Episode 3 (2022) Tim Cowlishaw - Tiny tools and little loops. Software art as care-ful software practice

We speak with Tim Cowlishaw, BAU, Doctoral Candidate at College
of Arts & Design Barcelona.

Whether as part of giant technology corporations or open-source
software projects, software developers are increasingly
responsible for defining, building, and maintaining the
infrastructure of our social world, and much critical and
anthropological attention has been paid to the ways in which the
cultures and practices of software development influence the
materiality and embedded politics of these infrastructures.
However, less critical attention has been paid to software
development deployed to less instrumental ends, in particular,
creative and artistic practices that use software as a medium. We
claim, building on Nick Seaver (2021)s work on care and scale as
contrasting values in the development of software systems, that
paying attention to such personal, creative software practices
provides a valuable opportunity for a deepened understanding of
cultures of software development in general, by articulating and
making visible the differences between the development of
aesthetic and instrumental software objects - a distinction which
is elided when software development is studied in more general
undifferentiated terms. In addition, we argue that software art
and the creative practice of software development offer a useful
means of interrogating the ontology of software and digital
artefacts, arguing that such practices are a form of ontological
designing (Willis 2006) producing digital objects (Hui 2016)
which serve to expose the ontology and embedded politics of
software artefacts and systems more generally. Finally, we argue
that such creative practices constitute a care-ful (Puig de la
Bellacasa 2017) approach to software development, building on the
Critical Technical Practice of Philip Agre (1997), offering one
example of how critical and ethical considerations might be
usefully incorporated into professional software development
practices.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The
Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel
organized at the European Association for the study of Science
and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on
2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace
Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who
also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz
University of Technology for funding.