Programm(ed/ing) Culture

An off-hand hands-on, hands-off, and on end journey into labs, code, gender and autonomy.

11:00 - 14:00

Audrey Samson

Audrey Samson is a Rotterdam based media designer, artist and researcher. She manages the Digital Art Lab at the CKC culture/arts center (Zoetermeer, NL). She teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, NL). She completed a BFA Major in Design Art from Concordia University in 2002 (Montreal, Canada), and a M.A. in Media Design from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2007 (Rotterdam, NL). Her research/practice focuses on: rethinking interfaces, the use of online media for mourning purposes, the concept of finality in reproducible media, women's relationship to technology, the affordances of the internet medium in telematic performance, working from the products of planned obsolescence, and re-assembling objects to endow them with new functionalities.

Audrey is co-founder of the Roger 10-4 project together with Sabrina Basten. She is part of the Genderchangers (gender & FLOSS) network and the Aether9 telematic performance group. More info on her endeavors can be found at www.ideacritik.com [1]

15:00 - 18:00 I like tight pants and mathematics: queering up programming culture

Programming as a practice is not just about loops and variables. Programming has been conceived and continues to be practiced in a cultural context: programming culture.

To get into programming, one firstly has to come to terms with the stereotypes held about programming as an introverted, male, “geeky” endavour. Secondly, one has to deal with the image of the programmer that is held within the programmer community itself, which is less derogative but has its own biases towards gender and class. Finally, there’s the reality of people actually practicing programming, which is more varied then any stereotype but still shows for example a gender makeup that is hugely imbalanced towards men.

To give programming a productive place in your arts and design practice, you need to get to know programming culture, and, ideally, take part in (re)shaping it. To feel comfortable with being a programmer, you might want to change what a programmer is. With queering up I am not referring to homosexuality, but rather to an approach that undermines existing masculine, heteronormative ideals. An historical example would be Glam rock’s appropriation of the traditional ‘earnest’ masculine rock musician into the polysexual identity mirror palace created by musicians as David Bowie and Freddy Mercury.

Within the workshop I will introduce my design practice and how I work with and within programming; then we will have a short introduction into programming culture and it’s main tropes, and finally we will do a short exercise to kickstart our reimagination of programming, and of ourselves as programmers.

Eric Schrijver

Eric is a designer, theatre maker and author. He proposes artists and designers to get intimate with their toolset. He has lectured at the Libre Graphics Conference and written for Libre Graphics magazine. For more information see his site: [2]