Aesthetic Programming: Forking Workshop

Join our resident Tzu-Tung Lee and their collaborators Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox for a workshop exploring the translation of code and software programs.

Through a series of workshops conducted with Tzu-Tung Lee in cities worldwide, authors Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox are endeavouring to collaboratively translate their open-access book Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (2020) from English into Chinese. Through this process they seek to engage with the politics of translation within the global Sinophone context.

Taking inspiration from the process in software development known as “forking”, this intimate workshop seeks to fork Aesthetic Programming through discussion, translation, editing, and other creative means, incorporating situated knowledge and examples into the process.

The first “forking” workshop of the book was held in Taiwan in 2023 and focused on “problematic terms” in Chinese technology vocabulary translation. For example, should “coding” be translated as “編碼” (encoding), “編程” (programming), or simply “寫程式” (writing programs)? This second workshop, taking place at Delfina Foundation in London, will work through other glossaries, references, and examples in a global Sinophone context.

Workshop Participants

The organisers encourage people who are interested in the intersection of art, technology, cultural studies, language, and politics to register.

No prior programming experience is required, but participants are requested to bring their laptop or tablet along to the workshop.

For this London iteration, the workshop’s discussions will be mainly conducted in English but will involve some Chinese. It is not however necessary to know of Chinese in order to participate.

Workshop registration

The workshop is limited to 15 participants. If you are interested in taking part, please email events@delfinafoundation.com (subject line: Aesthetic Programming). It would be useful for the organisers if you could include in your email a couple of sentences about yourself and/or why you wish to attend.

More about the book

Aesthetic Programming (2020) 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. This open-access book intends to enable 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. The book further explores 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, data-fiction, and recent developments in automated machine intelligence, for example. The book develops a 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.

Links

Aesthetic Programming, Chinese Translation

Aesthetic Programming Discord

Code Of Conduct

Workshop credits

This workshop is hosted by Delfina Foundation, and it is supported by Delfina Foundation, Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts, London, and Digital Art Center, Taipei. Organised by Tzu Tung Lee, Winnie-Soon, and Geoff Cox. Tzu Tung Lee’s residency at Delfina Foundation is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (ROC).