Programming the Postdigital: Curation of Appropriation Processes in (Collaborative) Creative Coding Spaces

Abstract

Creative coding is a form of postdigital art that uses programming to solve esthetical problems, subordinating functionality to expression. It often comes with rather uncommon usage patterns of coding, going beyond technologies' affordances and finding ways of appropriating them in an individual way and in exchange with others. The learning ecologies GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Pouët present digital infrastructures that curate and support such appropriation-related activities. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of the structure of these spaces, and the appropriation-related communication taking place. It shows how crucial the varying designs of the learning ecologies and the implemented interaction possibilities are for the appropriation activities taking place and draws a line to the desire for stronger participation in postdigital curation.

Postdigital Artistic Positionality and its Potentials for Cultural Education

“…Postdigital artists propose new forms of critical examination of digital, networked media (Ackermann, Egger & Scharlach, 2020), even as they use these technologies, or indeed acknowledge politics of identity, or class. This means that 'postdigital artworks are generated via digital methods, or at least informed by digital technology, even if they do not necessarily have to create a digital output' (Ackermann et al 2019: 183).…”

“…These arguments also have implications for postdigital art practices, which may be created through the digital (at least in part) and interpreted in the context of cultural education. There is a need to consider firstly, what this could mean for the identity of cultural studies (taking into account historical tensions with political economy), as well as to question whether we may have a new opportunity in postdigital art, to move beyond an uncritical utilisation of digital platforms, devices and media (Ackermann, Egger & Scharlach, 2020). In our discussions we go further, to argue that postdigital art practices, based on authentic human experience, can offer us a form of resistance to many political economic 'illusions' of democratic forms of public culture, that can now be found across the Internet, and are thus now also participants in human lives.…”