In late 2020, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox published the open access book “Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies” (Open Humanities Press).The book addresses the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of programming from its insides, as a means to think and act critically, offering an applied and overtly practice-based approach to understanding the importance of programming. Our intention is for readers to also become writers in the sense that they acquire key programming skills in order to read, write and think with, and through, code. We feel that it is important to further explore the intersections of technical and conceptual aspects of code in order to reflect deeply on the pervasiveness of computational culture and its social and political effects — from the language of human-machine languages to abstraction of objects, datafication and recent developments in automated machine intelligence, for example. Moving beyond a STEM focus, the book develops discussion of power relations that are still relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism.This not only relates 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.Following the free and open source ethos, we want to open up different possibilities for making “cuts” across the various materials and ideas, and encourage readers to fork a copy and produce their own versions; with different references, examples, reflections and new chapters for example, for further modification and re-use.
Geoff Cox likes not to think of himself as an old white man from a parochial island but is clearly in denial. At least other aspects of his identity are thankfully more ambiguous and fluid. Research interests lie broadly across contemporary aesthetics, cultural theory, software studies, and image politics, reflected in his academic position as Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, UK, and Adjunct at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Winnie Soon was born and raised in Hong Kong, increasingly aware of, and confronting, identity politics regarding colonial legacy and postcolonial authoritarianism. As an artist-coder-researcher, they are interested in queering the intersections of technical and artistic practices as a feminist praxis, with works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books. Researching in the areas of software studies and computational practices, they are currently Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark.
