Improvised Images: Exploring the Aesthetics and Politics of Live Coding

Anna Wanqi Li

Anna Wanqi Li is a doctoral candidate at the Cambridge Centre for Film and Screen, working at the intersection of film studies, new media theory, and the histories of technology. Alongside her research, she is a filmmaker and new media art practitioner. Her practice explores avant-garde filmmaking through computational technologies, spanning both conventional moving-image forms and multimedia performance.

Improvised Images: Exploring the Aesthetics and Politics of Live Coding introduces students to the creative and critical potential of live coding through TouchDesigner (Non-Commercial), a free node-based visual programming platform for real-time image manipulation. Combining theory and practice, this workshop explores how we can engage playfully and politically with moving images through code. The first half of the session traces a historical zigzagging between cinema (particularly the history of avant-garde practices) and creative computing, challenging the dominant narrative of a definitive ‘digital convergence.’ Instead of framing cinema and computing in a before-and-after model, we draw on media archaeology and critical media theory to uncover latent programmability already present within the moving image. Participants explore TouchDesigner hands-on, learning its basic interface, operator families, and image-processing workflows while experimenting with integrating external resources to subvert the software’s intended uses. In the final stage, they are invited to create and share a short live VJ-style performance.

This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the and view the complete series of .

Our CDH Methods workshops have limited places and are prioritised for students and staff at the University of Cambridge. However, if space is available, we welcome all participants who want to learn and apply digital methods and use digital tools in their research.

This session may be of particular interest to:

• PhD students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event, please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.

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Host or Publisher Cambridge Digital Humanities