performance. 

Hyperspace Live Coding Festival is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut, presented in partnership with Liquid Architecture and RMIT. The program invites artists, students, researchers and audiences to explore the creative possibilities of live coding and become part of a growing international network dedicated to experimentation, collaboration and innovation.

Schedule

Panel Discussion: Spaces, Language, Encoding

Friday 6 November

4.45 – 5.45pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD, Building 12, BlackBox Multimedia Space (12.02.103)

Alexandra Cárdenas (GER), Flor de Fuego (GER), Hayden Ryan, Alex Mclean (GBR), harte echtzeit (Christopher Taudt).

The Hyperspace Live Coding Festival will kick off with a short introduction by curator Christopher Taudt and the organising team, welcoming artists and guests. An international panel will launch a discussion to explore questions of language, spaces, cultural practice and how live coding can be used to question established norms. Taking the title “Spaces, Language, Encoding”, international and local artists will ask questions such as;

What would be needed in order to create new spaces with abstractions, languages, encodings, code and non-english programming languages?

How human are algorithms and patterns? How strongly are they related to human cultures and cultural histories?

Do programming languages and digital utopias give us the chance to find new ways of expression which can be free from cultural traditions and explore new frontiers?

Is there a digital colonialism in place imposed by certain tools and corporate-infused practices of the present-day internet?

Performance: language <>code

Friday 6 November

6.15 – 7.00pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD, Building 12, BlackBox Multimedia Space (12.02.103)

Alexandra Cárdenas (GER), Flor de Fuego (GER).

In live coding, using a (programming) language is not only a tool but a profound means of expression. Artists working with code are continually navigating a practice that is based in both a knowledge of computer science as well as cultural heritage and human languages. This is reflected by the fast variety of available languages as well as the scope of artistic work where music, visuals, spoken word, dance and poetry blend. This performance revolves around the tension between the abstract logic / formalism of computer science as well as mathematics and the human desire for culture as well as for story-telling.

The performance asks what new cultural abstractions computers have enabled. Additionally, it embraces a resistance to normative, Western cartographic practices by exploring representational forms of mapping place - thereby prompting us to consider non-colonial approaches to mapping placeless spaces, such as the internet. 

The artists will explore how hyperconnected, rhizome-like structures of live coded artworks can be used for cartographic exploration in a sonic and visual territory while challenging their own tools – programming languages that are fundamentally western-influenced. The performance will engage with the performance space and the specific room acoustics involved by utilising a spatial audio system.

This performance is presented by Alexandra Cárdenas and Flor de Fuego, two prolific live coding artists utilising music, visuals and communication practices based in Germany, with curatorial support by Hayden Ryan, an Aboriginal sound scholar and artist of Yuin descent.

Workshop One: Introduction to Live Coding Music with Strudel

Saturday 7 November

10.00am – 12.00pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD,  Building 9, Level 3, Room 4A

Host: Nū

A gentle introduction to making music with live coding for beginners. No experience, neither in music, nor in programming is needed.

Please bring your own laptop with a modern browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari and a pair of headphones. No other software needed.

Workshop Two: Compositional Techniques for Advanced Live Coding Music with Strudel

Saturday 7 November

10.00am – 12.00pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD, Building 9, Level 3, Room 5A

Host: Alexandra Cárdenas (GER)

An advanced workshop that focuses on compositional techniques for recording and live performances of live coded music. Alexandra Cardenas has a degree in music and more than 20 years of experience in live coding which she will share. If you have had your first gigs as a live coder or years of experience, this workshop will help you to get to the next level.

Please bring your own laptop with a modern browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari and a pair of headphones. No other software needed.

Workshop Three: Introduction to Live Coding Visuals with Hydra

Saturday 7 November

1.00 – 3.00pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD,  Building 9, Level 3, Room 4A

Host: holisticc

If you are curious how to make glitchy, wild and mesmerizing visuals with just a few lines of code in your web browser, this workshop is for you. A gentle introduction to making visuals with live coding for beginners. No experience in programming is needed.

Please bring your own laptop with a modern browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari and optionally a pair of headphones. No other software needed.

Workshop Four: Advanced Visual Live Coding with Hydra

Saturday 7 November

1.00 – 3.00pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD, Building 9, Level 3, Room 5A

Host: Flor de Fuego (GER)

An advanced workshop that focuses on compositional techniques and advanced approaches to visual live coding with Hydra.

Flor de Fuego is a renowned live coder and scholar with more than 10 years of experience which she will share with you. If you have had your first gigs as a live coder or years of experience, this workshop will help you to get to the next level.

Please bring your own laptop with a modern browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari and a pair of headphones. No other software needed.

Performance: Sightseeing Machines

Saturday 7 November

3.30 – 4.15pm

RMIT University, 124 La Trobe St, 3000 Melbourne CBD, Building 12, BlackBox Multimedia Space (12.02.103)

Inmintcondition (THA), M0xa (IDN), Shara Francisco (PHL)

The CSIRAC computer is a famous 1st generation computing machine that inspired computer scientists to perform music with machines as early as the 1950s. It is inherently connected to Melbourne. In this performance, selected live coders from South-East Asia will develop a performance based on the heritage aesthetics of CSIRAC in a remixed, re-sampled, de-constructed, fragmented and amalgamated work. The artists will share their perspective as sightseeing visitors to Naarm/Melbourne and its technological past in the form of the CSIRAC computer.

Performance: Hyperspace Algorave (A/V)

Saturday 7 November

6.00 – 10.00pm

Miscellania | 2/401 Swanston Street, 3000 Melbourne CBD

Nū, Alexandra Cárdenas (GER), Flor de Fuego (GER), d.dadut, cleary, Inmintcondition (THA), M0xa (IDN), Shara Francisco (PHL), Live Coders Naarm Collective (LCN) plus more…

Hyperspace presents an algorave at Miscellania, bringing together international and local practitioners of live-coded sound and visuals.

Here, code is not simply a tool for making music. It is performed, written, altered and executed in real time, becoming part of the process through which rhythm, texture and image enmesh. Algorithms become instruments, while improvisation takes place through the continual negotiation between performer, machine, audience and code.

Across the program, pairs of live coders will work with sound and image to produce music that is never entirely predetermined. Patterns shift, systems break down, rhythms mutate and structures are rebuilt in response to the people and the atmosphere of the room.

Part concert, part club environment and part demonstration of computational performance, the algorave proposes a different relationship between code, bodies and dance, one in which the machinery of music-making is made visible and the algorithm itself becomes something to move with.

Miscellania is not wheelchair accessible. Full accessibility information can be found here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fHR60VwEErBidoSdSbRgbWh8LDVlDjW5RQB8JE916B8

Miscellania operates on the Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and acknowledge that the struggle against colonial violence continues. Sovereignty has never been ceded. We offer free entry for all First Nations Peoples - please send us an email at info@miscellania.club to organise.