hello world
We are excited to invite you to contribute to this anniversary issue: trans 50 CODE
We live in a matrix of our own fabrication, using codes as a system of rules to convert information – letters, words, sounds, images, gestures – into other forms to mediate, legitimise, control, encrypt.
Language conveyed through words and writing is our basic means of coding. This encoding synchronises our gazes, transposes our feelings into transmittable data. Information is both lost and gained in this process of translation to interpretation, and back again.
Unwritten conventions of dress, speech, and behaviour tell us who belongs where and what is expected of us. Etiquette, culture, dress codes, and rituals of status mark thresholds between inside and outside, formal and informal, public and private. They are learned rather than legislated – followed or broken to structure space and codify evolving subgroups in society.
As a gateway to discovery, code transposes or sequences complex subjects into comprehensible bytes. Categorising elements of our environment to grasp its immensity and infinities, it can be a tool for constructing new realities, all the while limited by the language of its own binaries.
Mediating and measuring our world in different ways, codes structure territory, locate people and commodities, define the conditions of spatial existence. Laws, building codes, and borders organise space, procedure, responsibility, and project architecture in ways that are often invisible but lasting. Codifying expectations and ideals cement a framework within which we build. These rules dictate what is allowed or forbidden, safe or dangerous, valued or discarded – inciting an interest to find loopholes.
In this 50th issue, we ask you to decipher the codes that supposedly keep our worlds together. Tap us the secret passwords, decrypt the jargon, expose the gatekeepers, show us how you code-switch, play into the cheat codes, re-program the glitches.
Send us an abstract up to 400 words in English or German at this link by November 5th!
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Alex, Kemmett, Kian, Simon
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