Geoff Cox

The book explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking - and curriculum - that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. It introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning.

The aesthetic and political implications of working with code as procedure, expression, and action. Speaking Code begins by invoking the "Hello World" convention used by programmers when learning a new language, helping to establish the interplay of text and code that runs through the book. Interweaving the voice of critical writing from the humanities with the tradition of computing and software development, in Speaking Code Geoff Cox formulates an argument that aims to undermine the distinctions between criticism and practice and to emphasize the aesthetic and political implications of software studies. Not reducible to its functional aspects, program code mirrors the instability inherent in the relationship of speech to language; it is only interpretable in the context of its distribution and network of operations. Code is understood as both script and performance, Cox argues, and is in this sense like spoken language-always ready for action. Speaking Code examines the expressive and performative aspects of programming; alternatives to mainstream development, from performances of the live-coding scene to the organizational forms of peer production; the democratic promise of social media and their actual role in suppressing political expression; and the market's emptying out of possibilities for free expression in the public realm. Cox defends language against its invasion by economics, arguing that speech continues to underscore the human condition, however paradoxical this may seem in an era of pervasive computing.

Social change does not simply result from resistance to the existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Author as Producer" (written in 1934) recommends that the `cultural producer' intervene in the production process, in order to transform the apparatus in the manner of an engineer. This collection of essays and examples of contemporary cultural practices (the second in the DATA browser series) asks if this general line of thinking retains relevance for cultural production at this point in time - when activities of production, consumption and circulation operate through complex global networks served by information technologies. In the 1930s, under particular conditions and against the backdrop of fascism, a certain political optimism made social change seem more possible. Can this optimism be maintained when technology operates in the service of capital in ever more insidious ways?

The interaction between culture and economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer by the term 'Kulturindustrie' (The Culture Industry) to describe the production of mass culture and power relations between capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak one, but one that appears to hold continuing relevance, despite being written in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand, the culture industry appears to allow for resistant strategies using digital technologies, but on the other it operates in the service of capital in ever more complex ways. This publication, the first in the DATA browser series, uses the concept of the culture industry as a point of departure, and tests its currency under new conditions. For more information see The DATA browser series presents critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology. The editorial group are Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Anya Lewin, Malcolm Miles, Mike Punt & Hugo de Rijke . This volume is produced in association with i-DAT .