FLORIAN CRAMER lecture at Techne 06 in Milan
FLORIAN CRAMER lecture at Techne 06 in Milan
_ The actual lecture was shorter than this text.
Consecutive translation was stretching the lecture and had made me cut down my manuscript. There are overlaps with my previous writings: the sections on LaMonte Young, jodi, I/O/D, Alan Sondheim, jaromil and .walk.
Other partsare elaborations of stuff I wrote in "Words Made Flesh": the sections on Moles and the use of the "software" term in early 1970s conceptual art.
My critique of software-aided art and Jeffrey Shaw's "Legible City" is published here for the first time, same goes for the brief mentions of"Google Will Eat Itself" and "Squant".
-F]
Entering the Machine and Leaving It Again: Poetics of Software inContemporary Art
Florian Cramer
Milano, Feb.
7th, 2006
Abraham Moles and the Situationist International
The history of algorithmic programming in art is much older than that ofelectronics: It includes, for example, word permutation poetry like thatof the 3rd century Latin poet Optatianus Porfyrius and automaticcomposition formulas like Athanasius Kircher musical automata of the 17th century (both created in Italy). However, today I would like to speak about the poetics of software in recent and contemporary digital art. It is, of course, inseparable tied to modern computing.
My focus however is less on computing as something that enable or shapesnew forms of art, but rather the other way around: on digital art as aspeculative appropriation and practical cultural reflection of computing.
In 1962, physicist and philosopher Abraham M. Moles wrote a seminal programmatic and theoretical outline of computational art, the first manifesto of permutational art (erstes manifest der permutationellen kunst) .
The booklet combines structuralist and cybernetic theory withexamples of mathematics, contemporary experimental poetry, music, visualart, and even mysticism and erotic art.
Moles' demanded to refound boththe poetics and the aesthetics of art on the grounds of computation: Ascomposition, the new art would "narrow down and exhaust the field of possibilities accessible through a set of rules."
And as aesthetic perception and criticism, it would work through a reverse formal process based on mathematical and stochastic analysis, thuseliminating semantic interpretation. (Italo Calvino writes a parody ofthis kind of interpretation of art and literary works in his novel Se unanotte d'inverno un viaggiatore in which a student computes the author'snovel with a statistical program.)
Moles even speaks of the new art as a "fundamentally anti-semanticactivity."
In his conclusion, he writes that artists would turn into"programmers" and, quote, "from now on, artworks will be realized eitherby machines or through their own consumers". With this statement, Moles pretty much set the agenda of the new computerarts, and today, after almost half a century, it still phrases a virulentpoint. To my knowledge, his "manifesto of permutational art" is the earliest and most concise program of what later would be called generativeart. In 1971, he expanded the manifesto into a book "Art et ordinateur" thatamong others included examples of early computer-generated abstract visualart by Frieder Nake and others.
Among others, it included examples ofearly ASCII typograms , graphical interface computing and even the visionary question "Will Mickey [Mouse = Topolino] end up in the computer", that has been answered just last week when Disney bought up Pixar and announced that from now on, it would only producecomputer-animated films. However, Moles' implication that computer-generated art would be onlyformal and eliminate all cultural semantics, was controversial. Already in1963, one year after the manifesto had appeared, it made him subject of afierce polemical attack by an other group of contemporary artists and theorists, the Situationist International.
On the surface, the programs of both Moles and the Situationists shared many common points. Drawing both from the sociology of Henri Lefebvre, they conceived of industrialautomation as the root of a society of surplus and leisure.
In the early1960s, painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio had even promoted amachine-generated "industrial painting" within the Situationist International.
However, the Situationists were not fighting against semantics, but - in their indebtedness to romanticist and surrealistprograms - on the contrary advocating a revolutionary imagination.
On these grounds, Guy Debord attacked Moles as a "petite tête" ("small head") technocrat and told him "tu es un robot" ("you are a robot").
In 1959, the German section of the Situationist International had played a prank against Moles' main theoretical reference, ally and German editor, thetechno-philosopher Max Bense.
Bense had been also leading the formalistcomputer experiments of his Stuttgart group of experimental poets andartists. The Situationist announced a public lecture of Bense in Munich. once the audience had gathered, a tape recorder was switched on and thevoice on the tape declared that Bense was unable to come and would insteadgive his talk in "cybernetic form."
The talk was a deliberately non sensical cut-up of German, Latin and French phrases with garbled quotations from Marx and Hegel. Yet the audience stayed through the lecture and applauded in the end. In the prank, the Situationists took cybernetic poetics and turned it as a tactical device against itself. The stunt displayed that attempts to do away with semantics had their blind spot precisely in the semantics of his own statements that negated semantics.
I would like to argue that this schism between a rigidly formalist and arigidly "imaginist" (to use a word by Situationist Asger Jorn) poetics obstructed computer arts for almost three decades until the advent of thepersonal computer and the Internet.
- Synthetic Computer Art
Before the personal computer and the Internet, computer art was think able only as synthetic creation, i.e. the construction of algorithms inclean-room laboratories. Of course, this was the inevitable condition ofcomputer-based generative art and computer science in general in the 1960sand 1970s when almost all software had to be written from scratch. But itis also true from computational art that did not actually work withelectronic computers, and probably not even think of itself ascomputational art at all.
- Proto- and Para-Computer Art
In 1960, the composer La Monte Young who's know today mainly as a pioneer of minimal music wrote a piece that consisted solely of the followinginstruction : "Draw a straight line and follow it."First of all, it's a performance score. But its instruction is unambiguousand formal enough to be also executed by a machine and adapted as acomputer program. It is, in other words, an algorithm and a source code. However, it is an impossible algorithm at the same time. If either theperformer or the machine would radically carry out the instruction, this seemingly simple piece mutates in the most monstruous art work of alltime. One cannot consequently draw a straight line and follow it without going beyond physical limits and writing a circular inscription into thewhole earth.
So the piece implies a philosophical defiance of space and time constraints, and leaves the piece in a non-resolvable gap between its physical execution and its mental, conceptual imagination. Doing so, thisscore is not only the founding document of minimal music, but it al socreates a paradoxical union of minimalism and late romanticist Wagnerian total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), by the virtue of a source code thatcondenses an abundance into one line of instruction. The piece reverses subject and object: ultimately, the performers turns into its object, andthe line becomes its subject.In other words, the conflict articulated in the controversy between Molesand the Situationist exists within the piece. It is not resolved, butsustained as a paradox.
The fact that La Monte Young and other Fluxus artists who wrote performance scores - such as Al Hansen and George Brecht - did not conceive of their own work as computational is hardly surprising. It stands, above all, in the tradition of Western musical score notation. Ever since Pythagoras equated music and mathematics, score notation hasbeen a formalized instruction code and therefore could be seen as a formof software programming - especially then when those scores are performedby mechanical instruments like player pianos.
Experimental, free form score notation as it had been introduced by JohnCage and Earle Brown could therefore be seen as an anticipation of codeart; with the difference however that it deliberately detached itself from formal machine instructions rather than rethinking them.(Hans Ulrich Obrist's catalogue "Do it" assembles more recent examples ofinstruction scores as a medium of contemporary art.)
- Software as Metaphor of Dematerialization
In the immediate context of American Fluxus and conceptual art, the notionof "software" got introduced in the early 1970s, however in a semanticsthat was strangely detached from both Moles' theoretical and La MonteYoung's practical anticipation of software art. In 1973, Lucy Lippard published her famous book Six years with the subtitle "TheDematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972". The keyword"dematerialization" also sums up how the term "software" had beenintroduced and understood in contemporary art since 1970.
"Software" had been the title of an art show curated by critic Jack Burnham in New York in 1970. It mostly consisted of concept art works, partly juxtaposed with experimental computer software development projects such as Ted Nelson's first prototype of a hypertext system.
However, the emphasis of the exhibition was not algorithms in art, but immaterial "software" as opposedto material hardware. As Edward A. Shanken puts it in an essay on Burnham's exhibition, the exhibition used the term software as a"metaphorical premise" for the dematerialization of art, not as are flection of computation.In the same year, Sidney Youngblood published his book "Expanded Cinema", a reference work on the extension of experimental film into cinematicperformances and installations, including video, "cybernetic cinema" and"computer films". It contains a chapter on "Hardware and Software" which speculates about programming as future artificial intelligence, but doesn't go into any specifics of its artistic application. Elsewhere,Youngblood uses the same broad metaphorical notion of software asimmaterialization as Burnham when he writes:"Just as every fact is also metaphysical, every piece of hardware impliessoftware: information about its existence. Television is the software ofthe earth. Television is invisible. It's not an object."
Perhaps this phrase was the inspiration for Radical Software, anunderground magazine for video artists and activists that first appearedin the same year, 1970. Despite its name, and under the same metaphoricalpremise as Burnharm's exhibition and Youngblood's paragraph, it was notconcerned with computing at all, but propagated an "Alternate Television Movement."
The issues combined aesthetic reflection with political debates about free media and publicly accessible radio spectrum, much like the contemporary free wireless network movement. Otherwise, the journal conceived of "software" purely as dematerialized art, and did not covercomputer programming. Software-aided art Abraham Moles' idea that artists should become programmers therefor eremained restricted to the specialized field, the ghetto, of electronicart or "media art" as it is still exists today - although I think it's out moded as a category and likely to be given up soon. (The new motto of this year's transmediale festival, "festival for art and digital culture"is one indication of this, too.)
However, most artist-programmers in computer arts were rather meta-programmers, artists who instructed computer programmers to write certain software for them. There is, first of all no computer art without software, unless the hardware is being usedas purely non-computational sculptural objects - as bricks.
In that respect, all computer art could be called software art. However, in onlyrare cases, it is an artistic play with the software as a medium, butsomething that should correctly be called software-aided art. In mostcomputer-generative art, both the software and the hardware acted as merecatalysts. They functioned as black boxes. Neither the hardware, nor the code or its processing was considered the artwork, but only the output: i.e. a computer-generated image, animation, installation or audiovisualpiece. Often, this is linked to the concept of an autonomous machinecreation, in other words the idea that an artwork is no longer a humanproduct, but a creation by the computer. If we take the original Greekterm poiesis, which literally means "making", we could say that in suchartworks, poiesis turns into poetics, the making of making. But when making turns into meta-making, human subjectivity is not abandoned. Instead, it just shifts to a second order position, expressing itself inthe design of the formula rather than the design of the product. When critics and viewers, fixated on the material product, conclude that technology has done away with human agency behind a work, this is acognitive fallacy reminiscent of Plato's cave. It is yet another fallacyto believe that conversely on the aesthetic side, i.e. that of perceptionof the work, viewers would be liberated through the mechanical variations of the work permitted by the formula.
- Jeffrey Shaw, The Legible City
To illustrate my point, I would like to fast-forward to the years1989-1991 and Jeffrey Shaw's computer installation The Legible City at theZKM media arts center in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a contemporaryclassic in the genre of interactive installation art and consists of a video-projected 3D simulation coupled with a stationary bicycle. The projection shows abstract cubic 3D representations of cities of New York, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The spectator, or player, of the work sits on thebicycle and cycles, in a "virtual reality" simulation, through the cities.
The cityscapes are made up of letters and words written by Shaw's artisticcollaborator Dirk Groeneveld. The work was realized on Silicon Graphics work stations, and completed two years before the computer game Doom came out and established immersive first-person 3D navigation games oncommodity PCs.
The Legible City could be called an alternative interface to reading textson a computer. The conventional flat two-dimensional emulation of printand text pages on the screen is being replaced with an immersivethree-dimensional text-scape. The navigation seems to be intuitive thanksto (a) the simulation of anthropomorphic, euclidian space and (b) theemulation of the bicycle as a familiar technology of moving throughspaces. So the piece is a perfect example of a concept of digital art as"interactive" simulation and "virtual reality", through anthropomorphistinterfaces created with complex, high tech hardware and software, realized, because of that complexity, as an installation in a dedicated high tech art space. Again and again, the "Legible City" has been called a seminal work ofdigital art.
I quote, in translation, from an essay by the German critic Stephan Porombka: Nothing that was written for the computer in the 90s could match an installation like Jeffrey Shaw's "Legible City" - neither technology-wise, nor conceptually. After all, Shaw had employed a Silicon Graphics Crimson computer that was worth several ten thousand dollars to achieve the right effects. Only with such a machine, it could be suggested to the audience that its own activities were synchronized to the movement of the digital image on the screen.
{1}Please allow me to disagree with this opinion. I see Shaw's "Legible city"as hardly anything more than a technology gimmick and a glorifiedinterface design study. Its subject of the city inscribed with textsreminds of Tommaso Campanella's "Città del sole", the utopian city whose walls are covered with educational explanations of all knowledge andsciences. Just as Campanella's utopia is naive and even problematic, so is Shaw's if it was intended as such. The Legible City is not, as was written, liberating the letter like concrete poetry. While concrete poetry and Marinetti's "parole in libertà" were about freeing type and language from their conventional typographic and grammatical constraints and freeing them, as much as possible, from anthropomorphisms and spatialdimensions, Shaw's system puts them just under a different restraint - theanthropomorphic Euclidian space of the city.
It does not take apartwriting and reinvents it from scratch, but puts letters into apseudo-interactive human kitsch world. One could compare this to the treatment of letters in 19th century children's books or alphabetic toys, only that the latter are interactive in a much more comprehensive sensethan the Legible City - because they are building blocks of a worldoutside a black box. But first of all, Shaw's installationsuffers from the fact that it does not think of itself a toy, but takesitself overly serious as an "interactive" and experimental art work. On his web page for the project, Jeffrey Shaw's writes: Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.The text misses to reflect that these allegedly "spontaneousjuxtapositions and conjunctions" are not spontaneous at all. They onlyexist within the set of possible combinations encoded into the softwarethat controls the installation. There is no possibility, for example, thata word appears on the screen that has been inscribed into the softwarebefore, and no conjunction can be made (a) outside the predeterminedpossibilities in the program and (b) outside the Euclidian spaceconstraints of the visual simulation. It is, in other words, an illusionof interactivity, spontaneity and intuitivity which the piece sells.Nothing of this could be criticized if the work would actually reflect andcritically engage with this illusion. But this lack of reflection, andcognitive fallacy of "interaction" and "spontaneity", is not onlycharacteristic of Shaw's work, but the whole field of generative andso-called interactive art. It is struck with dangerously simplified notionof interactivity - a reductive understanding of interaction as pointing,clicking and other Pavlovian stimulus-response-reactions within theconstraints of a programmed box. Shaw voices this misunderstanding himselfwhen he writes: The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle give the viewer interactive control over direction and speed of travel. The physical effort of cycling in the real world is gratuitously transposed into the virtual environment, affirming a conjunction of the active body in the virtual domain.The "conjunction" however is a fake since the "active body" can only actwithin the pre-programmed constraints of the box. However, the box masksthese constraints through its "virtual reality" kitsch and trompe-l'oeuil.Even as a toy, "The Legible City" is restrained in comparison classicalalphabetic toys which have * a much richer interactivity, because they don't force their players into a restrained brick world, but on the contrary allow players to integrate their bricks into their own world; * nevertheless, a more humble and humorous understanding of themselves and their own limitations.The Legible City could be called a naive piece of art, with its gapbetween formal restraints and overblown self-perception. As such, it isemblematic of the self-gratifying ghetto of "media art". It is art that ismost unlikely to receive any acclaim and be considered relevant outsidethis ghetto, in the larger context of contemporary arts.
- Analytic Computer Art
Net.art
In the mid-1990s, net.art embodied a paradigm shift in so-called media artwhose nature was institutional, poetic and aesthetic at the same time. Ininstitutional terms, it was the first computer art outside research labsand highly funded institutional environments. In poetic terms, it was lowtech computer art. In aesthetic terms, it borrowed from the older low techartisanship of hacker cultures by adopting its aesthetics of disruptionand digital humorism: network collaboration and subversion, ASCII art,code poetry, viruses, computer game modification. While all computer artbefore had used a synthetical approach, creating its works from scratch,net.art used an analytical approach of taking digital information and codeas material. It was computer art under the new conditions of cheappersonal computing. Unlike in earlier computer arts, artists could useready-made digital information and code "out there" and treat it likeDadaist and Pop art painters treated found objects in their collage work.
One could call it an informal, playful and performative approach todigital art. With the example of the work of jodi and other net.artist, I would like to show how this art developed from experimentation withnetwork information to experimentation with software, and fromexperimentation with software to performances and interventions.
jodi
I would like to start with OSS, an early work from http://www.jodi.org
Jodi stands for Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, aDutch-Belgian artist couple. Their early work OSS [slide] makes smallbrowser windows pop up and fly around that evade manual control. If oneopens the site, it performs a hostile takeover of one's web browser. It isa hack, a punk-like aesthetic and technological hijacking. It involves nosimulation, no anthropomorphism, no virtual reality, but is the technologyitself read against the grain. It does not simulate an anthropomorphicspace in order to be perceived and experienced, but simply uses everydayexperience with personal computer operating systems and the Internet asits frame of reference. It is not a high tech installation in a whitecube, but low tech running on any home or office computer. The wholesource code of the pages takes up less than 10 Kilobyte, i.e. has theaverage size of a short E-Mail, as opposed to a complex softwareapplication with several 100,000 lines of original source code. It usesready-made, industrial software - a web browser in this case -, howevernot in an affirmative way, but in an attempt to hack it and subvert itscultural interface paradigms. It is ironical and melancholic to the degreethat it promises no computing utopias, and is not futuristhuman-machine-interface research, but ultimately depicts "interactivity"inside the computer as a scam and sad hoax on the users. By forcing theuser to hack the computer in order to regain control - by killing thebrowser, shutting down the machine or perhaps even throw it out of thewindow - it however creates a genuine interactivity outside the box andoutside preempted behavioral patterns in the software.Contrary to a slick, visually immersive digital art which treated thecomputer as a black box, Jodi aestheticize computers as self-immersed,often absurd generators of contingent data streams. Contrary to the"Legible City", code, software, the machine is no longer hidden from theactual artwork, but the guts are exposed and made the artwork proper. YetJodi's art does not fall into the reverse fallacy of telling an imaginarytruth underneath the surfaces of software user interfaces. One could saythat it exposes the surrealism of formalisms. Comparable to the"Composition 1960" by La Monte Young, the two poles of rigid formalism andsubjective imagination aesthetically coexist in jodi's work. However, theydon't coexist in a violent tension, but as a play. This play involvessimulations, too, but unlike the "Legible City" it is not simulation ofanthropomorphic space, but simulation of machine functions.Jodi's aesthetics of disruption and noise differs from the noise andrandomness in older avant-garde arts from Dada to John Cage because itshifts the noise from the work to the transmission channel, and fromontology to simulacrum. For Jodi's website reads and behaves as if itcontained intact data disturbed only by faulty net transmission orcomputer crashes; but in reality, the line noise is mocked up within thedata itself. Unlike Nam June Paik's visual noise manipulations of TV setsin the 1960s, jodi's disturbance is not done in hardware with only partlypredictable results, but is a clever simulation of noise done in software.And while the chance poetics of Cage and Fluxus conceived of disturbanceand randomness as means of radical freedom - an idea still reverberatingin Shaw's allegedly "spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions" -, theirimplication is much more ambivalent in jodi's work. Cage's ontologicalembracement of chance is replaced with a tricky rhetoric of simultaneousanarchy and entrapment, a neo-baroque conceit and discordia concors ofsurface chaos with inscribed structure, and vice versa.
Analogous to jodi, net.artist Olia Lialina stated that many of her earlyworks were based on bugs in the Netscape browser and therefore no longerwork on contemporary computer setups. These plays with the web browserwere not only a critical engagement with the Web and its aesthetics, butalso an engagement with the software that shaped its access modes andinterfaces. It was therefore a logical step from subverting standardbrowsers to developing alternative browsers. Most famous is the I/O/D,web.stalker [slide http://www.backspace.org/iod/iod4.html]. It turns webbrowsing upside down by not showing the smooth typographic rendering, butthe otherwise concealed technical layers of the web, including HTML sourcecode and http protocol communication, in separate windows and controls. Ittakes apart the separate components of web browsing - "takes apart" in theliteral meaning of analysis. It thus achieves two things at once: It freesthe cultural technique and the cultural imagination of web browsing fromits conventional interface metaphors, including that of "browsing" itself.Secondly, it maps the World Wide Web as a controlled space, controlled bycodes. This duality of freeing the user's imagination and revealingcontrol structures paradigmatically expresses itself in I/O/D's slogan,"software is mind control, get some".Jodi reflected the mind control embedded into software, when they began towrite their own web browsers, too, the "wrongbrowsers" which displayedonly pages within arbitrarily restricted domain name spaces. Around thesame time in the late 1990s, the international "browserday" festivalfeatured experimental browsers programmed by artists and hackers, amongthem also an "analog" browser in the form of a wooden window frame withwhich users should "browse" the city.Software artWithin net.art itself, there was an increasing shift towards work withsoftware, and as a result, software manipulated or written by artists.
Critical observers described these works as "Artware" (Saul Albert in1999), "experimental software" (Tilman Baumgärtel), "speculative software"(Matthew Fuller), "artistic software" (Andreas Broeckmann) and "softwareart" (Alexander Galloway, 1999). It was reflection on the fact thatdigital artists had first taken software as a transparent tool, and laterbegan to reflect which influence that tool had on their own work andaesthetics. The more intensely artists worked with the computer, the moreproblematic the alleged tool became - not because of some "objective"limitation, but because of the culture, philosophy and subjectivityimposed by the creators of onto the users of the software.
Codework
Subjectivity expressed in code is also characteristic of the whole genreof artistic codeworks whose chief medium are E-Mail messages writtenhybrids of English and code fragments from programming languages,character encodings, markup languages, emoticons and network protocols.Jodi were pioneers of this genre of digital art, along with Ted Warnell,Alan Sondheim, Netochka Nezvanova and the Australian female net artist mez (Mary Anne Breeze).
One of Alan Sondheim's codeworks reads as follows:
The work is based on the output of the Unix system command "top" whichdisplays a list of running processes, memory and central processor load.
"Zombie" is a technical Unix term for a program process that can no longerbe terminated with the "kill" command. Sondheim's text takes thesedescriptors-or "semantics," as computer science would call it-literally.He reads the output of the program as a physical inscription of bodies, asperformance art and a subjective utterance in the medium of computersoftware. Yet it is not simply a poetic metaphorization because thetechnical apparatus of writing becomes a part of the text. There is afeedback of textual input, output and processing inside the text andwithin the medium of code. Subject and object, syntax and semantics,formalism and culture become inseparably entangled, crisscrossing andwriting over each other. As such, the "codeworks" by kodi, mez, AlanSondheim and other artists manifest a most radical understanding offormalisms as meaningful. They appropriate languages that were designed tobe asemantic-programming languages, protocol code, shell commands-tounveil and elaborate their metaphorical and physical inscriptions,implications, and engendered meaning lurking between the lines. At thispoint, that is equally present in the works of I/O/D, for example,computational art has turned into a flat-out antithesis and refutation ofAbraham Moles' claim that cybernetic art would be "fundamentallyanti-semantic".This also means, by implication, that there is no difference between"code" (or artificial language) on the one hand and "interface" on theother, because the code already is an interface, and the interface is acode.
Bifo
Vice versa, the fact that computer code executes and thus has an embeddedvirulence is used in poetic appropriations. At the "Digital Is Not Analog" Festival in Bologna 2001, Italian subcultural legend Franco "Bifo" Berardimade a public reading of the sourcecode of the famous "Loveletter"computer virus . This reading reappropriates computer sourcecode as Dada poetry similar to Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate", and like jodi's workexposes its strange aesthetics. On the other hand, it differs sound poetry because it refers to the contagious virulence anddangerousness of the code, and tries to emulate its embedded action, andread it as a subversive performativity.
jaromil, forkbomb
This energy is also embbedded into the twelve characters of jaromil'sforkbomb ::({ ::& };:Most computer operating systems can be crashed or at least brought to agrinding halt when users, even those without superuser privileges, launchan abundant ever-growing amount of programs that eat up all memory and CPUtime. The easiest way to achieve this is a "forkbomb", a little program which does nothing but launch two or more copies of itself upon startup.
Since these copies do the same in turn, this sets off a chain reaction with an exponentially growing number of processes. Fork bombs have been popular entertainment among hackers since about the mid-1990s, but jaromil manages to condense them to a most terse, poetic syntax, arguably the mostelegant fork bomb ever written.In other words, if you have access to the terminal prompt of a Unix-likeOS, these twelve characters - which look like Internet smilies - can bringit down. It has become a secret code of recognition among the initiated,like the stuffed trumpet of the Tristero underground postal network inThomas Pynchon's novel "Crying of Lot 49".Unwillingly, this example also reveals a problematic issue of the term"software art": That it is often misunderstood as high programm crafts manship. In fact, this understanding has its roots in computerscience itself. Donald Knuth's textbooks "The Art of Computer Programming"or Paul Graham's recent book "Hackers and Painters" are founded on apost-classicist notion of art as beauty and high craftsmanship, forexample in the elegance of an algorithm.Negativeland, SquantA counter-example to this - software art that expends programming skills -is a rather unknown work of the American experimental music groupNegativeland, the "Squant" browser plugin http://www.negativland.com/squant/plugin.html. Negativeland claim that Squant is a color that cannot be seen on traditional RGB monitors. This plug-in changes the spectral display capabilities of your system software.
THE NEWHEW SQUANTVIEW PLUG-IN utilizes a new color model ("RGBS") to facilitate the visualization of the Squant color spectrum, in addition to the already-established RGB color model.Negativeland's website offers downloadable software packages for Windowsand Mac OS and a "Tech Support" forum. It is filled with actual helpinquiries by people who tried to get the plugin running, failed at onestep, were helped, and still failed. Of course, the plugin and the"Squant" color is a hoax and doesn't work at all. Yet it is a cleverartistic reflection of software as culture that includes vaporware just asmuch as actually running code. The false promises, installationnightmares, support horrors and other frustrations with software, known toany PC user, become the material of the work and get turned into ansocial-artistic performance.
ubermorgen.com/Alessandro Ludovico: Google will eat itself
This tendency is even more pronounced in recent artistic work - work thathas its origins in the realm of net.art and software art, but isdeveloping into interventionist performance art both in the Internet andoutside.A very recent example is "Google will eat itself" http://www.gwei.org by ubermorgen.com and Alessandro Ludovico. ubermorgen.com consistsof former etoy member Hans Bernhard and Liz Haas, Alessandro Ludovico is well known in Italy as the founder and editor of Neural magazine."Google will eat itself" is simple to explain: it is a website that runsads via the Google "AdSense" program, i.e. embedded commercial textadvertising provided by Google, but bought from other companies. Google pays website owners a small fee for every click on an ad link; "gwei.org"uses this money to buy Google shares. The idea is that Google will pay thesite to get bought up by it. Ideally, gwei.org should make so much moneyfrom Google ad payments that it can buy up all Google shares. Toaccelerate this process, "Google will eat itself" imploys some hiddendirty programming hacks that trigger automatic clicks on the advertisingso that any user who visits the site will click multiple Google ads atonce.It is not only one company eating up another, but also a piece of softwareeating up another software. Google is one of the first world companiesthat is a piece of online software, with search requests as its input, anda double output of search results and money to the shareholders. Thiscollapsing of software program and corporation get turned against itselfby gwei.org. It is the net.art of an Internet that is no longer an openfield of experimentation, but a corporate space. The dark-humorous actionism of the piece manifests yet another resolution of the conflictthat had originally voiced by Moles and Debord, technical formalism versus agency.
dot.walk, psychogeographic computing
Computation and situationist urban drift ultimately converge in the"generative psychogeography" of the Dutch artistic project http://www.socialfiction.org
Its .walk is a "psychogeographic computer,"operated by pedestrians who walk through street grids like electrons flowthrough the gates of computer chips. The .walk computer can execute simpleprogram code like the following: // Classic .walk Repeat { 1 st street left 2 nd street right 2 nd street left }Psychogeographic computing has a double effect: It demystifies computingand turns it into a radically simple and popular low-tech and low-costoperation. Secondly, it liberates the imagination of what a computer canbe and which purposes it may serve. Socialfiction.org has expanded andsystematized this idea into a broader concept of "speculative programming"in which computing becomes a figure of thought and reflection not only intheory, but also in artistic practice.While the same could be said about Moles' manifesto from 1962, theimplications are contrary. Where Moles models art, criticism andaesthetics after computing, superimposing the latter on the former,speculative programming does the opposite, modelling computation after thearts and and speculative imagination.
Footnotes:{1} Nichts, was in den 90ern für den Computer geschrieben wurde, konntesich mit einer Installation messen lassen, wie sie etwa Jeffrey Shaw mitLegible City realisiert hatte - technologisch nicht und auch nichtkonzeptionell. Immerhin hatte Shaw einen mehrere zehntausend Mark teurenSilicon Graphics Crimson Computer eingesetzt, um die richtigen Effekte zuerzielen. Nur mit einem solchen Gerät ließ sich dem Rezipientenvermitteln, dass die eigene Aktivität mit der Bewegung des digitalenBildes auf der Leinwand gleichgeschaltet war.{2}
http://www.signwave.co.uk--
http://cramer.plaintext.cc
font mailing list aha
