Our series Otherwise Practices With/in Computing is starting with the first blog post Aesthetic Programming: A Queer Praxis In P5.js by Winnie Soon.

"I have been teaching and researching Aesthetic Programming since 2014. It is both an undergraduate course and a subject matter to make sense of having programming skills within arts and humanities. I found that there are a few challenges or questions that I might need to address:
First, programming is used to belong to science disciplines, why do students need to learn to program if they do not want to be programmers or creative coders in their future. This leads to the second question: what does it mean by learning to program in the arts and humanities, and if the motivation is different from those in science disciplines, how can programming be taught differently? Lastly, how to sustain the motivation throughout the whole semester given the fact that learning to program, or acquiring computational skills, is a long and sometimes a daunting process as if learning a new natural language. One may further ask, why do we need to introduce programming in arts and humanities [2], and this question perhaps relates to coding literacy (Vee 2017). 

In this entry, however, I would rather address the question of ‘how’ to imagine a different way of approaching programming beyond the STEM perspective, in which programming is not just a means to solve problems, but also facilitates critical reflection and conceptual thinking on real-world phenomena, in particular, the pervasiveness of computational culture and its social and political effects.

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