Coding Contingencies (CC) is a procedural take on how different characters got to code.
How did they choose a particular programming language, a coding paradigm, a development environment, an infrastructure where to run the code, and so on? These are not just technical choices, but rather coding contingencies.
Personal decisions, trending technologies, curiosity and boredom, to name a few. A talk on esolangs as form of frugality, a collegue passionate about live coding that drags you to an algorave night, a crypto-boyfriend, the tech stack of a company, a drastic turn of events, etc. etc.
A simulation does not happen all at once, instead it is a process that evolves through time.
This happens in both discrete steps and long-term iterations.
Discrete steps can be further subdivided or grouped together, with the possibility of magnifying details, and the ability of zooming in and out a story.
Long-term iterations are a way to keep asking _what's next? what's next?_ to the machine. At every cycle, the simulation reaches out to each partecipant and asks for an update. In this way all the actors and relations develop in parallel.
This leads to multi-facets and situated (Haraway) subjects, where not all the elements needs to interact with each other all the time. Their interfaces can be loose, they don't need to be one hundred percent compatible to come together.
At this point each world will be really dry and synthetic, defined just by some labels that state that an actor is a musician, the name of a programming language, etc.
The structure of the simulation resembles a nested loop: for each world visit each participant, and ask for updates. Actually, we can save resources simulating just the combinations we want to explore, and not all the worlds of the initial dataset.
Being a writing machine more than a piece of software, the process could be thought as a slow simulation. One that benefits the understanding of such a device and the quality of the different stages, instead of the quantity of iterations and generated data. A way to witness code and non-code entities (Mackenzie, 2006) coming together and shaping each other.
This procedure helps us to think about software as cultural object. Something "deeply woven into contemporary life –economically, culturally, creatively, politically– in manners both obvious and nearly invisible." (Software Studies, 2009), and not just as technical tool existing in a vacuum.
Through some iterations, each world will grow a network of actors to play with. Once reached a sufficient mature state, we will introduce a new element: documentation. Throwing a pebble in the puddle to watch how it will ripple through. Which other elements will relate with it, and which one will not? Which transformation it will trigger in the dynamics of access, of power, and representation that are sprouting around software in each simulation?
These emerging issues will articulate the main questions of this research: could software documentation be a surface to situate code in the world? Could it be a device to foster entry points for a more diverse participation? Could it be a way to orientate technologies with our set of values?
see how there are a lot of open questions in the first and third fields, while the programming language is slightly more defined and fixed. this is a good starting point. obviously a programming language is vast and complex and with dozen of features one could be interested in, but for the sake of our system it is useful to leave these things unsaid.
we can use the software as a pivot to orientate the relation between the actor and their intentions.
from where they are coming and where do they want to go?
who took them there?
what do they need?
which particular aspect of pure data resonates with their view of the world?
is it the open source nature and the licensing of the source code?
the welcoming community thriving around the programming language?
or the visual paradigm that facilitates the thinking about and connecting abstractions together?
