Does the Creative Coding movement separate means and ends? As more artists, designers and creatives learn to write software code to realize projects and art installations which use digital technology, is Creative Coding merely an expansion of the number of programmers, or is it the beginning of a “philosophical” investigation and transformation of the nature of what programming is? Why is this an important question? Might the Creative Coding movement be the beginning of a scientific revolution?

To pursue these interrogations, I go back to the beginnings of computer science, to its initial formulation by figures like Alan Turing, Emil Post and Claude Shannon. I elaborate a position with respect to debates in the philosophy of science around scientific revolutions, “normal science,” and paradigm shifts. Was Berlin media theorist Friedrich Kittler right when he wrote that “there is no software”? – meaning that the essence of computing is shaped at the hardware level and its “scientific” principles? Or is informatics purely culturally determined, as “software studies” tends to suggest?

My methodology identifies two levels of computer science knowledge: a “scientific” portion and a “cultural” portion. This “double epistemology” then provides a lens to observe the scene of Creative Coding today and to assess its historical significance in relation to what is unvarying and what is changing in informatics.

Public lecture in English – no pre-registration is necessary. We look forward to seeing you there!