<!-- Be prepared to give an account of where you are at with your self-directed research and talk about what you want to achieve this year and what you want to do. Xpub students will talk about the work they have been doing on the Special Issues (individually and collectively). All students will be asked to consider what possibilities they wish to explore in the coming year.
Think concretely about what you want to make this year, how you are going to make it and why you are going to make it. Consider: What possibilities are open to you? (It is understood that making a final project is a process and things will change as you work on it). What material have you written (for previous presentations, descriptions of work , assignments for last year's methods class, the methods of annotation you developed &c) which you can use? Review the written feedback from tutors you got from previous assessments and have it available for reference during the first session. -->
### What have you been making?
- Site specific software
- Developing custom tools in order to approach different needs
- Or materialize specific ideas to gain good grip on them.
- Different tools call different grips call different workflows call different outcomes
- Code as a shared practice: from coding alone to coding together
- Interaction between code and the community that surrounds it, how do they shape each other
- Coding as care, not control
- Writing code: balancing between accessibility, susteinability, flexibility.
- Writing after code: how to document and render works accessible, how to partecipate to the public discourse and create communities, how to mantain a project and how to let it go
- that could be applied to different projects: from personal ones to collective to commercial.
- This could be done by intercepting different ongoing projects (from my artistic practice to freelance works and everything in between) and use them as case studies. Since they involve different kind of public they could provide different insights.
- The idea of the methodology is because of the very nature of Site Specific Software: every context is different, and instead of generalizing one solution for all it would be better to understand some principles to deal with each situation.
### Notes from the excercise with Miriam and Aitam
Find the pad here --> [Group Discussion](https://pad.xpub.nl/p/groupdiscussion)
And the trascription of what I said:
```
Hi, my name is Kamo
- how are you feeling about this year?
i am super excited, it is super exciting to get out of the xpub bubble, to talk to lens based,
i wanna find different degrees of publicness with my practice, it is interesting to make work accessible to people that don't have anything to do with your work
an understanding of what communities i am working with
- what strategies to make it more accessible?
making work interactive, but i am not interested in the idea of participatory art, it always comes with limitations, participation is way more complex than just pressing some buttons, i am interested in the idea of offering software, for this year at some point, i don't see myself focussing on one specific project but multiple alterations applied to different contexts, when i say "software" that's really generic, the chore project is methodology, i always work with the needs of the public, what if i make sth for a client that is already open source, involving the client into thinking this way, inviting to participate on this "openess", i am searching for a position related to certain issues, when you're coding, sustainability, accessibility and flexibility are parts of coding but they don't always have the same priority, for example making code accessible or sustainable for people who will use the code in the future, i would like to write a book about trolley problems, this is sth that interests me how these three pillars work together,
- references?
i learnt about software studies and i would love to dig into this, it is about considering software as a cultural object, to see everything that you see through the software lens as human and non-human beings, how softwares influence our perception of the world, but also zooming in and ask questions like what did control c did to writing? such problems.
- Why is it about the computer?
there is this materiality that could be really alien, it's a different interface to reality
> Code is always addressed to someone. [...] We do not write code for our computers, but rather we write it for humans to read and use. [Jesse Li (2020)](https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/)
Coding is not just production of software, but also production of knowledge. A dialogue between human and more-than-human actors. The guestlist of this conference of the bits is often compiled by chance: the choice of a particular programming language, the coding style, the development environment and ecosystem, the infrastructure that runs the code, and so on, are the result of specific contingencies.
These contingencies are situated in precise contexts, and these contexts are different one from another. Programming is not just sharing code, but sharing context. Programming means to provide a point of view and a perspective to look at the world, before attempting to get some grip onto it with a script. That's the reason why even if source code, even when obfuscated, speaks for itself, it cannot always cast light around its surroundings.
> If software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software) ([Wendy Hui Kyong Chun](http://computationalculture.net/software-studies-revisited/), 2022)
To make place for code turns to be a necessary act of care in the process of sharing knowledge. This does not mean to constrain the usage of some piece of software, or provide opinionated solutions or tutorials, but rather letting others know where does this code come from, and where it would like to go.
There are 60 repository in my xpub git, most of them without a clear entry point for others. One idea could be to write a daily [README](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/README) file in order to make the projects more accessible. [Make a README](https://www.makeareadme.com/) is a good starting point. Experiment with writing style and approach. Try to understand what is relevant besides technicalities. Could it offer not just a practical bootstrap but also a critical or personal perspective on the tool? Could it enforce some principles or form some habit?
### Research
> When asked, hackers invariably relate the README convention to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled “Eat Me” and “Drink Me”. ([The Jargon File](http://catb.org/%7Eesr/jargon/html/index.html))
One in which I develop for myself, one in which I develop for someone else, and one in which I develop together with some others.
Not all these projects need to start from scratch. This year could be the chance to inject some awareness and forms of care in already ongoing projects.
Developing for myself could happen in the context of [Object Oriented Choreography](../ooc-summer-session/), my long-term contemporary dance project with VR. What would it mean to bring XPUB forms of care into that work? What does it mean to develop for oneself in the context of coding as discourse?
Developing for someone else refers to commisioned works and freelance work. Could it be a way to bring not only the advantages but also the perspective and cultural dynamics of FLOSS into commercial practices. Freelance work often comes to me in the form of web or interaction design and development. It could be a way to orientate specific commision to the development of tools of general use.
Developing togheter with others it's a way to rinegotiate priorities when developing software. How do we value and balance between accessibility, flexibility and sustenaibility? This could happen either collaborating with someone from XPUB (think for example to the [workbook](../workbook/) with supi, the ilizarov projects with gr, etc ) or intercepting some external realities' need to craft together some piece of site-specific software.
developement is really specific technical community (white cis male eheehhe)
a lot of violence, status quo, reinforced in the industr, competition,
control, frame the world in a form that you can control and act on from a really occidental point of view, colonialistic, extractive form
i would like to research on the question: can we do it in another way? giving back something and not only take
when you're using a tool you can learn the world throught the use of it, the difference is: can i use the scissors to cut a piece of paper and make a notebook or kill someone? -->
Software comes from a really specific and situated cultural tradition. Software tends to privilege occidental, masculine, binary, and extractive practices. Software comes with technical obscurity. Software comes invisible, transparent, neutral. Software models the world in order to better control it. I don't like these trends.
