Embodying Code: Artist Alida Sun and the physical craft of code art

When Alida Sun moves, rows of technicolour shapes move with her, tinkling as they are displaced. Geometric patterns and warbling chirps are characteristic of the Berlin-based artist and technologist’s glittering digital artworks.

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These works are made with a self-designed system, which Sun calls an audio-visual instrument. It detects light and transforms her movements into visuals and sounds. Using this system, the multidisciplinary artist has created a new artwork every day for 2500 days. That's nearly seven years of daily coding.

“When I started on this daily coding journey, I knew I was going to have to make the process restorative and fun for me, because coding and being glued to a screen isn't the healthiest practice,” Sun tells Euronews Culture.

So, she created a software that is intrinsically driven by physical movement. “In a way, it’s a daily ritual of being aware of oneself - of the body - and playing,” she says.

To Sun, coding and artmaking has become a physical process. In her exhibition at Method Delhi titled RITES, Sun investigated the physical rituals and history of tangible craft behind lines of disembodied code.

This month, Sun will lead a lecture on RITES and embodying code at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and speak on her process of daily art-making at the Women In Tech Sweden conference in Stockholm.

Since her early forays into interactive and light art as a STEM graduate, Sun was moved by how technology-based art could shape physical space, ranging from rooms to neighbourhoods. Today, Sun tries to make code art more intimate and tangible.

“It's endlessly fascinating to me how people can connect with an artwork through their phone screens and how it can affect them on a physical level because I am using my physicality to create these code artworks,” she shares. “Code is seen as a very cerebral medium, and people often think of it as disconnected from the physical self, but I am questioning and challenging that.”

RITES takes this one step further and translates Sun’s code art works into hand-woven, embroidered tapestries. The works were woven in collaboration with women artisan weavers from the Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute of Fine Arts & Crafts (SSMI), a Delhi-based non-profit.

The exhibition presents an alternative way of viewing technology, focusing on “the history that is outside of this ‘Big Tech bro-ligarchy’,” says Sun. At the heart of the project is the reclamation of women’s pivotal and oft-erased contributions to the development of modern computational programming.

The bright, intricately threaded tapestries are fitting vessels to capture this history: modern programming finds its roots in weaving, a practice also conventionally associated with women’s labour.

“Women literally wove the memory that got humanity to the moon,” Sun says in reference to the women in New England, US, who stored the software code for the Apollo Missions in handwoven copper ‘rope’. The technology, called ‘core-rope memory,’ was very similar to weaving, and most of the women encoding the information used to work in textile mills.

Women’s computational heritage and the kinship between textiles and code also drove Sun’s collaboration with the women artisans at SSMI.

“India's history of textiles is something that I'm still learning about, but I'm consistently blown away by,” Sun says.

Working on RITES, the artist was keen to incorporate this artistic heritage and collaborate closely with the artisans. “They [the artisans] started embroidering flowers and their own patterns, and that was a really important part of the exhibition: to amplify the culture in which these works were actually hand-embroidered,” Sun explains. “It was this lovely dialogue that also influenced my programming: I've never programmed flowers before, but once I saw what the artisans were doing, I started programming flowers into digital environments.”

The focus on weaving and the intricate, technical work of the artisans was crucial to celebrate women’s artistry.

“All these art forms that are mostly associated or created by women are relegated to craft and not art or fine art,” she explains. “The hierarchy of the two [art versus craft] is deeply entrenched in patriarchy and colonialism.”

The designation of arts that adorn people or the home as ‘applied’ or ‘decorative’ has historically plagued the artistic ventures of women. As influential art historians Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker wrote in their 1998 paper "Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts": “The sex of the artist matters. It conditions the way art is seen and discussed."

With RITES, Sun and the artisans from SSMI were in constant dialogue. Despite language barriers and coming from different cultural contexts, they could connect over their encounters with the patriarchy, the aims of the exhibition, and the joy of the generative art process. Going into the artmaking process, which took two years, Sun had one guiding principle: “Just have fun with it.”

The results radiate joy. Squares in an assortment of sizes and colours are threaded onto a striking pink background in her piece Protect your playful whimsy at all costs. Little embroidered flowers and linework stand out as if embossed, giving dimension to Women pioneered electronic sound art.

Having fun allows Sun to operate outside the “padlocked dumpster fire,” as she calls it, of the existing tech ecosystem. When she could not afford software as a new artist, she made her own system. At first, she was largely making works in black and white (“it’s good for projection,” she explains) but soon began to create in colour.

Her art is playful and, for its carefree and feminine nature, subversive.

“The girliness and the feminine qualities - I think they feel the most subversive,” she says. “There's a really exciting movement where more people, especially women and girls, are questioning and challenging these Big Tech narratives, which are always male-dominated and are, as such, extremely boring.”

Sun herself actively critiques exclusionary systems in the tech world and beyond through her art and on her Instagram, which has 177K followers.

As Sun continues her daily artmaking journey, she holds tight to this sense of play and movement. “It makes the coding process a lot more fun and restorative,” she says. “There's something strangely healing about code for me.”

After her exhibition at Method Delhi ended last month, Sun’s RITES can currently be viewed online. Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming exhibitions.