NICA-RMeS Workshop | Computational writing and publishing
— © Image: Geoff Cox and Winnie Soon —
Computational writing and publishing — Workshop with Geoff Cox and Winnie Soon
Date: 21 April 2023, 13:00-18:00
Location: Utrecht University (Grote Zaal/MCW Lab, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20)
Contact: Dr. David Gauthier (d.gauthier@uu.nl)
Credits: 1 ECTS
Registration via NICA – Website now open
Deadline for registration: 14 April 2023
The procedural qualities of both writing and coding lend themselves to the sharing of resources, collective actions, and social exchange through the use of experimental publishing tools such as wiki-to-print and git repositories. This points to conceiving a publication (such as a book) as a dynamic computational object that is open for re-versioning. Given these possibilities with computation, and despite the trend towards open access, it seems odd that relatively little has changed in academic publishing and scholars still seek to distribute their work through journals even when more accessible and sustainable forms are available. Similarly, workflows tend to follow a model that remains relatively unchanged since industrialism. The presentation explores these concerns through some of our recent projects, including the co-authored book Aesthetic Programming (2020). Our examples examine a parallel between writing and coding, attempting to open up the aesthetic and political potential of publishing as a cultural practice in which books can be coded, written, read and published as dynamic networked objects, not fixed in terms of attribution or commodity form or specific determination.
During the workshop we will engage with publishing software from the Varia collective.
The workshop also coincides with the International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) which presents live coding concerts in Utrecht.
Speakers
Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, co-Director of CSNI and co-Director of MA Curating Art and Public Programmes. He has a research interest in software studies and contemporary aesthetics. With Jacob Lund, he is co-editor of The Contemporary Condition book series published by Sternberg Press (since 2016), and with Joasia Krysa, co-editor of the open access DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press (since 2018, earlier with Autonomedia). With Christian Ulrik Andersen, he co-runs a yearly workshop/publication in collaboration with transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin (since 2012), and is co-editor of the associated open access online journal APRJA, hosted by the Royal Danish Library. He has published widely, most often in collaboration, including: with Alex McLean, Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression (MIT Press, 2013); with Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2016); with Winnie Soon, Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Open Humanities Press, 2020); with Mitra Azar and Leonardo Impett, the co-edited special issue Ways of Machine Seeing, AI & Society (Springer-Nature, 2021), which relates to an ongoing collaborative research on computer vision (with, amongst others, colleagues at University of Cambridge and The Photographers’ Gallery) and visual literacy (with Institute of Education and The Turing Institute). The multi-authored book Live Coding: A User’s Manual, with Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Thor Magnusson and Alex McLean, was published by MIT Press late 2022.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Dr. Winnie Soon is Course Leader/Senior Lecturer at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London. They have over 10 years of experience in academic research, teaching and leadership. Soon is the co-PI of the research project Digital Activism (with Christian Ulrik Andersen) as part of SHAPE – Shaping Digital Democracy research centre funded by Aarhus University and the co-research lead, British Digital Art, British Art Network. Soon’s research and practice intersects with art and technology in the areas of Software Studies and Computational Cultures, engaging with topics like queer code and coding otherwise, digital censorship, minor technology and computational publishing to understand the potential and implications of technology in a wider cultural and societal context. They are the co-initiator of the art community Code & Share [ ], which brings code, diversity and art together. They are the co-author of “Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies” (with Geoff Cox) and “Fix My Code” (with Cornelia Sollfrank). Recent contributions to publications include “Execution” in Posthuman Glossary (with Critical Software Thing), “Throbber : Executing Micro-temporal Streams” in Computational Culture Journal and “API practices and paradigms” in First Monday (with Eric Snodgrass). They are actively providing and maintaining two ongoing software art projects: net.art generator (w/ Cornelia Sollfrank and Gerrit Ché Boelz) and Queer Motto API (w/ Helen Pritchard & Cristina Cochior). Since 2022, Soon is the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series, together with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Jichen Zhu, at the MIT Press, focusing on software as a site of societal and technical power.
