Artists and Hackers / Chelsea Thomto
Chelsea Thompto is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. We talk about the Transcode Manifesto, digital preservation, and how software is not like sculpture.
This season we’ve partnered with the New Media Caucus, an international non-profit formed to promote the development and understanding of new media art. We’re interviewing five new media artists working today, both individually and at a live in-person event we held in February.
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Chelsea Thompto is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. We talk about the Transcode Manifesto, digital preservation, and how software is not like sculpture.
I was looking forward to talking with Chelsea because in addition to working in code she’s also been active in sculpture and printmaking. I wanted to talk with her about code’s affordances for an artist. In other words, what potential ways of working are unlocked when you’re an artist who chooses to work with code as a medium? When she was creating sculptures, for example, she was designing systems for their creation, and this over time led her to thinking through ways she can leverage interactivity in her works: how to bring your audience into a relationship to relate to the work and to interface with it? And this is something that code in particular is uniquely suited for, where one can write code that directly integrates interactivity into one’s work, as sculpture, as software, as a website, among many other examples.
Chelsea talked about her project Transcode Manifesto, an always in progress manifesto.
“Transcode takes up codes as an artistic material and as a trans methodology. While not only referring to computer code, transcode does view computer code as a material with immense potential in enacting the gesture of trans.”
We also get into ideas of the handmade web, digital preservation, and teaching our values.
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Support from the National Endowment for the Arts
This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
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