Most us shop, bank, and socialize on digital devices, moving quickly through tasks and distractions. Only slowed when downloading a file, we may find ourselves staring at a spinning icon that reassures us a computer program is in the process of executing our command. The process is invisible, but we are convinced something is happening, and it is happening now. These two experiences of digital technology—its invisibility and its staging of liveness—are central preoccupations of Denmark-based Hong King artist-researcher Winnie Soon.
Our experience of time is influenced by our relationship with computers. This is one of the arguments of Soon’s research paper “Executing Micro-temporality,” a cultural analysis of the throbber (the animated icon that signals a computer program is executing an action) and an investigation of the micro-processes underlying “the pervasive and networked conditions of the now.” In art projects, including The Spinning Wheel of Life (2016) and Throb (2018), a screensaver and an installation, she unfolds the throbber icon to explore different registers of time, including, as described on her website: “spinning and generative times, machine and waiting times, processing and executing times, storing and printing times, past and present times, evolving and perpetual times.”
Our experience of time is influenced by our relationship with computers. This is one of the arguments of Soon’s research paper “Executing Micro-temporality,” a cultural analysis of the throbber (the animated icon that signals a computer program is executing an action) and an investigation of the micro-processes underlying “the pervasive and networked conditions of the now.” In art projects, including The Spinning Wheel of Life (2016) and Throb (2018), a screensaver and an installation, she unfolds the throbber icon to explore different registers of time, including, as described on her website: “spinning and generative times, machine and waiting times, processing and executing times, storing and printing times, past and present times, evolving and perpetual times.”
Most of us think of computer code as application-driven but Soon, as she discusses in this interview, is “interested in thinking with, and through, programming.” The recent Recurrent Queer Imaginaries, a collaboration with Helen Pritchard, involved researching the history of manifestos and then, using an algorithm based on thirty-five historical and contemporary queer and feminist manifestos, programming a “Motto Assistant,” a software agent that generates manifestos for all manner of revolutions.
Coding, for Soon, is also a practice of poetry. The project Hello Zombies includes poems generated from spam. Another project, Vocable Code, is based on an open call for individuals to complete the statement “Queer is.” The recorded answers were then translated into code and spoken by a computer. As Soon explains, “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.”
—Eva Heisler
I am interested in how your code practice engages issues of reading, translating, voice, and materiality. Perhaps we could start with a definition of “code practice.” How would you explain it to non-programmers?
Code practice is the use of computer programming languages in designing software as part of an installation, web-based project, or artwork, and this includes reading, writing, and executing program code. Beyond that, I am also interested in thinking with, and through, programming as an approach to examining wider computational culture and politics in terms of how software is being used and produced.
Vocable Code is a fascinating project. The term “vocable” conjures a sound that, while not a word, is evocative, like “uh-oh.” In the context of your project, “vocable code” refers to programming language that is voiced and expressive.
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.
How do you see your overall practice, and this work in particular, as a queering of programming?
For me, the notion of queerness has to do with thinking beyond binary and normative categorization, questioning the assumptions behind such distinction. For example, some people might think that the computer is a functional tool and use it just to realize their thoughts or to achieve certain goals; or they might consider computer programming as a means to build platforms, apps, and gadgets in the neoliberal context in which we often come across these applications in contemporary culture. To invite various participants to donate their voices is a way of thinking about how we might challenge the norms of everyday practices, including computing. The project asks, what does it mean when human voices are computerized and performed within a formal logic, and how might I, as artist-programmer, play with the program code as the in-betweenness of formal logics and natural languages?
You have referred to the tradition of constraint-based writing as an influence on this piece. Can you explain how you see this project in the context of experimental writing practices?
The practice of constraint-based writing plays out in at least two ways. First is the writing of program code with certain rules. Inspired by the Feminist Software Foundation, I am writing in a style that undoes the usual way of writing code, such as not using the single x and y, ones and zeroes as integers, true and false as Boolean, or the single operator of > or <. 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);
}
Beyond the constraints, at the code level, I also ask participants to adhere to a set of constraints when they record their voices completing the sentence “Queer is.” (See the instructions here.) The voice files are also selected randomly, both in terms of the number of voices and which voices to play. In that sense, I am exploring experimental coding (and writing) practices.
Hello Zombies is a project that uses an algorithm to make poems out of spam, and then sends those poems back to the spammers. You refer to spam as a zombie form, neither living nor dead. Can you say more about this? Is “zombie” also an analogy for automated systems and, if so, what does it mean to make poems addressed to this system?
I think of spam as a zombie form not only because the term “zombie” commonly refers, in popular culture, to a mindless slave, but also because I want to situate spam as the phenomenon of datafied culture. Spam is massive in quantity and pervasive everywhere in mailboxes, websites, servers, etc. However, it is difficult to have a real dialogue with spam. Spam seamlessly contacts us, but spam is “dead” while at the same time alive to intervene in computational operations.
Yes, the project Hello Zombies is an automated system, constantly creating zombies, harvesting spammers’ addresses, sending spam poems to them, and checking for network replies from spammers. I want to exemplify the computational processes of production in computational culture, addressing the mutable quality of automation that points at regulatory controls, loopholes, labor practices, digital consumption, and datafication through the language and performativity of spam poems. Here is an example of a spam poem based on the work "readme.SpamPoem," a collaboration with poet Susan Scarlata:
[ALL DUMP OR ALL LEAK]Use upload carriers. Strict phones have typical data.Cowards land what models either size.Data that does not network directly concerns us.URL, all dump or all leak.
Your project If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? (and thousands of other questions), a collaboration with British artist Helen Pritchard, is a computer program that searches for questions on Twitter and then translates those questions into machine-spoken words. In all installations of this project, the searching and speaking occur in real time. I am interested in how you use voice: voice as embodied, and voice as disembodied. The experience of a voice is so tied to the specifics of a given body, yet your projects, such as this one and Vocable Code, employ computerized voices. What is the significance of the machine-speaking voice? What is it about the query, as both human utterance and computer command, that interests you as an artist, writer, and programmer?
In this artwork, we are interested in questions or voices that are unheard; that’s why we collected questions and converted them into voices that play out in real time. The computer voice that we used is called Karen; back then, we had a fairly hard time finding a woman’s voice as most of the computerized voices were male, unlike today when we experience a woman’s voice through different voice assistants, like Siri or Alexa. We didn’t think about the computerized voice as an “assistant,” with a class distinction, to aid humans with tasks. We wanted to give voices to women and others who are marginalized, even though we tend to think that posting on social media is a way of being seen.
Regarding the question of living and nonliving, we are less interested in that dichotomy, but in how the body is part of the integrated human-machine system. We wanted to problematize such distinctions of machine and human, living and non-living, questioning the concept of voices in the context of digital culture. In this work, there are humans and possibly bots that are represented, translated, or even mediated, via a real-time computational process.
Throb is a project that reflects on the experience of time when online. A throbber is the symbol we see when waiting for a download or transaction to complete. What you’ve done is to write code that describes the visual elements of a throbber but does not perform as the usual spinning circle. Instead, your throbber uses four characters (—, \, |, /) that respond in real time to computational operations but loop clockwise in such a way that the pattern constantly changes. Your piece throbs at a much slower tempo than the throbber icon, which, as you say, gives the illusion of a flow of data, of nowness. Would you tell us more about your research into how computers have shaped our experience of time?
Regarding the iconic throbber image, I have done a couple of works. The one about real time reacting to networked and computational operations is called The Spinning Wheel of Life. While the use of four characters is related to the artwork called Throb, the 2018 version was a screensaver with a generative pattern, and the latest one is presented as an installation. The installation, building upon the 2018 version, includes display of a screensaver, with both static characters and a computer-selected character that throbs, and a dot matrix printer that reproduces the pattern every ten minutes, showing the generative processes of how a throbber, or the overall pattern, evolves subtly over time. These pieces explore different scales of time and temporality, including spinning and generative times, machine and waiting times, processing and executing times, storing and printing times, past and present times, evolving and perpetual times, and examine how the affective nowness and perceptible realities are entangled with computational operativities.
The iconic symbol of the throbber usually indicated that micro-temporal actions are being performed behind the screens of loading, waiting, and buffering in digital culture, but we as ordinary people have no idea what is really taking place and how long we should be waiting. The now that we are immediately experiencing via streaming and displaying live data, from personal computers, smartphones, IoT devices, and among other interfaces, is essentially a delayed present with networked agencies, computational procedures, and technological operativities. From a research perspective, I am interested in the gap between presenting the unknowable time and temporal operativities that are happening beneath the screen interface, including discrete signal processing, internet data transmission, and the processes of buffering, to understand the role and implications of computational time, and how the perceivable now is being rendered by computational conditions. Indeed, the now that we experience is entangled with computational logic.
Your most recent work, in collaboration with Helen Pritchard, is Recurrent Queer Imaginaries. You created the Motto Assistant, a software agent that writes manifestos. In building the Motto Assistant, you researched the history of manifestos, especially queer and feminist writings that, as you put it, “have been used to propose imaginaries for life in cities that ‘could be’ or ‘could have been.’” How have you used these histories as code? Could you explain how your Motto Assistant is encountered by an audience?
For this piece, we have collected thirty-five historical and contemporary queer and feminist manifestos that are archived online and housed in the radical bookshops and libraries in London, specifically the places around Kings Cross and Euston, sites that are historically important for the queer movement but that have been affected significantly. For example, Queer nighttime spaces have been replaced by the relentless gentrification of tech companies and start-ups.We fed the collected manifestos into a machine learning algorithm (Recurrent Neural Networks) to generate new collective voices, which is not the usual way of using machine learning to learn a single author’s writing style. But through this process, we found a lot of new, forgotten, and interesting (misspelled) words.
Both Helen and I became "machine learning assistants" to edit the predictive text that has been generated in the process. We retain a lot of newly generated words, but also edited them if we knew the misspelled ones.
This edited text then became the source text for the “Motto Assistant.” The custom-made software employs the diastic method (invented by artist and poet Jackson Mac Low). The seed text (“not for self but for all”) was used to generate deterministic mottos that could conceivably number in the billions.
For the installation, the Motto Assistant is presented in a projection, and the audience experiences the contingency of new mottos as they are generated over time. The installation is more than just a piece of software, though; it includes all the collected manifestos and a diagram that shows the condition and state of the texts.
