Issue 3/2003 - Net section
One of the real fascinations of code is its similarity to language. In the same way that a piece of literature is able to instantly program your mind to discover uncharted territories, a piece of code can allow you to discover unsuspected perspectives by means of PC calculations. Art made with code seems to be directly related to inventions within language, or processing ideas by means of machines. Two of the first researchers in the software culture/art relationship, the net.art hero Alexei Shulgin and the new media expert One of the real fascinations of code is its similarity to language. In the same way that a piece of literature is able to instantly program your mind to discover uncharted territories, a piece of code can allow you to discover unsuspected perspectives by means of PC calculations. Art made with code seems to be directly related to inventions within language, or processing ideas by means of machines. Two of the first researchers in the software culture/art relationship, the net.art hero Alexei Shulgin and the new media expert Olga Goriunova, promote the eclectic scene of software art by annually curating the »Read_Me« international festival [http://www.m-cult.org/read_me/index.php ]. This passionate effort has also produced a detailed database called runme.org [http://runme.org ], which preserves and categorizes many creative pieces of software, searchable under a great variety of keywords – there are many worthwhile downloads to be made here. Hosted by the LUME Media Center of Helsinki the latest festival focused on an extended background comprising tools, interfaces and cultural approaches.
This fluid territory between obsessive coding and expressing poetry using a programming language was illustrated by Florian Cramer in a critical review of popular interfaces. »The ›user‹ as an invention of the operating systems ... who is supposed to read, not so much to write ... in a growing induced illusion that software is the hardware« - these are some of the main points of his remarkable theories, which continue with a radical celebration of Unix as a text system and with some intriguing research in modern literature that leads him to compare writers' intuitions with contemporary interfaces. Another perspective was the ›unexpected output‹, intentionally programmed, of Adrian Ward's never-outdated Auto-Illustrator, an amazing software parody of graphic design tools, or the fascinating »Taxonomy of Glitches« developed by Tony Scott, who investigates the aesthetics of errors, crashes and voluntary sabotages.
Music, one of the fields most transformed by software production, was also on centre-stage at the festival. The »Command Line Techno«, realized in letter sequences by Alex McLean, is along the lines of a reconfiguration, in letters, of the language of music grammar. But the anthropomorphic interface of Frankie the Robot, a sexy, dancing software DJ, and Micromusic.net, the highly aware 8-bit music community that has created its own community software and allows its members to vote on who must be included in official CD compilations, were also good examples of socially motivated music codes.
»Hacktivism« was the keyword in the »Guerrilla Engineering« section with its two special guests. On one hand, The Yes Men presented their usual hacker projects, inspired by and directed at corporate institutions, along with their latest exhilarating video documenting some real conference performances in front of unsuspecting top executives and lawyers. And, on the other hand, Ubermorgen was able to explain some of its many works, including the immaculate-looking 'Injunction-Generator’, which generates credible Web-related court orders, and its Vote-Auction.com masterpiece, one of the few contemporary works of art that really worried the U.S. election system. The media fallout generated during the latest U.S. presidential elections with this simple website, where everyone could anonymously declare his/her willingness to accept bids for his/her vote, struck a nerve in the privately-funded consensus machine that legitimates the most powerful government in the world.
An accompanying exhibition mixed some archaeological items of software art such as »DOS pseudo-viruses« with transforming data such as the seminal »Tempest for Eliza'« by Erik Thiele, a tool that induces frequency changes in a monitor, which consequently emits sound waves slightly amplified by a nearby radio. These are icons from the edge of coding culture, which were well interpreted by Amy Alexander in her live exhibition »Deprogramming.Us«, software that mutates the daily work of a programmer into a performance, transforming the insane rhythm of typing into color variations and animations that are projected onto the background behind the performer, while the keyboard that controls the live soundtrack is played like a guitar. This remix of routine gestures symbolizes what code can always do: reprogramming sense.
http://www.m-cult.org/read_me/