i-feel-the-need-to-explain-myself

i spent a long time making this site for everyone, and ended up not really having much energy to make my own page. my original idea was to make a "view source" article that discusses the act of view-source. Visitors can drag a slider to look between the rendered page and its source code, in which I hide a lot more emotional pondering through comments.

It feels quite urgent to discuss the power dynamics hidden in the interfaces we see and use daily, which are increasingly optimized for smoothness, scale, and opacity.

However, in order for this argument to really land, I would like to write the page myself.

this wouldn't be much of a statement when i first learned how to code; but now we seem to have entered a time where it's assumed that websites you see are almost always vibecoded (to some extent). the main site that I made, from which you could access this little piece, was written with claude code. I still spent a lot of time on it, and wrote some code myself; but it doesn't feel like it matters much anymore. This makes being in the [art and code] track of a museum incubator feel rather doomed as well. my friend Nolen Royalty calls this the broken legibility of effort, where we can no longer tell, at a glance, whether something took a human hard work.

It's a difficult position to hold much of nuance. While we're mulling over our own engagement and moral stance towards AI, entire trillion-dollar industries are designing towards a future against writing your own code and emails, making music with friends, searching for answers. The future they are selling, in the name of technological advancement and sometimes "safety", is one that values coherence, obedience, and efficiency, over... art? creativity? beauty? (I have a longer essay, Violence of Alignment, on this issue, if you're interested in reading)

So...when the whole world seems to have given up on reading and writing code, why do we -- why do i -- still teach and practice creative coding?

For me, one of my favorite things about teaching creative coding, was learning about my students through the way they code. When I read student code, I can almost always see the writer behind it: were they deliberate, careful, persistent? Were they fighting their way through complexities by adding more and more and more to an already bloated architecture, because they’re determined and stubborn? Did their understanding of classes hit midway through programming a project? Were they carefully thinking through their steps, eager to figure out how individual parts relate to a whole?

I appreciate them all, the traces of how someone learns and thinks -- viewing source is ultimately viewing people. How do I even communicate to the world, how much humanity those numbers and letters hold?

While in the counterculture of whimsy over productivity, I have also started to feel rather uneasy with my field being labelled as "creative technology"

The "creative" in "creative technology" has often functioned as a pretty dress for the "technology" in "creative technology". Lucas Gelfond has traced this asymmetry all the way back to the 1960s, when Bell Labs engineers started the first big art and technology experiments. Gelfond connected the historical challenges of artist / engineer collaboration to the industry nowadays, where art is either treated as purely instrumental, or as a demo, an advertisement, and a friendlier face for the tech companies.

But why is it that "technology" always only refers to tech companies and their products? Ursula Le Guin had a whole rant about this definition, following a test: "ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?... I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do." I think about this often and hold this dearly, because this is also what i love about all the technologies that i have appreciated and learned over the years. Yet when "technology" becomes a stand-in for computer software technologies (and further, the tech industry) -- in the same way how "AI" has become a stand-in for LLM Assistants and image generation tools -- the abstraction conveniently glosses over the labor, infrastructure, and maintenance of what the things actually are.

If "technology" only means what companies ship, then my relationship to it can only be a consumer. Olia Lialina has had an argument against "Art and Tech" for years that shares a very similar premise, that the rhetorical trope that dissolves the computer into "technology" makes people "unaware of the computer as a system that is programmed, that can be reprogrammed any moment, that could potentially be programmed or reprogrammed by their users."

we, the people who learn to use technologies, are already, and have always been, creative!

while writing this little piece, I was using my code editor sort of like a regular editor. writing an html page should feel like writing in any other way, and so I now find it quite liberating to just publish it like this.

stop worrying and love the computer!