VocableCode The work is setup as side by side, not to privilege the back/front but to see them together as critical interfaces, as codework, as computational art, as e-lit. I, says Soon, and I, Annie, agree, really like all the voices that overlap with one another, repeatedly creating the chaos and orders and help me to think about how to queer the world. Winnie Soon on fb.
Take a look and be convinced! https://dobbeltdagger.net/VocableCode/
Vocable Code, is a project by Winnie Soon, a Denmark-based Hong King artist-researcher who is interested in the cultural implications of technologies, specifically concerning internet censorship, automation, data circulation, real-time processing/liveness, infrastructure and the culture of code practice.
In the interview “Winnie Soon, Time, Code, and Poetry” by Eva Heisler in Asymptote Journal she also speaks about this project:
The project is inspired by Geoff Cox’s 2013 book Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. The chapter “Vocable Code,” co-written with Alex McLean, argues that code is speechlike, with expressive and performative qualities. Along this line of thinking, my work Vocable Code examines the entanglement of human and nonhuman voices, including human voices that are stored in a computer format and operated through a formal logical structure. There are computerized voices, too, with translation, and they perform in real-time when the program code is executed. Apart from that, the source code is written as a form of poetry, which is highly readable and expressive as a piece of written language, but it is executable at the same time. The attention to “voice” is to explore the agency of such entanglement.
The source code does not prioritize efficiency, and that means some of the code and functions are not “useful” at all, and even might be considered redundant from a computer science perspective, but I use decimals and many other custom-variable names as a queer way to foreground the conceptual and political voice of a programmer. For example, one of my favorite lines below shows the use of variable names and the function “abs,” which means absolute but is not functionally useful, as the code can run without this syntax. However, if you speak these lines of code aloud, you will immediately recognize code is not as alienated as many people think, and it is highly readable and poetic.
If (gender == abs(2)) {
SpeakingCode(queers[WhoIsQueer].iam.makingStatements);
}
Take a look and be convinced! https://dobbeltdagger.net/VocableCode
So beautiful! So interesting!
