On Becoming Bots & Bugs
| On Becoming Bots & Bugs | |
|---|---|
| Name | On Becoming Bots & Bugs |
| Location | Het Wilde Weg |
| Date | 2024/07/19 |
| Time | 10:00—13:00 |
| PeopleOrganisations | Emil Woudenberg |
| Type | HDSC2024 |
| Web | Yes |
| No | |
In a classic playground game of Simon Says, we give instructions and test our ability to distinguish between genuine and fake commands. Taking turns as “coders,” each Simon doles out strict commands or provides written instructions for us to “read” and interpret. Participants act as “bots,” interpreting and crawling through the provided code as instructed by the coder. Exploring both the coder's capacity for relating to the bots and the bot's capacity for “misinterpretation” or being a “bug.” Using science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin's more expansive definition of technology, describing hi-tech as “what we can learn to do.” Here, manuals, instructions, tools, and do-it-yourself are a practice of making the natural - supernatural; following code or instructions can make us something new - becoming both bots and bugs.
Emil (Em) Woudenberg is a queer and trans artist, designer/developer and hacker from Toronto, currently residing in London.