Workshop
Coding Culture: An Interdisciplinary Hackathon

In collaboration with ZKM (Centre for Art and Media), Karlsruhe

Thu, 01.02.2018 -
Fri, 02.02.2018
Library MMB

More information about the Hackathon and resgistration details can be found here.

Art is increasingly defined in an expanded field of knowledge, whereby it takes part in a multitude of practices and shares multiple knowledge bases. Coding Culture is an interdisciplinary hackathon, bringing together art institutions and programmers with the aim of creating synergies and expanding the knowledge of both fields. The hackathon will bride these two fields in a creative collaboration.
As pre-running event of the exhibition project Open Codes. Digital Culture Techniques at the Goethe-Institut/Max Müller Bhavan Mumbai (MMB), the hackathon explores the possibilities that coding can open up for the arts and creative sector, with the aim to find different forms of engagement between art and code. During the running time of the hackathon, teams of 2-4 coders will focus on building new open-source software or data sets. The hackathon will foster a dialogue and an exchange between art institutions and coders. The goal is to investigate not only different modes of accessibility to art, but also investigate new forms of working with the arts through creative programming. The hackathon is an experiment that raises questions as to how data on art (in a wide sense) could be made available to a larger audience, and how it can be handled to create new narratives and insights. It analyses how programming can be used for creative, educational purposes, in the spirit of free, open and unrestricted sharing of knowledge and ideas. In this regard, the published results from the hackathon may be forked, that is, further developed by other coders at a later stage while keeping the link to its source. This opens up the possibility of adaptation to local and shifting requirements, and extends the projects reach.

Course of Action

The Hackathon will start with a two-day event on 1st and 2nd of February 2018 taking place at the MMB.

1st February:  10:00am                  Signing up of teams
                         10:30am - 11:00am General introduction by curators
                         11:00am - 01:00pm Participating institutions will give introductory
                                                        talks to their organisations and explain their
                                                        provided data.
                        01:00pm - 02:00pm Lunch
                        02:30pm - 06:30pm Teams will have the opportunity to work on
                                                        their ideas, prototype and break off into
                                                        focus groups, ask questions to the
                                                        institutions.

2nd February: 11:00am Teams can meet at the MMB to further work on their
                                        project
                         12:00pm Site visit to institutions for tour of premises and
                                        further discussions, groups may split up
                                        according to their projects

3rd February - 4th March: Within the following four weeks, the teams will put their ideas into code. In this running time, several meetups or video conferences will take place in support of the teams, to exchange and share preliminary outcomes. Institutions should ideally provide one or two Q&A sessions with programmers if there is the need to discuss certain questions.

4th March: The teams submit their code on 4th March 2018 together with a short description, explaining the main ideas and key features. The jury consisting of the participating institutions will, in a further step, decide on the winning team. Projects may also be included in the exhibition project opening on the 6th of April 2018. All projects will be made publically available and accessible under an open source licence.


Hackathon