- intentionally unpredictable visual (audio) systems
- typical process as a designer = top down
- conceptualise > realise
- exploratory + spontaneous moments happen less often, as you develop specific habits and go-tos
- cybernetic synthesis collapses top down nature/mode of control
- denies the ability to know exactly what's going to emerge
- for a cybernetic patch to be interesting, it has to be unpredictable at fundamental level
- it's about receding control to emergent behaviour
- makes cybernetic design both rewarding and frustrating
"Creative Coding is a discovery-based process consisting of exploration, iteration, and reflection, using code as a primary medium, towards a media artifact designed for an artistic context."
- Looking for
- New modes of encounter that resist dominant technological, social, and epistemological hierarchies
- Porosity/leakiness of notational systems (= code/textile/text)
- Human trace in notational system
- breaks + cracks, ambiguity, intuition, association, collaboration, affect, emotion, care, uncertainty
- Feminist modes of coding/knitting/writing
- Interested in:
- Vulner–ability as a post-digital technology
- Destabilising binary oppositions
- Understanding programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts
- Moving away from patriarchal, hegemonic values of computing systems which are often void of emotions (transforming binary through feeling)
- Interrogating the white, Western and rational discourse surrounding programming
- Decolonising the notion that technological knowledges are only Western/white/male (female history of coding)
- Learning from "old" technologies (ecologically + socially more sunstainable)
- Using knitting to unpack/critique contemporary computing + the algorithmic organisation of society
- Softness + warmness as an opposition to capitalist modes of being
- Pushback + resistance to agile and extractive data-driven pratices
- Non-linear/cyclical/emotional/intuitive/… writing
- Rhythm technologies impose
- Troubeling:
- The digital's binary logic as part of broader forms of dualistic thinking that impose and uphold hegemonic concepts
- Internalised ideals of linearity, objectivity, and control
- Vulner–ablity as a postdigital technology/artistic practice, that:
- Approachs encounters not based on where they happen, but how — through oopenness, care, and a willingness to be affected
- Reclaimins traits traditionalle coded as feminine, and often devalued in dominant Western knowledge systems, as epistemologically powerful
- Frames vulnerability as an ability to be cultivated (rather than viewing oppenness to affect as a weakness), thereby disrupting neoliberal ideals of autonomous individuality and foregrounding relationality
- Develops new modes of encounter that resist dominant technological, social, and epistemological hierarchies
Textile as Notational System
Date it stores: care + time, rituals, spells + wishes, thoughts
Knitting as Notational Practice
slow, careful
- softness + warmness as an opposition to capitalist modes of being (separation from people + things) than as a gendered mode of being (everyone can be soft and warm)
- love/joy/gift-giving
- pushback + resistance to agile and extractive data-driven technology practices
- learning a new approach to code + algorithmic thinking frough female craft forms
- inbetween thinking and not-thinking
Text as Notational System
Date the typewriter stores: breaks + cracks, struggle, thinking-cycles, non-linearity, affect + emotion
Writing as Notational Practice
How do the technologies we use choreograph our actions, provoke us to perform, and open spaces for improvisation?
What are the user gestures that define new paradigms for interaction with systems?
Even when we believe we find the answers within, I suspect we find them in the other; within ourselves. As physical boundaries dissolve, might the lines between self and other, inside and outside, analog and digital, also begin to blur? What would a meditation practice rooted in porosity and permeability feel like? I hear the pulse of fast, insistent drumming and slowly rise.
I'll try again. And again. I repeat until I find a sound that blends in with the soundscape of the other instruments. I try to identify a rhythm that I can match. The others do the same. We merge into a fast, repetitive rhythm.
I take the long sheet of paper, which feeds line by line from the typewriter, into my hands and hold it up above the machine. I see sentences I would like to delete. I see paragraphs I want to rephrase. There are also typos, an extra comma. Questions and statements that I have already developed further in the process of writing and want to work on. I can tell from the irregularity—or uniformity—of the typing where I typed listlessly, where I typed energetically. Where I have tentatively and uncertainly set down a provisional thought. I try to embrace these human traces in the text, my traces, and to understand them as productive in the sense of vulnerability. And indeed— the more I write, the more I lose the fear of leaving these traces behind.
“Kind of maniac”—my studio mate’s affectionate observation flashes through my mind. Truly. The repetitive rhythm of typing puts me into a writing frenzy. It is loud, it echoes, it sets other objects in the room vibrating. Is that it? Does the typewriter set me vibrating? I begin to take what I am writing seriously. Because it is there. I cannot simply highlight it with a click and delete it with a key. I am forced to continue writing with what is there; I cannot tinker with a small paragraph, deleting, correcting, adding, until I have honed the central point of that short paragraph. The process is, and remains, visible; in some cases, until the paper trails over the edge of the table.
But it is precisely in these porous marginal areas, in this permeability of my process, that something lies. I develop thought processes (uncertain ones) that I would have deleted on my laptop before they had a chance to develop. I begin to discover the epistemic potential in the nonlinear, in the erratic, in the breaks. Is the avoidance of this because it resists the linearity and objectivity of the literary canon? Because it feels like a feminine = emotional = irrational production of text/knowledge?
When I write on the computer, my traces vanish. The keys are flat, the stroke gentle. I only need to brush the key lightly for the letter to appear on my laptop screen. And no matter how softly or firmly I press, the letter will always appear in the same even black on the display.
When I type with that same stroke on a typewriter, the letters come out in a pale, uneven grey. That forces me to type more dynamically. My fingers don’t glide across the keys as they do on the computer; my hands hover over the typewriter’s keyboard, so that I can throw my fingers down onto the keys with greater force. The loud, clattering rhythm this creates shifts me into a different writing mode. The repetitive beat puts me into a kind of trance, perhaps even a meditative state, that keeps me typing on.
At that point I suddenly stop paying attention to capital letters or line breaks. Although a bright ringggg towards the end of each line reminds me that the time has come: I must now be mindful of whether the next word will still fit on the line, whether the word I’m in the middle of typing will need to be broken after the next syllable.
The ten-finger system imposes a rhythm on me—quick, steady, efficient. Just fast enough for transcription, too fast for real thinking. Writing on the computer reinforces this tendency. Lines break automatically, autocorrect makes most typing, spelling, and grammar mistakes disappear with ease. Whole lines and paragraphs can be deleted, corrected, shifted elsewhere. What remains is a text without mistakes, without traces of me. No hints at the moments when I hesitated, deleted, typed frantically, or slipped up.
The typewriter disrupts that supposed linearity and lays bare my train of thought. It leaves signs of the enthusiasm with which I struck each key, and in doing so calls into question the objectivity I am meant to uphold as a researcher. It wrests control from me. It unsettles the rhythm imposed upon me.