The humble breaths of tech identities
Resonate (Belgrade) Day 2: Errors, Silicon (again), Thought Systems, and Breath
The day started with a talk by Daniel Temkin about writing code. But not your normal kind of how to write code, the kind I like (and normally write). He called for code that actually overcomes years of good design practices to include personal expression and art. In it, he mentions a quote from the Humble Programmer essay by Edsger Dijkstra that went something like this: the key to the humble programmer is to avoid clever tricks like the plague. A fitting motto for the day because in fact, we, as humans, are not so clever anyway. Instead, we find ourselves in a loop of time and breath to constantly assert our own identity. Let me get to the in-between of it all.
Error
“We are Morons” or so says the comments in the code for Windows 2k. Temkin used it to show us how the code shows emotion the most in the comments. Human. At the same time, in Kate Sicchio’s talk on Hacking Choreography (a topic close to my own heart) she mentions the struggle that dancers have of interpreting the score that she is live coding. Error. Or is that just the beauty of our bodies in movement? In Martin Schneider’s talk on data visualisation through the use of movement experiments, he mentions a case where Cinderella needs the help of birds for her to finish the task given to her by her evil stepmother: sort the peas and the ash. Again humans are too prone to error (or just not fast enough). As Temkin mentions we are not logical beings. So what does that mean for identities that are being asserted in a land made up of (error-prone) logical codes of social media, banks and so on?
Thought Systems
Perhaps it’s our creation of our very own thought systems that helps us to keep up our (wannabe logical) reasoning of why we are who we are? In Sicchio’s talk she mentions that one of her dancers did not like doing the dance because she had to interpret words (codes) in order to move. She was caught in between a loop of thinking versus isolating of the body. Duality. So she made her own system to interpret the codes. Double. Codes are read by both humans and machines. The poetry of them is for humans, the logic for machine. For Temkin we use coding compulsion, a looping process of a need to get things working, to bridge the two. For dance and code, new thought processes depend on how individual bodes express themselves. As Eva Papamargariti mentions as inspiration for her work: objects are not important instead we should focus on the trail of energy that is left behind. Liquid. Just as we can’t explain what goes on in our thought processes, we can’t quite fully understand technology. Perhaps we should embrace that in-between space, like dancing, instead of trying to prove our worth through the logical points of work and time that can easily be explained as systems?
Breath
Breath. It keeps coming back, like a nasty habit. In the project Sarotis by Ava Aghakouchak and Maria Paneta, they use silicon (yes! silicon again) to create wearables that inflate and deflate to send data on the body and/or to navigate space. Silicon is a malleable material (perhaps important for the research around silicon and gender mentioned in my writing of Day 1.). But more importantly their silicon had a breath. If we can’t be logical, if we are prone to error, in fact if we are prone to air, than breath is maybe the truest form of asserting our identity? I’m not sure exactly what I want to say here, but I know it is important. For now it is stuck in that vague in-between space where I can’t quite put it into words. But the point is, we are always trying to identify ourselves with, for, by or against technology. Maybe we should just give up fighting for awhile and breath, and by doing that maybe we can actually be the identity we loop constantly to create.
Conclusion
It has been a long day, and I’m not sure if any of this makes sense. But what I write now is triggers for longer thoughts, and an insight, ironically, into my own thought system. I couldn’t help but read the gender into each bit of the day after my text from Day 1, from Sicchio’s mentioning that after the performance she did dancing with a male programmer people assumed she was controlled to the woman’s restroom door showing a high-heeled shoe. And how could I not mention silicon again (with a little laugh)? Just as Resonate triggers its own path through identity by only writing the names of the people — their identities, there is some weird link between identity, technology and breathing. I’ll let you know when I have it, until then, let’s breath and see what tomorrow awaits.
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To learn more, see the post: Diversity of Words.
