The Code is Warm, Long Live the Code
Blog post 1 (Code)
I know I should have initiated a ping-back in my theory blog, but like Noah I have been thinking about our amature coding runs in light of the first Part 1 of Understanding Media, and want to try an incorporate these past two week’s readings with my experience with code so far. I agree with Noah’s approximation of what McLuhan might think of coding practice, and that its reduction to referents might obscure its perceptual quality as yet another medium of human extension. Experiencing coding in through the fulcrum of McLuhans theories is a difficult enough task, but his importance of the the medium as such, has helped me appreciate the various platforms we are using to perform normal Englishy tasks like writing and editing. It goes without saying that we have come to take our newly acquired acadamic tools for granted, especially when we consider the amount of work that goes into developing them. Its through the gritty, obsessive work of coding that we get a better picture of this development, and platforms like p5.js sure make life a lot easier, but the fact that these coding modules are themselves designed (through code no less) is a little baffling to me. It is this structure (code-upon-code, function-upon-function) that makes it difficult for me to intuitively control java as a tool. This is to say, that I am often lost as to where one platform ends and another of begins. Although it’s nice to think of coding practice as learned, habituated experience through both Benjamin and Mcluhan, the actual business of learning parameters, visualizing and executing geographic objects, and managing and organizing code has been a handful (though I have not lost hope yet!!).