What is The Writing Machine Collective (WMC)?

Cyber-text over hyper-text, poetry over narrative, syntax over semantics, writing systems as the creation of codes and symbols, writing as inscription versus writing as performance, computing as an artistic medium, algorithm as a thought process, machine as space, as process, and as an organism, generative art and literature…

The Writing Machine Collective (WMC) began with a group of teachers and students from the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong who wanted to dig into issues of emergence, complexity, and algorithmic priniciples in art-makig. Early activities experimented with language, literature, especially peotry, via code-based programming. The group's identity has evolved with stronger affinity with computational generative art, and the notion of writing and its materiality in old and new media remains a central concern of our research activities.

WMC's short history has been driven by a rigorous lateral thinking approach, by which the diverse issues raised by existing literature on new media art are extracted for artistic experiment. The 1st edition of WMC was exhibited in July 2004, and 2nd edition Jan 2007. The 3rd WMC was published in the form of a showcase at the Hong Kong Museum of Art's "Digitalogue," a local media art retrospective. In the 5th year of its activities, the WMC assumes programming literacy as a prime mission, and code-writing at the core of creative activities. A few times of exhibiting and showcasing clarify the path for the future direction for community-building; to find adequate forms to present the process-orientedness of a computational, code-base creative process continues to be the collective’s main aesthetic issues.

(Linda C.H.Lai, 2009 / Hong Kong)


WMC Executive Committee:
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR (Project Development & WMC founder): Linda C.H. LAI
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Justin C.T. WONG
DIRECTOR FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION: Hector RODRIGUEZ
EVENT EXECUTIVE: Yvonne M.Y. LAU (until October 2007)
FEATURE EDITOR: Janice Y.L. LEUNG
(until June 2009)

 
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