Over the past 34 years, we’ve grown a community with liveness as its rallying cry, and a dream of making programming direct, visible, tangible, and alive at its heart. But it’s striking to realize that – even as we come together to discuss liveness at LIVE – we don’t really know what liveness is. Definitions of liveness in the literature are often vague, more gestures towards a direction than falsifiable descriptions. When definitions do flirt with specificity, they sometimes contradict each other in interesting but unexamined ways.

Alongside the ambiguity of liveness’s definition, we have a second problem: While it is clear that approaches to liveness range widely, varying across many axes, there has been little work to articulate the dimensions of variation which efforts towards liveness encompass. Searching out patterns and mapping out these dimensions might hint us towards unexplored realms of design space, or at least give us a clearer shared language.

This essay begins what I hope will be an ongoing, collaborative effort to figure out what liveness means to us, and to map out the space of possibility we are journeying through together.