Conclusion

Knowing more about software involves knowing not just what it does, but also how people use it, think about it as well as through it, when they construct digital things. As digital technologies continue to develop, so too does their potential to transform the ways we work and interact with the materials in which they are embedded. For animators working with software, it changes the ways they work with the entities they create, how they see and interact with them. Exploring what this means requires finding a way into software. As David Berry notes: ‘What remains clear … is that looking at computer code is difficult due to its ephemeral nature, the high technical skills required of the researcher and the lack of analytical or methodological tools available’ (2011, p. 5). This high technical skill, and perhaps a perspective that technologies are ‘only’ tools, leads to a tendency to talk about digital things, including images, without paying attention to software: ‘writings on digital media almost all ignore something crucial: the actual processes that make digital media work, the computational machines that make digital media possible’ (Wardrip-Fruin, 2009, p. 3).