WORKSHOP: "Revisiting Concepts, Notations, Software, Art"

SYNOPSIS

In this workshop we will address the underlying texts and infrastructural contexts that permeate our contemporary computational cultures—that is, software and its written codes. Rather than taking the common and constrained position of a so-called "user" of software applications, this workshop takes another perspective. We will program and write code ourselves in order to grasp the praxis of constructing software and in so doing, question the concepts, constructs, and notations programming affords. The overarching context for this praxis is the domain of art and aesthetics, or what is known as "software art." More than merely a context to learn how to code, we will ask if software based artworks can articulate certain types of critiques of our computational cultures, and if so, what are modalities these "critiques" operate in.

PRE-WORKSHOP

In preparation for the workshop we ask you to read the following texts and get acquainted with the programming environment we will be using during the session. The listed manual and tutorials are here for you to get a grasp of the programming environment and the practice of programming more generally. The manual by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox has some interesting critical reflections at the beginning of each chapter that are worth reading in preperation for our session.

Texts:

• Cramer, Florian. “Concepts, Notations, Software Art.” In Signwave, Auto-Illustrator Users Guide, 101–12. Liquid Press/Spacex, 2002. Link
• Cox, Geoff, Alex McLean, and Adrian Ward. “Coding Praxis: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Code.” In Read_me: Software Art & Cultures, edited by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, 161–74. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004. Link
• Galloway, Alexander R. “Jodi’s Infrastructure.” E-Flux, no. 74 (June 2016). Link

Programming environment:

• P5.js: https://p5js.org/
• P5.js Editor: https://editor.p5js.org/

Manual and tutorials:

• Soon, Winnie, and Geoff Cox. Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/