CULTURALLY SITUATED PROGRAMMING PLATFORMS: SEIS8S, A LIVE-CODING LANGUAGE FOR ELECTRONIC LATIN DANCE MUSIC

Abstract

This dissertation speculates on culture, social spheres, and programming to gain insight into how computer platforms can be (re)thought and (re)designed around the consciousness and struggles of Latin American communities. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary methodology emphasizing approaches to live-coding performance, platform design and software development, participatory action research, and interpretive and semiotic analysis. The research in this dissertation starts with the argument that computer languages are influenced by social spheres (e.g., science and arts), economic models (e.g., knowledge economy), communication systems (e.g., natural language), and infrastructures (e.g., software collaboration protocols and institutions). Next, it is discussed how I deployed this argument by ideating and coding a computer language based on specific social spheres (i.e., live coding practice and popular music), communication systems (i.e., Spanish), and infrastructures (i.e., cultural centers and online spaces) of Hispanoamerica. Finally, this computer-music language is compared and contrasted against collective reflections and uses by this dissertation’s author and members of the general public through a series of conversation circles and live coding performances. This research results in developing Seis8s, a computer-music language inflected by Spanish constructs borrowed from Latin dance music. Seis8s blends Latin American music sensibilities and live coding techno-politics to promote critical reflection. Seis8s emphasizes resistance to asymmetric types of computer-music abstraction by bringing Afro-Latin instruments and rhythms to the center of the technology and the performance. Results of this research also include ten public presentations using Seis8s involving individual and collective live coding performances and conference presentations. These public presentations showcased Seis8s and promoted reflection toward universal understandings of bodies, culture, politics, and economies of these technological and artistic milieus. This research also gives insight into mestizaje and latinidad as concepts still present in the belief systems and ways of knowing Spanish speakers in Latin America and, consequently, in the software they develop. Mestizaje and latinidad are challenged collectively by positioning the white-mestizo ideology as a shared problem that could be resisted through reflection on the irreducibility of the Latin American identity and its potential to coexist with other identities.