Code, Poetry and Freedom

2019

Computer programming is more than a tool for the artist. Writing code is manipulating a medium: a medium that is like no other. This chapter discusses the importance of coding and shows how it is enabling principled investigations into inventing new forms, creating new experiences and extending the nature of engagement with art works. It shows how formal ways of making art, from perspective to the 20th century use of systems, geometry and mathematics, have pointed to the value of programming. This is a direction that has defined the work of a range of artists. The chapter discusses the use of the medium of code by artists who talked about their art making process. They include pioneers Aaron Marcus, Harold Cohen and Manfred Mohr and other artists, some of whom are live coding practitioners.

Update Available: Transforming Education in Design, Film and Fine Arts, 2023

2002

This paper is concerned with understanding the character of open source (OSS) project work. Using data from interviews, email communications and the code itself we describe how the orderliness of such projects is achieved in contrast, perhaps, to stereotypical views of ’hacker’ projects. We use this data to explicate the ways in which OSS projects are accomplished and the ways in which the various participants observably, reportably, accountably orient their actions, their contributions to the project as a whole. The contrast we draw is not with idealised views on software projects but with ethnographic and ethnomethodological studies of software production that emphasise the project as a practical, ongoing achievement. The paper moves beyond idealised versions of the open source project towards understanding OSS as a practical sociological phenomenon.

2006

This article explores the connection between computer programming (coding) and traditional composition. It first looks at how a discussion about adopting the open source community's copyleft publishing model suggests a deeper parallel between coding and composition than has been previously acknowledged. By repositioning the rhetorical triangle as a coding triangle, the article argues that the act of writing programs for a machine informs the process of constructing an audience, in traditional composition. To better inform the act of how a traditional writer invokes an audience, the article summarizes how Walter J. Ong has characterized this process. The article then examines how Claudia Herbst's portrayal of the cultural power of computer code raises questions as to how computer users similarly invoke an author. It also briefly considers how computer programming texts have characterized coding as an act of writing. Next the parallels between coding and composition and their treatment thus far in composition literature and new media theory are considered. The article considers Alfred Kern's work in employing BASIC programming to teach grammar and composition and then offers suggestions for thinking of new ways that a knowledge of coding can inform the teaching of writing. This article concludes with guidelines for writing teachers who wish to incorporate computer coding into their curriculum.

The study Work of Art as Code Production examines the process of the perceiving the artwork from a socio-semiotical point of view, as text and communication act. The aim of the research is to find out if there is a way to determine whether the text is an art text or just resembling it by using the same structural characteristics. The thesis consists of introduction, 7 chapters and summaries in Estonian and English. The chapters are as following: Artwork as Text, Creation of Meaning. Text Code, Culture Industry as a Monologue, Art as a Dialogue, Semiotic Characteristics of Artwork, Art and Commerce: Elite versus Popular, Logical and Mythological Code, Subcultures as New Pop-culture. Artwork as Text introduces the theory of aesthetic texts and reception mechanisms of Umberto Eco. The semiotic definition of an aesthetic text gives the structured model for an unstructured process of communicative interplay. In fact, the reception process of artwork is code creation. Each time a member of the audience is (re)reading an artwork there is happening a new code creation from the codes of the artist and the codes of the recipient. There is no certain number of interpretations or codes that can be created. The main characteristic for artwork code-creating is deviation from the norm. The best readability makes code that is not too strange nor too obvious. The receiving process of a text of art makes the audience to give up denoted so called natural interpretation and step out of the pattern of a hegemonic way of thinking. Creation of Meaning. Text Code is approaching art texts as a unique symbiosis of structure and substance Je ne sais pas quoi, which cannot be separated. Contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of texts as " encoding " and " decoding " respectively. According to Stuart Hall's encoding/ decoding model the message is being created with multiple meanings. There are three main reception modes: full or hegemonic mode, partial mode and rejecting mode. In Hall's active audience theory the audience is taking actively part in the process of decoding. The work of art always requires the audience's active participation in the process of communication. From the point of view of the reception theory there are two types of texts: ordinary mundane text and hypertext.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2006

This article was the Introduction to an issue of MIT Press' peer-reviewed journal Leonardo Electronic Almanac that I guest-edited in 2006. The topic of the issue was "New Media Poetry and Poetics" and this was one of the earliest collections of writing on the topic that attempted to read New Media poems. The original abstract read: "Poetry has entered the digital realm, and has been changed by the experience. No longer static texts on a page, contemporary poetry has undergone some intense rewiring at the hidden levels of pixel and sub-text machinery. In the new media environment, we deal with an expanded notion of "poem" as praxis of surface level and sub-textual computer code levels, and an expanded awareness of the digital poem as process. The reading and reception of this writing occurs in a networked context, in which the reader becomes an "ergodic" participant (to use Espen Aarseth's term) and helps shape the form of the new media poem."

ii iii Preface This monograph represents the written portion of a PhD thesis which focused on the contemporary field of software art. The other portion of the study was a set of five creative new media works. At one level these works provide examples of software art, but at another level they raise questions concerning the nature and boundaries of the genre. Rather than imagining a clearly delineated and integral aesthetic field, my focusat both a practical and theoretical level -is upon exploring dimensions of discomfort, uncertainty and opening.

A Matter of Design: Making Society trough Science and Technology Proceedings of the 5th STS Italia Conference, 2014

This essay studies the source code of an artwork from a software studies perspective. By examining code that come close to the approach of critical code studies (Marino, 2006), I trace the network artwork, Pupufu (Lin, 2009) to understand various real-time approaches to social media platforms (MSN, Twitter and Facebook). The focus is not to investigate the functionalities and efficiencies of the code, but to study and interpret the program level of code in order to trace the use of various technological methods such as third-party libraries and platforms’ interfaces. These are important to understand the socio-technical side of a changing network environment. Through the study of code, including but not limited to source code, technical specifications and other materials in relation to the artwork production, I would like to explore the materiality of code that goes beyond technical implementation, and to consider the things that have been inscribed in the level of code socially. I argue that examining code is a way to understand socio-technical relations. Keywords: Code; software; socio-technical; non-human

2019

Live coding is a technique for creating music through the computation of algorithms in real time. It includes a set of philosophical and technological characteristics that have the potential to unchain deep and urgent questions regarding the aesthetic, politic, technical and social aspects of music. Space, as a common thread that deals with each one of these aspects, has been an important subject of questioning and exploration by live coders throughout the three decades of development of this practice. Live coding is intimately related to hacker ethics and appropriates current technological advancements, bringing a new set of tools and aesthetic approaches to music creation. Moreover, thanks to a particular collaboration between music composition and computer science, live coders are endowed with the curiosity and the capability to overcome given cultural rules to create new spaces and contexts for their performances. Public space offers live coders an immense territory for explorat...

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021

The article discusses the attempt to understand a source code under the conception of philosophical hermeneutics guided by language. Based on a confrontation between H.-G. Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, our main goal would be searching for the essence of the source code in language. Thus, a closer look is taken into cultural symbols, natural language, and artificial languages. Especially, there would be discussed the problem of abstraction, linguistic community, self-forgetfulness, vitality of formal languages, and display of individuality. This is where the cultural layer of the code can be traced, hence we may find our world-view verbal in nature. In line with the Critical Code Studies approach, in this article, the source code is treated as text. Because of its complexity, the issue should be studied within philosophical inquiry and computer science knowledge. Hence, the perspective developed here goes back to origins and provides a philosophical foundation for Critical Code Studies thinking. The article presents academics with a philosophical challenge: how to understand the source code with an adaptation of a philosophy rejecting artificiality. With philosophical reflection, the source code gains additional meaning and experiences increase in being. Understanding happens in language, which realizes as discourse.