Hello All,
I have been enjoying catching up on this list (have been on the road heretofore). My comments are vernacular and simply set out some interests in ‘the performativity of code’ comes from many different directions- 1) the ways that technologies, including software are produced by specific actors with specific insertions in the world and understandings who in turn become actors – producing and containing identities and practices through code. Code is never neutral, always productive and constraining. How can coding produce new kinds of actors? 2) Radical empiricism – specific acts of coding performing new possibilities. For e.g. when my team created CodeZebraOS many years ago it was literally performative – using the visualization structure to cluster a lateral discourse that emerged over time that undermined hierarchies and underscored affect. 3) The work of coding – the process of designing software, applications, making code and the products of code. I lead the Visualization Laboratory at OCAD University, with many coding projects flowing through it, resulting in prototypes and even clean code. We collaborate with computer scientists and intervene into their coding concepts; we access commercial code and bend it. We access code from many sources. It is a balance of understanding the underlying assumptions of that code, its materiality, of engaging with the actual technologies. I am interested in the labor process of coding and how as obsessive, focused work, performed in my lab by individuals who share their work in collaborative teams in a studio-laboratory environment it produces specific agents – returning us full circle to my first interest. 4) Returning to my first point, the culture and practice of user and usability studies, grounded in HCI and design. How we engage with the very process of formation of identities and practices I first described. I will try to be a consistent contributor (and I promise to situate my comments within specific theoretical constructs as appropriate).
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