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Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox will introduce their new book Aesthetic Programming - A Handbook of Software Studies that explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum* — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems.

More info: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/

* The book derives from one of the undergraduate courses of the Digital Design degree program at Aarhus University in Denmark, which has been taught in parallel to a course in Software Studies since 2013.

Biographies: Geoff Cox is Associate Professor and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, UK. Winnie Soon is an artist and Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark.