Executing Liveness: An Examination of the Live Dimension of Code Inter-actions in Software (Art) Practice

API practices and paradigms: Exploring the protocological parameters of APIs as key facilitators of sociotechnical forms of exchange

“…Despite acting as key infrastructural elements and connectors within the networked environments of the present, the prominence and importance of APIs is still largely under recognised. This relative lack of discussion on APIs applies not only in terms of their practical usage in things such as application and platform development, but also with regards to the sociotechnical questions of the cultural and political implications of the parameters of accessibility and exchange that APIs have the ability to set, acting in this way as crucial arbitrators for a range of computational infrastructures (Bucher, 2013;Espinha, et al, 2015;Soon, 2016;Snodgrass, 2017;Verborgh, 2017). If, in Helmond's description, APIs can be understood as an "underlying technological glue of the social Web" [1], linking various platforms, applications, and information processes together, it becomes important to pay close attention to what forms of sociotechnical exchanges APIs have tended towards.…”

Executions: power and expression in networked and computational media

“…In his article on stack software structures, Rory Solomon asks the question of "whether it is truly possible to access nondiscursive layers of media, and what that even might mean" (Solomon 2013). Using the examples of both the functional call stack within programming languages and the more general-purpose diagrams of application stack software architectures (with their pyramids, cones, cylinders, and other diagrammatic heaps of sedimented computational layers stacked one over or below the other), Solomon highlights the way in which a mode of last in, first out interpretation and execution, as well as other stack-like models, can serve as a helpful reminder of how one discursive system can bootstrap and further build itself off of other discursive systems, a cycle of layering and sedimentation that points to discourse as both historically sequential and highly contingent.…”