NODE+CODE #21 – On The Move

Movement as a circulation of bodies, code, and memory.

Our 21st edition of the NODE+CODE meetups was once again a special one. With Naoto Hieda and Kit Kuksenok we moved through different frameworks, platforms and contexts and experienced coding practices shifting through adoption, adoptation and refusal — creating new forms of relationships, collaboration and life in a post-digital world.

 
Photos by Eda Temucin
 

Japanese creative coder, artist and PhD researcher Naoto Hieda shared how his work with code informed his formal and poetic approach to all means of contemporary expression – from browsers to paper drawings. As an artist with neurodiversity/-queerness, their practice lies in collecting and giving a new life to what is left – a screen recording of a live-coded improvisation becomes a YouTube link, a drawing of the trees they spontaneously danced for gets superimposed on their childhood painting or a memory of a meaningless movement turning the ashtray while having a conversation with a friend on a rooftop bar becomes a collectible card.

Kit Kuksenok, artist, writer, and coder, held a lecture performance named Code Work, that reflects on the adoption, adaptation, and refusal of software practices in professional and everyday contexts. Their work on Code Work started as ethnographic investigation of programing practices in oceanography research as part of their PhD, exploring adoption and adaptation. Since then, Kit has explored, through images and movement, the sociality of body data, its capacity for betrayal, and refusal practices.

This time around, we met at Berliner Straße 60, but as always, the talks of the evening opened up a lot of conversations – we chatted a lot, had some delicious soup!

 
 

Contributors

 

Naoto Hieda

Cologne, Germany

naotohieda.com

Naoto Hieda (they) is a media artist from Japan living in Germany with a background in engineering (B.Eng. at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and M.Eng. at McGill University, Canada). Naoto is currently studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany and works internationally for theater productions and in the visual arts. In their artistic work, they question the productive qualities of coding and speculates on new forms, post-coding through neurodiversity and live coding.

Kit Kuksenok

Berlin

https://xnze.ro/

Kit Kuksenok is an artist, writer, and coder. Since first learning to code in 2002, they have worked as a systems integrator, web developer, software engineer, data analyst, and lecturer in computer science. They hold a MSci (2014) and PhD (2016) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle). The work on code work started as ethnographic investigation of programing practices in oceanography research as part of their PhD, exploring adoption and adaptation. Since then, Kit has explored, through images and movement, the sociality of body data, its capacity for betrayal, and refusal practices.

  • 3 moderators

  • 2 contributors

  • 38 community members

  • meetup #21

  • great spicy soup

Funding

The project is funded in the program “Promotion of Cultural and Creative Industries Institutions” by the Hessian Ministry of Economy, Energy, Transport and Housing.

 

In collaboration with