Winnie Soon

Can coding be poetry?

Words become code and code becomes art. Vocable Code obscures the lines between art, software, and political voice. Human voices, programming languages and text come together to complete the sentence: "Queer is..." .

These elements mix together to explore linguistic tensions in writing and reading within the context of (non)binary poetry and computer programming. By being more poetic, it offers an alternative to the mainstream development of coding, which deserves the same critical reflection from a humanities and literary perspective. Just like words in a book, computer programming is a language that also has aesthetics and political implications that can affirm or erase people's identities.

Where is the line between the voice of humans and computers? How fuzzy is that line?

Winnie Soon (they/them) is an artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries, engaging with themes such as queer code and coding otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, minor technology and free and open source culture. Their work has featured in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books - “Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies” (with Geoff Cox) and “Fix My Code” (with Cornelia Sollfrank).

VOCABLE CODE