Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Programming the Postdigital: Curation of Appropriation Processes in (Collaborative) Creative Coding Spaces

  • Original Articles
  • Published:
Postdigital Science and Education Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Creative coding is a form of postdigital art that uses programming to solve esthetical problems, subordinating functionality to expression. It often comes with rather uncommon usage patterns of coding, going beyond technologies’ affordances and finding ways of appropriating them in an individual way and in exchange with others. The learning ecologies GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Pouët present digital infrastructures that curate and support such appropriation-related activities. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of the structure of these spaces, and the appropriation-related communication taking place. It shows how crucial the varying designs of the learning ecologies and the implemented interaction possibilities are for the appropriation activities taking place and draws a line to the desire for stronger participation in postdigital curation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. P5.js is 'a JavaScript library for creative coding, with a focus on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, beginners, and anyone else' (McCarthy 2019), which gained great popularity in the creative coding scene.

  2. This option is only available for users with a reputation of a least 15 points for an upvote or 125 points for a downvote, see: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges?tab=all.

  3. Q-ID is the abbreviation for Question-ID.

  4. Last accessed: 29 July 2019.

References

  • Ackermann, J. (2011). Masken und Maskierungsstrategien – Identität und Identifikation im Netz [Masks and Masking Strategies – Identity and Identification on the Net]. In C. Thimm & M. Anastasiadis (Eds.), Social Media: Theorie und Praxis digitaler Sozialität [Social Media: Theory and Practise of Digital Sociality]. Bonner Beiträge zur Medienwissenschaft, 11. Frankfurt: Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ackermann, J. (2013). Appropriating Game Rules. In K. Mitgutsch, S. Huber, M. Wagner, J. Wimmer, & H. Rosenstingl (Eds.), Context matters! Exploring and reframing games in context. Proceedings of the Vienna Games Conference 2013 (pp. 247–258). Wien: New Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ackermann, J., Doerk, M., & Seitz, H. (2019). Postdigitale Kunstpraktiken: Ästhetische Begegnungen zwischen Aneignung, Produktion und Vermittlung [Postdigital Art Practices: Aesthetical Encounters between Appropriation, Production and Education]. In B. Jörissen, S. Kröner, & L. Unterberg (Eds.), Forschung zur Digitalisierung in der Kulturellen Bildung [Research on Digitalisation in Cultural Education] (pp. 183–194). München: Kopaed.

    Google Scholar 

  • Androutsopoulos, J. K. (2008). Cultural Studies und Sprachwissenschaft [Cultural Studies and Linguistics]. In A. Hepp & R. Winter (Eds.), Kultur – Medien – Macht. Cultural Studies und Medienanalyse [Culture – Media – Power. Cultural Studies and Media Analysis] (4th ed., pp. 237–253). Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barron, B. (2006). Interest and self-sustained learning as catalysts of development: a learning ecology perspective. Human Development, 49(4), 193–224. https://doi.org/10.1159/000094368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berry, D. M., & Dieter, M. (Eds.). (2015). Postdigital Aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bismarck, B. v. (2012). Curating curators. Texte zur Kunst, 86 (The Curators), 43–61.

  • Bismarck, B. v. (2014). Curating. In H. Butin (Ed.), Begriffslexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst [Glossary of Contemporary Art] (pp. 58–61). Köln: Snoeck.

    Google Scholar 

  • Botz, D. (2011). Kunst, Code und Maschine: Die Ästhetik der Computer-Demoszene. [Art, Code & Machine: The Aesthetics of the Computer Demoscene]. Bielefeld: transcript.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Boyd, D., & K. Crawford (2011). Six provocations for big data. Paper presented at A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, Oxford Internet Institute, September 21. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926431. Accessed 26 July 2019.

  • Cormier, D., Jandrić, P., Childs, M., et al. (2019). Ten years of the postdigital in the 52 group: reflections and developments 2009–2019. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(2), 475–506. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00049-8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘post-digital’? In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Creischer, A. (2015). Ausstellen [Exhibting], 119-122. In J. Badura, S. Dubach, A. Haarmann, D. Mersch, A. Rey, C. Schenker, & G. T. Pérez (Eds.), Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch [Artistic Research. A Manual]. Zürich: Diaphanes.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb, J. (2012). Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1277-1286. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145396.

  • Daniels, D. (2002). Kunst als Sendung: Von der Telegrafie zum Internet [Art as a Broadcast: From Telegraphy to the Internet]. München: Beck.

    Google Scholar 

  • De la Rosa, S. (2012). Aneignung und interkulturelle Repräsentation. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie politischer Kommunikation [Appropriation and Intercultural Representation. Fundamentals of Critical Theory of Political Communication]. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dourish, P. (2003). The appropriation of interactive technologies: some lessons from placeless documents. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 12, 465–490.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dufva, T. (2018). Art education in the post-digital era. Experiential construction of knowledge through creative coding. Dissertation, Aalto University publication series, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.10040.85765.

  • Eslami, M., Aleyasen, A., Karahalios, K. G., Hamilton, K., & Sandvig, C. (2015). FeedVis: a path for exploring news feed curation algorithms. In: CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 65-68). Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW; Vol. 2015-January. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2685553.2702690.

  • Finley, K. (2015). The problem with putting all the world´s code in GitHub. Wired, 29 June. https://www.wired.com/2015/06/problem-putting-worlds-code-github/. Accessed 26 July 2019.

  • Flint, T., & Turner, P. (2016). Enactive appropriation. AI & SOCIETY, 31(1), 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0582-y.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Toward an Ecological Psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • GitHub (2019a). Awesome creative coding. GitHub. https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding. Accessed 03 June 2019.

  • GitHub (2019b). About your personal dashboard. GitHub. https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-your-personal-dashboard. Accessed 02 August 2019.

  • GitHub (2019c). Hello world. GitHub. https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/. Accessed 26 May 2019.

  • GitHub (2019d). Network graph. GitHub. https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding/network. Accessed 07 August 2019.

  • GitHub (2019e). Viewing contributions on your profile. GitHub. https://help.github.com/en/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile. Accessed 07 August 2019.

  • GitHub (2019f). Awesome lists. GitHub. https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome. Accessed 03 June 2019.

  • GitHub (2019g). The world’s leading software development platform. https://github.com. Accessed 31 July 2019.

  • Grau, O. (2007). MediaArtHistories. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Guglielmetti, M. (2015). What is creative coding?. YouTube, 04 August. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF_IdMQiBgM. Accessed 02 August 2019.

  • Hepp, A. (2012). Mediatization and the ‘molding force’ of the media. Communications, 37(2012), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2012-0001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kalliamvakou, E., Gousios, G., Blincoe, K., Singer, L., German, D.M., & Damian, D. (2014). The promises and perils of mining GitHub. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 92-101. https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597074.

  • Kholeif, O. (2017). You are here. Art After the Internet. London: Cornerhouse Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203970034.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Krysa, J. (2011): Some questions on curating as (public) interface to the art market, In: Andersen, C. U., Cox, G., Lund, J.: Public Interfaces, APRJA, Jg. 1, H. 1, 2011. http://www.aprja.net/some-questionson-curating-as-public-interface-to-the-art-market/. Accessed 28 April 2019.

  • Martin, C. (2016). Impact of new forms of learning in interest-driven communities to future pathways for youth. On the Horizon, 24(3), 227–234. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-04-2016-0012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCarthy, L. (2019). p5.js https://p5js.org. Accessed 03 October 2019.

  • Norman, D. T. (2013). The design of everyday things. New York: Basic Books, Revised and Expanded Edition.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parks, L. (2014). Stuff you can kick: toward a theory of media infrastructures. In Goldberg & P. Svensson (Eds.). Between humanities and the digital (pp. 355-373). Cambridge.

  • PBS (2013). The art of creative coding. http://www.pbs.org/video/-book-art-creative-coding/. Accessed 06 June 2019.

  • Peters, M. A., & Besley, T. (2019). Critical philosophy of the postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education, 1, 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0004-9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • PKKB (2018) Postdigitale Kunst aus der Perspektive von Künstler*innen und Kurator*innen - eine qualitative Interviewstudie im Rahmen des BMBF-Projekts Postdigitale Kunstpraktiken in der Kulturellen Bildung (PKKB). Transkribiertes Interviewkorpus [Postdigital Art from the Perspective of Artists and Curators - A Qualitative Interview Study as Part of the BMBF-Research Project Postdigital Art Practices in Cultural Education (PKKB). Transcribed Corpus of Interviews](unpublished).

  • Pouët (2019a). FAQ. Pouët. https://www.pouet.net/faq.php. Accessed 15 May 2019.

  • Pouët (2019b). BBS Forum. Pouët. https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=1024=1024. Accessed 15 May 2019.

  • Rader, E., & Gray, R. (2015). Understanding user beliefs about algorithmic curation in the Facebook news feed. Michigan: Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Röser, J., & Peil, C. (2010). Räumliche Arrangements zwischen Fragmentierung und Gemeinschaft: Internetnutzung im häuslichen Alltag [Arrangements in spatial space between fragmentation and community: Internet use in everyday life at home]. In J. Röser, T. Thomas, & C. Peil (Eds.), Alltag in den Medien – Medien im Alltag [Everyday Life in the Media - Media in Everyday Life] (pp. 220–241). Wiesbaden, VS.

  • Salovaara, A. (2008). Inventing new uses for tools: a cognitive foundation for studies on appropriation. Human Technology, 4(2), 209–228.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shifman, L. (2016). Cross-cultural comparisons of user-generated content: an analytical framework. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5644–5663.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sierra-Paredes, G. (2017). Postdigital synchronicity and syntopy: the manipulation of universal codes, and the fully automated avantgarde. Neohelicon, 44(1), 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-017-0379-8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sloterdijk, Peter (1999). Regeln für den Menschenpark. Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus [Regulations for the Human Park. A reply to Heidegger's letter about humanism]. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

  • Stack Overflow (2019a). Teams. Stack Overflow. https://stackoverflow.com/teams. Accessed 12 July 2019.

  • Stack Overflow (2019b). Front page. Stack Overflow. https://stackoverflow.com/. Accessed 12 July 2019.

  • Stack Overflow (2019c). What´s reputation. Stack Overflow. https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation .Accessed 15 July 19.

  • Tasajärvi, L. (2004). Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time. Berlin: Even Lake Studios.

    Google Scholar 

  • Udsen, L. E., & Jørgensen, A. H. (2005). The aesthetic turn: unravelling recent aesthetic approaches to human-computer interaction. Digital Creativity, 16(4), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626260500476564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weibel, P. (2002). Erwin Wurm: fat survival. Handlungsformen der Skulptur [Forms of Sculpture]. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

This paper was created within the framework of the research project ‘Postdigital Art Practices in Cultural Education. Esthetical Encounters between Appropriation, Production and Education’ located at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany (BMBF) since 2017.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Kiepennheuerallee 5, 14469, Potsdam, Germany

    Judith Ackermann & Benjamin Egger

  2. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Rebecca Scharlach

Authors
  1. Judith Ackermann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Benjamin Egger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Rebecca Scharlach
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Judith Ackermann.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ackermann, J., Egger, B. & Scharlach, R. Programming the Postdigital: Curation of Appropriation Processes in (Collaborative) Creative Coding Spaces. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 416–441 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00088-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00088-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation