Cr.
Orbit
Hello, World
This incomplete essay, which began as a thesis, introduces my design practice where creating concrete poetry with code is applied as a methodology to interrogate, express and respond to the patriarchal and colonial norms embedded in the default components of the web browser. I play with graphic communication principles, such as visual hierarchy, to bring awareness to and subvert the reductive binary logic implemented into its graphical user interface. Coding practices are conceptualised through Haraway’s concept of cyborg writing, as well as gender, queer, and racial theory to examine creative technologists who challenge these norms through a combination of cyberfeminist and anticolonial research and experimental work. Through that, I analyse ‘orbit’, my collection of codeworks including ‘Y>x’, and 'eclipse/The Black Pearl’, and evaluate how situating concrete poetry in the web browser seizes code to mark the web that marked us as other.
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certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color (sic), nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive (sic), reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man
haraway, 1985
Before interrogating how components or modular elements of web design reinforce dualisms, I hope it could benefit us to establish the basics of how these interface elements are developed. Computers are able to understand and execute functions through communicating in 0s and 1s—a binary language using the data type, boolean, where 0 represents false or off, and 1 represents true or on. It can help to think of a switch as a tangible example of boolean. A lightbulb powered by a switch can either be off or on. Computer scientists value this if-else conditional statement for its optimisation and efficiency. After all, variables are more prone to errors given the range of factors to take into account while troubleshooting. Imagine it this way: if you had a problem and you had no idea what caused it, but you knew there could only two causes, this is probably going to be easier to resolve than a problem where there were tens or hundreds of causations. In the context of human-computer interaction, where people interacting with computer could be considered a factor, there are dangers when favouring this binary logic. People are not composed of 0s and 1s and, as posed in hir book, ‘Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue,’ we have the right to defend our right to be complex (Feinberg, 1998). Thus, I propose that inefficiency is worth the hard work and confusion that it often brings if it means exploring and embracing human diversity.
In the Stack Exchange entry, “Boolean switch with a third state”, a UX engineer designing a filter asks how to adapt the toggle switch pictured on FIG 01 so that a user can select three options: ‘Male,’ ‘Female,’ or a third state indicating that “the individual’s gender should not be considered” (Shreyas Tripathy, 2017). However, due to the limitations of boolean, the toggle switch can only have two options, making it an incompatible format to translate gender fluidity and nuance. By labelling these options as simply ‘Male’ or ‘Female,’ the toggle switch reproduces the cisnormative fallacy that a person can only be a man or a woman. As a result, when interacting with the toggle switch, people are coerced into expressing themselves as either/or and are led to maintain the perspective that this gender binary is default, in effect being terrorised into conforming to a pinker or bluer tint of gender (Feinberg, 1998). Moreover, the switch will always preface something as the first one on the left or right basis. By situating ‘Male’ on the left, to an English-speaking audience where the reading direction starts from left-to-right, the man is placed first in terms of visual hierarchy. Therefore, through the illustration of a toggle switch, we can see how boolean binaries poison web design by codifying the combined patriarchal and colonial logic of dividing groups into two: man/non-man, white/non-white, primitive-civilised, magic/mythic-scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern—Europe and not Europe (Quijano, 2000). It’s the likelihood that Shreyas Tripathy didn’t intend to push a cisnormative fallacy which alarms me most about the implementation of these norms in facilitating an efficient design of web browsers. The toggle switch forms the basis for standard web components people interact with to articulate their identity online, and its clear that its visual hierarchy reflects male dominance on the screen.
In ‘The Body and the Screen,’ Michele White argues that looking is a crucial aspect of using the Internet and computers, and this can reinforce hierarchies, or to borrow from Haraway, dualisms which perpetuate the marginalisation of women. She employs the term “spectator” instead of user to draw on the Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory and emphasise people’s perception of visual and written elements on the screen (White, 2006). As if to echo Shreyas Tripathy’s dilemma, White’s analysis of sign-up forms indicates that the spectator must identify with a binary gender, with ‘Male’ usually listed above or before ‘Female’ on the form, and this composition resembles patriarchal power hierarchies. Although this text was developed in 2006 before attempts to recognise non-binary, two-spirit, and third genders were implemented into sign-up forms to make them more inclusive, almost two decades later, this issue persists. However, instead, non-binary gender identities are grouped as ‘Other’ or ‘Custom’ and listed after or below ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ on the form.
When registering for a new account on Google, I noticed that the sign-up forms have been updated since White’s time of writing. As shown in FIG 02, ‘Female’ is listed above ‘Male’. This rearrangement reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s wail from her petrifying tale ‘The Robber Bride’: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy” (Atwood, 1993). By placing ‘Female’ on a pedestal, Google reinforces that the heart of the issue is in the hierarchal structure of the web component. As is further evidenced in the options, regardless of order, the idea of female and male as default is remained intact. If we also consider the term ‘Custom’, there appears to be an insinuation that not aligning with the binary is just an optional choice. If they wanted to fully embrace the uniqueness of gender, alternatively, they could just have a open text field, which allows you to express the specificity of your gender. You don't need to produce a hierarchy. Instead, what we have here by placing the option to communicate a non-binary gender at the bottom is a suggested inferiority through the ranking.
The intrusion of such patriarchal and colonial norms goes beyond the toggle switch and drop-down filter which coerce spectators to reduce their sense of who they are into a binary. The programming languages used to develop these web components consolidate the intellectual myth of English and European superiority through enacting linguistic imperialism, which refers to "the imposition of a dominant language on people with a different language” (Phillipson, 2010). Communication protocols don't tend to support non-ASCII characters, which exclusively consists of the Latin alphabet, and thus becomes a digital manifestation of erasing languages.
Therefore, it becomes critical to engage with efforts to challenge these norms, like Outi Laiti’s ethnoprogramming, where code is written in Yoruba to imbue cultural understandings into code. Such projects are generally understood to be independent studies for research purposes, rather than for widespread use. Their experimental nature are at times devalued because of its lack of a practical application or replicability. Conversely, I believe it’s crucial to develop experiments to provoke spectators to understand the problematics encoded in the web browser throughout the entirety of its interface. Without doing so, it leads to naturalising dogmas, like the gender binary or anglocentrism.
(trans)cript
I had the pleasure to speak with Winnie Soon, coder, poet, and researcher whose practice also tackles the implications of digital infrastructure in wider power asymmetries. In November 2018, Soon worked on a workshop that for me illuminates one way of seizing code to mark the world that marked them as other. While the workshop had multiple media outputs, I was most interested in Vocable Code as a codework to queer code. As such, I inquired further on what would happen if web components were to be coded on queer principles like fluidity.
me: How can code be queer?
soon: When I have to think about absolute case, you know, like, if I'm hungry, then I eat, if I'm thirsty, then I drink. But, what if I'm a little bit hungry and a little bit thirsty and a little bit tired? You know? So, I see there's a profound impact. If we are increasingly drawn into these kinds of coding literacy, like everyone's thinking like a programmer, what might be the problem? If we really think like a programmer? What is the societal impact for that?
me: That's really interesting.
soon: Yeah, so that's why a lot of my pieces, in a way, I will say it's poetic, but also a lot of critique in my work as well. Like, critical of binary structure. So, just to give you an example–“queering bash”. It's just only five lines of code written in bash. I was actually struggling when I worked on this piece. How can I express this concern of binary structure? Not just in gender, but also in computer programming.
I found the syntax interesting. For example, the syntax called awk is a very specific function in bash. I find this awk can link to awkwardness. As a poet, when I think about computer code, I also think about how I can read it aloud. So, I usually do performances as well. I write code, and then the code can be read, but it can also be spoken aloud. This adds another dimension to the code. Yeah, I don't think there's one approach.
me: Yeah, there isn't. Because, in my earlier self-directed project, my second one, just before this one, which is linked together with this one, I was also exploring that tension between like, working with something that is a binary structure to communicate something non-binary. And, I think it was like, well, it's… I like that tension. It's interesting because it all feels very confusing. It's really challenging to do. Like you, I struggled as well.
soon: But, I think I see this challenge as a positive thing, both as a constraint, but also as a way of pushing myself to understand the computational culture, the coding scene, how I might push it forward.
*/note: codework is a type of creative writing that references or incorporates computer languages within the text*/
me: How can source code and critical writing be linked together?
soon: There are different types of codeworks. Some people will consider source code like computer source code as just text. It doesn't really matter whether the code can be executed or not. Then, you can play a lot with the freedom because you can insert a lot of human languages and you don't have to care about function. For example, the data type, Boolean—true or false, one or zero, now or not now; or if-else. This kind of conditional statement or for loop. A lot of the artists play with this type of codework as a kind of computer expression—not necessarily able to executed. So, another form of codework which I'm super interested in is to make the computer work which means it can be executed. It is form of a language that can also be communicated to humans. I like this challenge because it is a restriction for me. I like constraint based writing, which is something like a genre in creative writing. But, for my piece of work, not necessarily every line of code makes sense. Sometimes, I just use the function in computer programming because I see there is a particular poetic value there. A lot of the artists play with this type of codework as a kind of computer expression—not necessarily able to executed.
After speaking with Soon, I began to articulate poetry as a way of breaking free from the limitations of thinking like a programmer. In contrast to coding conventions, poetry is a writing system where human language is considered for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. In ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury,’ Audre Lorde describes poetry as essential to women because it becomes the way we can “give a name to the nameless so that it can be thought” through self-expression unbounded by complete logical or narrative structures (Lorde, 1993). It comes to little surprise to me then that the poetry and stories of women of colour are repeatedly about writing to access the power to signify (Haraway, 1985). Poetry encourages multiplicity in understanding, rather than forcing one into two.
the medium is the metaphor
In poetry, metaphors are figures of speech that compare two seemingly unrelated things which share common characteristics. Donoghue describes this comparison as a shift of meaning which can transform how a reader perceives a word: “another word is used that drives the statement in an unexpected direction” (Donoghue, 2014). Take “my body is burning with the shame of not belonging / my body is longing” from a dearly beloved anthology by Warsan Shire, ‘Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth’, where she likens her shame to fire (Shire, 2013). To say it’s driven my understanding of language to a new direction would be an understatement. Even though I haven’t walked in the same path of life as Shire, her use of metaphor permits me to grasp my understanding of shame as an emotional state, one that causes cheeks to blush and to turn red, in order to make sense of how Shire is illustrating her narrative. In this line, I see to it that she is suggesting her shame from being ostracised has led to physical or even psychological destruction because I know that fire’s heat has lethal consequences. It’s remarkable how Shire has altered the way I perceive the word by using fire to stress its painful qualities, distinguishing it apart from similar feelings like embarrassment or shyness. Ever since, whenever I experience shame, I remember this poem. I say it out loud. Sometimes, it’s easier to say that it feels like my body is burning because it captures the intensity of shame more clearly–the power of a visual, even when evoked by word. Metaphors prove to be powerful tools for not only encouraging empathy on complicated, personal experiences, but self-expression as well.
What’s interesting here is that the purpose of the metaphor in web design is not creative expression. In human-computer interaction, a metaphor is a device for explaining a user interface element, X, by asserting its likeness to another concept or thing from real life, Y, in the form X is Y (Barr et. al, 2005). By allowing spectators to transfer their knowledge and experience, metaphors help spectators predict and learn the behaviours to navigate software. Most digital documents like the one I’m typing on now, the one you’re reading, is automatically set as white with margins and paddings fit for A-size dimensions. It is this document metaphor which helps to explains browsing, printing, and entering data in electronic documents, like forms and spreadsheets, by drawing on the qualities of photocopy paper (Kim and Maher, 2020). As a result, familiar metaphors serve a strictly technical function to direct an intuitive interface for user tasks.
the medium is the poetry
I see reams of creative potential in the web components for producing poetry, especially of the visual variety. Concrete poetry (or visual poetry) incorporates graphic details, such as images, colours, shapes, typography, composition and patterns, into the poem to emphasise a specific message to the reader. Your typical concrete poem lays out these words to form an image or structure which represents the poem's subject matter—for example, a poem shaped like a heart to depict love.
In terms of how concrete poetry has been used to express one’s grievances, let's consider ‘A Seat at the Table’, where artist Says Gagnon transforms Solange's raw lyrics about black womanhood and empowerment into concrete poetry—a minimalist rendition that distils the concept album into words and a considered layout. On the second page of the lyric-book publication, the lyric only consists of one line: “I'm not really allowed to be mad”. Yet, this sentence appears to drag on due to the word “mad” being repeated across the page in a vertical zig-zag arrangement. I’m floored by Gagnon’s word arrangement in how it’s able to capture an emotional response to oppression: the layout conveys a sense of falling or even fluttering down due to the burden of carrying around repressed anger. Given that this is a lyric-book publication accompanying Solange's music, the spaces between each “mad” on the page seem to suggest that in the song, Solange repeats “mad” six more times in the final verse, perhaps with breathy pauses or sighs in between each utterance—but, she does not. I find Gagnon's choice then to distribute the word “mad” in this format intriguing as it goes to show how concrete poetry is a remarkable experimental way of expressing one's response to white supremacy. I would posit then that concrete poetry is another critical tool to aid healing from injustice. When poetry incorporates graphic details, I find that it allows us to acquire those graphic details to draw attention to an experience that might otherwise be overlooked from a dominant lens.
Concrete poetry can also be created through code by using programming languages to generate visual elements such as shapes, colours, and images, or even plain text. The code can be written to respond to user input or to generate visual elements randomly. The resulting concrete poems are usually displayed on a screen or projected onto a wall, creating an interactive and visually engaging experience for the viewer. Sneha Solanki’s ’The Lovers’ is one such installation where two networked computers display a romantic poem. One computer is infected with an encrypted virus that contaminates itself and its partner. The viewer can watch the mutations on the monitor text slowly take place throughout the exhibition, with the poetries serving as indicators and interfaces for the active virus. While my practice similarly considers the relationships between two states and the suffering that it may entail, it differs from ‘The Lovers’ in that it focuses on graphic design principles to work with the web browser as a medium of choice.
the medium is the poetry
I produced the concrete poems, ‘Y>x’ and ‘eclipse/The Black Pearl’ as part of a codework collection to investigate how creative technologists can refer to graphic communication techniques, with a focus on visual hierarchy, as a means to illuminate insight into web browser components. The use of metaphors throughout these concrete poems aim to affirm or raise awareness of these dualisms which are latent in code and wider society, online and offline, URL and IRL.
‘Y>x’ (pronounced “Y is greater than X”) is a codework that uses the browser’s dimensions to depict a patriarchal power dynamic between the binary genders, man and woman. The website is designed to be experienced on a device with a landscape monitor and a mouse, such as a laptop or a desktop computer. Depending on how big your browser is, you may experience one of two words. If your browser occupies approximately more than a quarter of your device’s screen, the word ‘Man’ is displayed in large text against a white background. Contrastingly, if your browser is exactly or less than a quarter of your device’s screen, the word ‘Woman’ is displayed in small text against a black background. To that effect, minimising the browser horizontally from left-to-right until it takes up less than a quarter of your device’s screen will show the words switching to allude to the amount of space men and women are perceived to take up, and the last few letters of ‘Woman’ fall down as if to stress that the space is not enough. As a result, ‘Y>x’ is a type of data visualisation. However, instead of presenting it with a percentage or report, it’s figurative and a moment of interaction. By situating the concrete poem on the web, spectators can apply their understanding of how web elements work to support their interpretation of my use of screen space and window size. If we know how a browser works, such as a padding or margin, we can create these breakpoints, and then play with that to communicate hierarchies. I chose to work with the browser’s dimensions as a metaphor because a spectator familiar with the interface will probably know that dragging the browser smaller is a process described as minimising (which is to not be confused with a minimised window). Therefore, the word ‘Woman’ printing on the screen only when the browser is being minimised illustrates the constraints confining the space women are allowed to occupy.
I imagine if I had used a toggle switch or drop-down filter based on a sign-up form to construct the concrete poem, it would’ve been easier to explicitly address the issue of gender binaries encoded in these web components. For that reason, it could be said that ‘Y>x’ doesn’t communicate the patriarchal norms in these specific web components in particular. It’s perhaps not enough for the poem to be located in the web, then. While showing my earlier iterations to my peers and tutors, people frequently interpreted ‘Y>x’ as a commentary on the wage gap because of the proportions resembling the gendered difference in pay. Nevertheless, even with this oversight, I learnt from the reception of ‘Y>x’ that the browser metaphor is an effective visual pun capable of exposing double meanings. With minimising as an example, there is a synthesis of the definitions of the word minimise through movement (dragging the browser to be smaller) and as a verb (to belittle) which aids in communicating ‘Y>x’s enquiry. When I progressed to work on my next concrete poems, I grew interested in how when people engage with poetry, they usually search for a deeper meaning, coming towards the work with an expectation that the messages are not obvious. In that way, website poetry sets itself apart from the conventional user experience, where spectators being able to immediately understand a digital environment is prioritised.
Soon, I came to ask how could this poetic reading process could be considered in web design to express and draw attention to personal narratives impacted by patriarchy and colonialism. ‘eclipse/The Black Pearl’ are juxtaposed concrete poems which take on this query through different methods to compare and complement one another. While the output of ‘eclipse’ is text, ‘The Black Pearl’ is a set of images.
During their development, I took a closer look at how a wider range of graphic communication techniques, including symbol and shape, can inform how we communicate and expand our understanding of browser capabilities to embody self expression. This broader depth of enquiry sought to ask how creative technologists can challenge these norms by writing code to convey their personal feelings relating to oppression. As a result, I started to frame the browser as a canvas, where like an artist, creative technologists can paint our experiences, using code to mark the world instead of oils or clay.
‘eclipse’ is concrete poem based on a singular input: "u can only see me in the dark". This line can be read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally to generate multiple sentences. Each word is located on a separate string controlled by a wave, causing them to drift across the screen at different times. As a consequence, sometimes you cannot see “me” on the screen The title alludes to my light being obscured by another body. By calling on this lunar symbolism used to demonise femininity as hysterical, I play with code as a homophone for secrecy to encrypt the subject of my traumas from being neglected, interpersonally and by society at large. I incorporate the associations of the asterisk as a star figure to reinforce this cosmic imagery. As such, I intended for ‘eclipse’ to be viewed on a ceiling projection so that spectators can read these fearful confessions like they were star gazing. While this set up wasn’t possible, after watching ‘eclipse’ on a television, my peers commented that the patience required to complete reading means you can’t overlook “me” if you want to understand ‘eclipse’, which possibly demonstrates how creative technologists can consider using wave or time to advocate that being seen matters, even when it’s a lengthy process and not simple to comprehend.
Water remembers everything it travels over and through
If you have been in water
part of you remains there still
natalie diaz, 2020
‘The Black Pearl’ is a concrete poem featuring select images from contemporary African archives. With the images masked in circles oscillating around the screen along the Z-axis, it creates the effect of pearls ebbing and flowing, “welling and swelling in the tide” (Angelou, 1978). By appearing to sink into the background it gives depth as if the screen were a black ocean. Should the spectator be viewing ‘The Black Pearl’ on a monitor with a reflective surface, the black screen would reflect their likeness in its expanse as water would do. Unlike ‘eclipse’, reading the code for the website offers further contextual insight into the thematics of the poem. Here, the application of wave not only controls the speed of the oscillations but defines the waves the pearls are bobbing on.
Ultimately, it’s been said that ‘eclipse/The Black Pearl’ demonstrates the web browser as more of an artistic medium, opting for non-representational and impressionistic visual language techniques while the critical writing recedes into a background. This could be down to my treatment of the browser as a canvas. As such, these visual poems don’t directly comment on the binary logic encoded into browser elements like ‘Y>x’ does with its singular metaphor, as I was leading with the assumption that spectators would read into the symbols due to the poetic nature of this project and the accompanying text available for elaborating on its details. I agree that these experiments could be perhaps improved by further investigating how ‘eclipse’ and ‘The Black Pearl’ could be interacted with by creative technologists.
That said, I wonder if there is something powerful, something alchemising, about leaning into the affordances of art, as this expansive manifestation of our imagination, to break free from the constraint of margins.
tbc
Starting with irony, ending with irony, by concluding only to say that this work is never-ending. ‘Y>x’ and ‘eclipse/The Black Pearl’ only marks the beginning of an investigation into the potential of concrete poetry as a means of challenging patriarchal and colonial language norms in coding. By subverting metaphors in human-computer interaction design through graphic communication principles, I discovered that the browser could reflect queer values of fluidity, and that this can effectively reframe how components are understood by spectators. That said, further development is needed to bring awareness to and subvert the reductive binary logic implemented into its graphical user interface. Experimenting has taught me the value of confusion, not knowing the answer, and looking inside unexpected places.