Hello!
As a visual artist/designer and occasional writer on contemporary Indian art, I have been thinking of a collaborative project with programmers that would attempt to look at code, both as a formal, logical "thing", but also a node within the broader cultural and political context. I am copy-pasting the text of a short write-up below.
I have had some initial discussions on this with Udhay and Jace. Udhay, in fact suggested that it might be interesting to have this as an item on the agenda at the next silk meet.
How about this weekend?
Cheers,
Abhishek
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CodeWork: A Rough Outline
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KEYWORDS: art, technology, pedagogy, software, programming, access, politics, public
A collaborative exercise between programmers/hackers and a visual artist-interpreter, CodeWork is a project that explores the overlaps between the practices of art and pedagogy. Through an exhibition and an accompanying website, it attempts to open up the public discourse around technology - particularly software technology. Though we are all aware of the fact that today, software technologies touch upon almost all areas of our life in increasingly critical ways, access to that technology remains the privy of the uber-geek. To put it simplistically: beyond the world of the practicing technologist, there are more people who are aware of the mechanics of an Internal Combustion engine or the chemistry of soaps than there are people who are familiar with a structured query in a relational database.
But then is this project merely a "Software 101 for the General Public?" More than imparting skills – rudimentary, basic or otherwise - this project attempts to initiate a certain informed engagement. One need not learn decoding Feynman diagrams to grasp the broad outlines of Quantum Mechanics. But once you have been exposed to that counter-intuitive worldview your notion of space, time and causality changes forever. Or even if it doesn't change radically, you perhaps begin to engage with the world around you in a slightly different register.
So what exactly would happen in CodeWork?
A team of 5-6 programmers along with a visual artist will explore chunks of actual code. Code that is meant to do a variety of things: checking inventories, searching databases, enabling financial transactions, visualizing bio-medical imagery etc. The team would brainstorm and come up with scenarios – actual scenarios where a particular software technology intersects with a particular task at hand. Each programmer would then respond to that scenario with a piece of appropriate code. To keep things relatively more accessible, the complexity of the task would be kept simple so that the resulting code doesn't exceed a certain agreed upon limit of line length. This code will be then printed in a large format – around 6 feet by 12 feet or something closely it's equivalent.
The idea is to confront the viewer with code that has an almost palpable materiality. It should be also mentioned here that the space where CodeWork will be exhibited will be entirely devoid of computers or any other digital device that can perform the very function the code is supposed to achieve once it gets activated within the context of an appropriate hardware. The point is really not to see the code in action – since that is something that we routinely witness in our daily lives - but to consciously 'alienate' oneself from the seductiveness of a smooth function and begin engaging with the guts and bones that lie concealed beneath.
But how could anyone with no prior understanding of programming, make any sense out of a clutch of Python Script, even if it was printed really big and nice? Wouldn't it still be essentially illegible? Here we would resort to the standard software practice of annotation. However, the annotation – both in its frequency and intensity – would be amplified to a much greater degree. While there will be a more straight forward textual annotation/explanation, the visual annotation/interpretation – which will be also printed out in a big scale - will not shy away from being expressive. While the visual annotation will borrow from the language of the scientific diagram or Information Graphics, a language known for its deft usage of analogy – for example the famous ball and plastic sheet analogy deployed in visualizing Relativistic gravity as dimples in space time - it will repeatedly rupture the unproblematic nature of those languages with gestures and elements that bring into play a wider range of references, histories and contexts.
It would then very consciously foreground the larger political underpinning that frame CodeWork as a project. Because to get an entry point into the world of code is to also realize that technology is being increasingly deployed in ways that seriously impinge on our many of basic freedom: the freedom of privacy, the freedom to customize something to ones own need, the freedom to discard what we find useless.
