The Creative Computing Lab in Poland

The poster is devoted to the project we are currently working on at the Jagiellonian University with digital media artists, programmers, and theorists: the creative computing laboratory. The main aim of this team is to research the creative process in its widest definition in the era of digital textuality. Digital literature is the focus of our study, above all highly computational literature. In the laboratory environment a team of artists, theorists, and programmers are working on the forms of contemporary creative programming, closely tied to the choice of programming language and the platform on which the work is written. One of the project's aims is to create digital artwork in the laboratory system, and to produce an academic description of the process. The invited artists, theorists, and programmers are gathered in three spheres of creative programming: text generators, interactive fiction, and experiments with augmented reality. One of the outputs of the project is a catalog and an archive of programed works, both for research and for teaching. The team is also focusing on the phenomenon of homegrown “writing under constraint” techniques, which are seen as precursors to creative programing techniques. As part of our search for original and undiscovered phenomena in the humanities, we are researching the local demoscene as an example of creative teamwork in digital media. This project is being carried out as a transdisciplinary task, at the crossroads of computer studies, literary studies, creative writing, experimental literature, and digital media. It also develops new tools in humanities research (laboratory teamwork) and new genres and communication practices (technical reports, open notebook science). As part of the project we are producing expressive processing (presupposing knowledge of the code) and platform studies (presupposing thorough knowledge of the capabilities of the platform where the works are written) tools for describing digital works. One of the aims of the project is to create a retro platform archive, as well as an archive of Polish works written for various platforms.

The poster will present the team's one year experience (the lab was launched in May 2016). We will focus on the most important terms in the dictionary useful for the lab's team, methods developed in collaboration between theorists, artist and programmers working together in the academic context. Moreover, we will build a guide on how to build such an institution in the geopolitical, economic and cultural context, which determine the scope of our research, approach, structure and significance of the lab. By describing our lab, we try to tackle trends that are relevant to contemporary studies on digital media, taking into account and affirming the local perspective, which is different from the dominant one.

Bibliography

Montfort, N., (2016), Exploratory programming for the Arts and Humanities, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2009), Expressive Processing. Digital

Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies.

Cambridge: MIT Press.