In the interactive computer arts, any advance that significantly amplifies or extends the limits and capacities of software can enable genuinely novel aesthetic experiences. Within compute-intensive media arts, flexibility is often sacrificed for needs of efficiency, through the total separation of machine code optimization and run-time execution. Compromises based on modular run-time combinations of prior-optimized 'black box' components confine results to a pre-defined palette with less computational efficiency overall: limiting the open-endedness of development environments and the generative scope of artworks. This dissertation demonstrates how the trade-off between flexibility and efficiency can be relaxed using reflective meta-programming and dynamic compilation: extending a program with new efficient routines while it runs. It promises benefits of more open-ended real-time systems, more complex algorithms, richer media, and ultimately unprecedented aesthetic experiences.

The dissertation charts the significant differences that this approach implies for interactive computational arts, builds a conceptual framework of techniques and requirements to respond to its challenges, and documents supporting implementations in two specific scenarios. The first concentrates on open-ended creativity support within always-on authoring environments for studio work and live coding performance, while the second concerns the open-endedness of generative art through interactive, immersive artificial-life worlds.