The design and distribution of information have become a driver of world politics and the economy. Yet the formal and material implications of “codes” often remain unnoticed or unchecked—as do concurrent shifts of agency and attempts to program society through spatial and formal measures. At the same time, what configures an object can no longer be merely defined through its Enlightenment-framed separation from the (human) subject. Whether something is coded and what that means to our understanding of coding as practice is at the heart of my current Lise Meitner Research group, Coded Objects, at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max Planck Institute. Given the prevalence of both key terms, it may be helpful to define them for this essay. If we start with objects, I understand them as material, formed things. That means they consist of matter, have been intentionally shaped by someone or something, and are of a scale considered manipulable by humans. For the question of coded-ness, we might ask what it might mean to see it as a material condition as much as the result of a set of parameters and processes—namely, to take it to be a detectable (not necessarily sensorily) trace in said object stemming from either material, formal, or cultural manipulations or contexts.
