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<chapter>
<title>CODE</title>
<desc>...</desc>
<mails>
<mail>
<nbr>0.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] On Software Art</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Sep 2001 20:05:24 +0200</date>
<content>Note: This text is almost identical with the essay "Software Art and Writing"
which, just as McKenzie Wark's essay "Codework", is part of the recent
issue of the American Book Review, vol.22, no.6. It was written by
Ulrike Gabriel and me as a retrospective reflection of our work in the
jury for the transmediale.01 software art award.
It is available online in HTML, PDF, LaTeX &amp; plain text formats at
&lt;http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/index.html#software_art_-_transmediale&gt;
-FC
....
Software Art
Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel
August 15, 2001
What is software art? How can ``software'' be generally defined? We had to
answer these questions at least provisionally when we were asked to be with the
artist-programmer John Simon jr. in the jury of the ``artistic software'' award
for the transmediale.01 art festival in Berlin, Germany.
Since more than a decade, festivals, awards, exhibitions and publications exist
for various forms of computer art: computer music, computer graphics,
electronic literature, Net Art and computer-controlled interactive
installations, to name only a few, each of them with its own institutions and
discourse. Classifications like the above show that attention is usually being
paid to how, i.e. in which medium, digital artworks present themselves to the
audience, externally. They also show that digital art is traditionally
considered to be a part of ``[new] media art,'' a term which covers analog and
digital media alike and is historically rooted in video art. But isn't it a
false assumption that digital art - i.e. art that consists of zeros and ones -
was derived from video art, only because computer data is conventionally
visualized on screens?
By calling digital art ``[new] media art,'' public perception has focused the
zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media,
rather than structures of programming. This view is reinforced by the fact that
the algorithms employed to generate and manipulate computer music, computer
graphics, digital text are frequently if not in most cases invisible, unknown
to the audience and the artist alike. While the history of computer art still
is short, it is rich with works whose programming resides in black boxes or is
considered to be just a preparatory behind-the-scenes process for a finished
(and finite) work on CD, in a book, in the Internet or in a ``realtime
interactive'' environment. The distribution of John Cage's algorithmically
generated sound play ``Roarotorio,'' for example, includes a book, a CD and
excerpts of the score, but not even a fragment of the computer program which
was employed to compute the score.
While software, i.e. algorithmic programming code, is inevitably at work in all
art that is digitally produced and reproduced, it has a long history of being
overlooked as artistic material and as a factor in the concept and aesthetics
of a work. This history runs parallel to the evolution of computing from
systems that could only be used by programmers to systems like the Macintosh
and Windows which, by their graphical user interface, camouflaged the mere fact
that they are running on program code, in their operation as well as in their
aesthetics. Despite this history, we were surprised that the 2001 transmediale
award for software art was not only the first of its kind at this particular
art festival, but as it seems the first of its kind at all.
When the London-based digital arts project I/O/D released an experimental World
Wide Web browser, the Web Stalker http://www.backspace.org/iod/, in 1997, the
work was perceived to be a piece of Net Art. Instead of rendering Web sites as
smoothly formatted pages, the Web Stalker displayed their internal control
codes and visualized their link structure. By making the Web unreadable in
conventional terms, the program made it readable in its underlying code. It
made its users aware that digital signs are structural hybrids of internal code
and an external display that arbitrarily depends on algorithmic formatting.
What's more, these displays are generated by other code: The code of the Web
Stalker may dismantle the code of the Web, but does so by formatting it into
just another display, a display which just pretends to ``be'' the code itself.
The Web Stalker can be read as a piece of Net Art which critically examines its
medium. But it's also a reflection of how reality is shaped by software, by the
way code processes code. If complex systems and their generative processors
themselves become language, formulation becomes the creation of a frame within
which the system will behave, and of the control of this behaviour. The joint
operation of these processes creates its own aesthetics which manifests itself
no longer by application-restricted assignments, but in the free composition of
this system as a whole. (Which simply is what developing software is all
about.)
Since software is machine control code, it follows that digital media are,
literally, written. Electronic literature therefore is not simply text, or
hybrids of text and other media, circulating in computer networks. If
``literature'' can be defined as something that is made up by letters, the
program code, software protocols and file formats of computer networks
constitute a literature whose underlying alphabet is zeros and ones. By running
code on itself, this code gets constantly transformed into higher-level,
human-readable alphabets of alphanumeric letters, graphic pixels and other
signifiers. These signifiers flow forth and back from one aggregation and
format to another. Computer programs are written in a highly elaborate syntax
of multiple, mutually interdependent layers of code. This writing does not only
rely on computer systems as transport media, but actively manipulates them when
it is machine instructions. The difference is obvious when comparing a
conventional E-Mail message with an E-Mail virus: Although both are short
pieces of text whose alphabets are the same, the virus contains machine control
syntax, code that interferes with the (coded) system it gets sent to.
Software art means a shift of the artist's view from displays to the creation
of systems and processes themselves; this is not covered by the concept of
``media.'' ``Multimedia'', as an umbrella term for formatting and displaying
data, doesn't imply by definition that the data is digital and that the
formatting is algorithmic. Nevertheless, the ``Web Stalker'' shows that
multimedia and terms like Net Art on the one hand and software art on the other
are by no means exclusive categories. They could be seen as different
perspectives, the one focussing distribution and display, the other one the
systemics.
But is generative code exclusive to computer programming? The question has been
answered by mathematics proper and the many historical employments of
algorithmic structures in the arts. A comparatively recent classical example is
the Composition 1961 No. I, January I by the contemporary composer and former
Fluxus artist La Monte Young, which is at once considered to be one of the
first pieces of minimal music and one of the first Fluxus performance scores:
``Draw a straight line and follow it.''1
This piece can be called a seminal piece of software art because its
instruction is formal. At the same time, it is extremist in its aesthetic
consequence, in the implication of infinite space and time to be traversed.
Unlike in most notational music and written theatre plays, its score is not
aesthetically detached from its performance. The line to be drawn could be even
considered a second-layer instruction for the act of following it. But as it is
practically impossible to perform the score physically, it becomes
meta-physical, conceptual, epistemological. As such the piece could serve as a
paradigm for Henry Flynt's 1961 definition of Concept Art as ``art of which the
material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound.''2 Tracing
concept art to artistic formalisms like twelve-tone music, Flynt argues that
the structure or concept of those artworks is, taken for itself, aesthetically
more interesting than the product of their physical execution. In analogy, we
would like to define software art as art of which the material is software.
Flynt's Concept Art integrates mathematics as well, on the acognitive grounds
of ``de-emphasiz[ing]'' its attribution to scientific discovery.3 With this
claim, Flynt coincides, if oddly, with the most influential contemporary
computer scientist, Donald E. Knuth. Knuth considers the applied mathematics of
programming an art; his famous compendium of algorithms is duely titled ``The
Art of Computer Programming.''4
Should the transmediale software art jury therefore have consisted of
mathematicians and computer scientists who would have judged the entries by the
beauty of their code?
What is known as Concept Art today is less rigorous in its immaterialism than
the art Flynt had in mind. It is noteworthy, however, that the first major
exhibition of this kind of conceptual art was named ``Software'' and confronted
art objects actually with computer software installations.5. Curated in 1970 by
the art critic and systems theorist Jack Burnham at the New York Jewish Museum,
the show was, as Edward A. Shanken suggests, ``predicated on the idea of
software as a metaphor for art [my emphasis],''6. It therefore stressed the
cybernetical, social dimension of programmed systems rather than, as Flynt,
pure structure.
Thirty years later, after personal computing became ubiquituous, cultural
stereotypes of what software is have solidified. Although the expectation that
software is, unlike other writing, not an aesthetic, but a ``functional tool''
itself is an aesthetic expectation, software art nevertheless has become less
likely to emerge as conceptualist clean-room constructs than reacting to these
stereotypes. The ``Web Stalker'' again might be referred to as such a piece. In
a similar fashion, the two works picked for the transmediale award, Adrian
Ward's ``Signwave Auto-Illustrator'' and Netochka Nezvanova's ``Nebula M.81,''
are PC user software which acts up against its conventional codification,
either by mapping internal functions against their corresponding signifiers on
the user interface (Auto-Illustrator) or by mapping the signifiers of program
output against human readability (Nebula M.81).
The range of works entered for the transmediale.01 software art award shows
that coding is a highly personal activity. Code can be diaries, poetic,
obscure, ironic or disruptive, defunct or impossible, it can simulate and
disguise, it has rhetoric and style, it can be an attitude. Such attributes
might seem to contradict the fact that artistic control over generative
iterations of machine code is limited, whether or not the code was
self-written. But unlike the Cagean artists of the 1960s, the software artists
we reviewed seem to conceive of generative systems not as negation of
intentionality, but as balancing of randomness and control. Program code thus
becomes a material with which artist work self-consciously. Far from being
simply art for machines, software art is highly concerned with artistic
subjectivity and its reflection and extension into generative systems.7
References
[Fly61]
Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors, An
Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961).
[hun90]
George Maciunas und Fluxus-Editionen, 1990.
[Knu98]
Donald E. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading,
Massachusetts, 1973-1998.
[Sha]
Edward A. Shanken. The house that jack built: Jack burnham's concept of
`software` as a metaphor of art. Leonardo Electronic Almanach, 6(10).
http://www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/House.html
Footnotes:
1 facsimile reprint included in [hun90], no page numbering
2 Henry Flynt, Concept Art [Fly61] ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with
language,'' Flynt writes, ``concept art is a kind of art of which the material
is language.''
3 ibid.
4 [Knu98]
5 Among them Ted Nelson's hypertext system in its first public display,
according to Edward A. Shanken, The House that Jack Built: Jack Burnham's
Concept of ``Software'' as a Metaphor for Art, [Sha]
6 ibid.
7 Or, as Adrian Ward puts it: ``I would rather suggest we should be thinking
about embedding our own creative subjectivity into automated systems, rather
than naively trying to get a robot to have its `own' creative agenda. A lot of
us do this day in, day out. We call it programming.'' (quoted from an E-Mail
message to the ``Rhizome'' mailing list, May 7, 2001)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001)</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Fri, 13 Apr 2001 15:19:56 +0200</date>
<content>(The following review was commissed by MUTE and will appear in the
forthcoming MUTE issue, see &lt;http://www.metamute.com&gt;. Josephine Berry
has my cordial thanks for editing the text into proper English. The MUTE
people were so kind to let me speak about literature and systems theory
on a panel with Robert Coover and Jeff Noon at Tate Modern. See
&lt;http://www.metamute.com/events/mutetate08042001.htm&gt; for the details.
-FC)
CODE: Chances and Obstacles in the Digital Ecology
The recent Cambridge conference CODE amounted to more than a
straightforward expansion of its acronym into - in computereze - its
executable "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy". It
actually got some of its participants collaborating. The most interesting
idea regarding collaboration came as an off-the-cuff remark from
James Boyle, professor of law at Duke University, who compared the
recent interest in open digital code to environmentalism. The first
environmental activists were scattered and without mutual ties, Boyle
said, because the notion of 'the environment' did not yet exist. It had
to be invented before it could be defended.
After two packed days of presentations, it could well be that the
virus will spread and make artists, activists and scholars in digital
culture associate 'IP' with 'Intellectual Property' rather than 'Internet
Protocol', whether they like it or not. Unlike many Free Software/Open
Source events with their occasional glimpses at the cultural implications
of open code, the CODE programme covered the free availability and
proprietary closure of information in the most general terms setting it
into a broad disciplinary framework which included law, literature, music,
anthropology, astronomy and genetics. Free Software has historically
taught people that even digitised images and sounds run on code. But
that this code is speech which can be locked into proprietary schemes
such as patents and shrinkwrap licenses, thereby decreasing freedom of
expression, is perhaps only beginning to dawn on people. John Naughton,
moderator of the panel on "The Future of Knowledge", illustrated this
situation by describing how, in the US at least, it is illegal to wear
T-Shirts or recite haikus containing the few sourcecode words of DeCSS,
a program which breaks the cryptography scheme of DVD movies.
There is little awareness that any piece of digital data, whether an
audio CD, a video game or a computer operating systems is simply a number
and that every new copyrighted digital work reduces the amount of freely
available numbers. While digital data, just like any text, can be parsed
arbitrarily according to a language or data format (the four letters
g-i-f-t, for example, parse as a synonym for 'present' in English, but as
'poison' in German), the copyrighting of digital data implies that there
is only one authoritative interpretation of signs. The zeros and ones of
Microsoft Word are legally considered a Windows program and thus subject
to Microsoft's licensing, although they could just as well be seen as
a piece of concrete poetry when displayed as alphanumeric code or as
music when burned onto an audio CD. The opposite is also true: no-one
can rule out that the text of, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet cannot be parsed
and compiled into a piece of software that infringes somebody's patents.
The legal experts speaking at CODE also explained the enormous expansion
in intellectual property rights in the last few years. While patents are
widely known to conflict with the freedom of research and even with the
freedom to write in programming languages, the conference nevertheless
extended its focus beyond this and made its participants aware of IP
rights as the negative subtext to what was once considered the promiscuous
textuality of the Internet. Still, it was surprising to see speakers with
very diverse academic and professional backgrounds position themselves so
unanimously against the current state of IP rights. In another informal
remark, Volker Grassmuck proposed that we refocus 'information ecology'
from software ergonomics to the politics of knowledge distribution. Does
digital code need its own Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund?
The conference took its inspiration from Free Software, but didn't bother
going into basics and priming the participants on what Free Software
and Open Source technically are - which was both an advantage and a
disadvantage. General topics were advanced right from the first session
without first clarifying such important issues as the meaning of the
'free' in Free Software. GNU project founder Richard M. Stallman -
who usually explains this as 'free, as in speech' not ' free, as in
beer' - revealed his own questionable conceptions by proposing three
different copyleft schemes for what he categorised as 'functional works',
'opinion pieces' and 'aesthetic works': as if these categories could be
separated, as if they weren't aspects of every artwork, and as if computer
programs didn't have their own politics and aesthetics (GNU Emacs could
be analysed in just the same way Matthew Fuller analysed the aesthetic
ideology of Microsoft Word.) It was annoying to hear Stallman reduce the
distribution of digital art to 'bands' distributing their 'songs', and
it was equally annoying to hear Glyn Moody call Stallman the Beethoven,
Linus Torvalds the Mozart and Larry Wall - a self-acclaimed postmodernist
and experimental writer in his own right - the Schubert of programming.
To make matters worse, the artists who spoke on the second day of CODE
echoed these aesthetic conservatisms in perfect symmetry. Michael
Century, co-organiser of the conference and Stallman's respondent,
unfortunately didn't have enough time to speak about the notational
complexity of modern art in any detail. He was the only speaker to
address this issue. Otherwise, artists were happy to be 'artists', and
programmers were happy to be 'programmers'. Stallman's separation of the
'functional' and the 'aesthetic' was also implied in Antoine Moireau's
Free Art License &lt;http://www.artlibre.org&gt;, a copyleft for artworks which
failed to illuminate why artists shouldn't simply use the GNU copyleft
proper. This question is begged all the more since the license is based
on the assumption that the artwork in contrast to the codework is, quote,
'fixed'. While Moireau's project was at least an honest reflection of
Free Software/Open Source, one couldn't help the impression that other
digital artists appropriated the term as a nebulous, buzzword-compatible
analogy. While there are certainly good reasons for not releasing art as
Free Software, it still might be necessary to speak of digital art and
Free Software in a more practical way. Much if not most of digital art
is locked into proprietary formats like Macromedia Director, QuickTime
and RealVideo. It is doomed to obscurity as soon as their respective
manufacturers discontinue the software.
On the other hand, the Free Software available obviously doesn't cut it
for many people, artists in particular. The absence of, for example,
desktop publishing software available for GNU/Linux is no coincidence
since the probability of finding programmers among graphic artists
is much lower than the probability of finding programmers among system
operators. This raises many issues for digital code in the commons, issues
the conference speakers seemed, however, to avoid on purpose. While most
of them pretended that it was no longer necessary to use proprietary
software, their computers still ran Windows or the Macintosh OS. It
would have been good to see such contradictions if not resolved then at
least reflected.
Code, Queens College, Cambridge, UK, April 5-6, 2001</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>2.0</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:17:51 +0200</date>
<content>
&gt; July/August 'Theme of the Month':
&gt;
&gt; Software as art
&gt;
&gt; If your artwork is 'software that does something' (such as Mongrel's
&gt; 'Linker' software) then what issues are involved? Do curators get it?
&gt; Is it 'enabling others', or artwork in itself? How do you 'show' or
&gt; distribute it? What about 'user support'?
as a start, you can take a look at
http://www.transmediale.de/01/en/software.htm
which has the jury statement and nominated projects of the competition for
software art at this year's transmediale festival.
the competition for transmediale.02 in february 2002 is underway.
greetings,
-a</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.0</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 3 Jul 2001 10:49:17 +0200</date>
<content>
&gt;Ittai Bar-Joseph
...
&gt;Aren't the definitions and "regulations" involving the use of a software
&gt;artwork part of the concept?
&gt;If so, is it possible / neccesary / advisable to form a set of rules that
&gt;define the way software art be dealt with?
as with any artistic practice, fixed rules would not help, but an exchange
of experiences and a comparison of conditions might help to create a good
and informed curatorial practice.
software art is only just coming into focus, so it is early days to
describe, let alone critique its presentation. we have developed a
description of software art for the transmediale competition that excludes
applications of software like director or shockwave; what is interesting in
software are, in my view, is that it is an artistic practice that takes
code as its material and that uses programming as a way to 'shape' the
code. the result can be open, algorithmic processes that articulate the
rigid and the open dimensions of digital processes, they can highlight the
technical or the socio-cultural dimensions of technology and do this in the
very 'language' of the digital machines themselves. software might be the
ultimate medium of creativity in a digital environment.
besides the transmediale.01 site, some examples of software art can be found on
digital_is_not_analog.01 - http://www.d-i-n-a.org
Reena Jana: Real Artists Paint by Numbers
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,44377,00.html
greetings,
-a</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Ittai Bar-Joseph</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 3 Jul 2001 14:46:17 +0200</date>
<content>
Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
&gt; we have developed a description of software art for the transmediale competition
&gt; that excludes
&gt; applications of software like director or shockwave;
On what basis was this decision made?
Today Director is a tool which enables the creation of professional software.
I think many people (developers included) still refer to Director as an
interactive animation / games
application, and are quite ignorant when it comes to the more interesting and new
features that are
scarcely in use yet. With today's "imaging lingo" (new features added in Director
8), it's possible to
create a Photoshop-like application from scratch.
Cheers,
Ittai.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>anthony huberman</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 3 Jul 2001 11:30:36 -0500</date>
<content>
Andreas referenced the Reena Jana text in Wired.com. I organized the
recent panel and performance event called "Artists and their Software" that
Reena's text references, and so this month's topic strikes me as
particularly relevant.
The event went very well. A comment from the audience, however, stuck out
as something that seems to be a central shortcoming. Many choose to look
at the coding and the programming and the "how to" aspects of
art-as-software, often overlooking the immensely fertile territory that can
be addressed through a broader look at the phenomenon: why is it important?
What implications do this trend have on our general understanding of what
art-making is all about? How do the values/strategies/principles that
art-as-software maintain affect the way in which artists and audiences
understand art? Many more broad questions come to mind: why are artists
attracted to software? How does their awareness of software, and its
availability, influence their art-making strategies? How do institutions
need to respond to this growing interest? Is incorporating software nothing
more than a technology fetish? More specific concerns can arise: what
happens to "improvisation"? How is the notion of chance incorporated in
this type of art? What happens to the "aura"? What are the boundaries of
software as an art-making medium? How can artists involve their audiences
with software? Can one talk about software-generated art as ever being
"finished"? Do software artists have to be programmers? What is the social
life of software?
The algorithm seems to replace the creative will of the artist, in many
cases. This is exciting to me not because it is technologically marvelous,
but because of what this implies in how the artist and the audience
understand each other.
Software is a set of rules. It is the grammar within which a vocabulary of
computer code makes sense. As British sociologist Anthony Giddens has
pointed out, we understand our reality as already existing and seek to
write scenarios that allow us to act out a role within that reality. The
software seems to be the scenario, but it relies on users to act it out.
What makes software come alive is precisely its social life: how these set
of instructions are interpreted and enacted. And understanding this
process of interpretation, of behavior, can fill up pages and pages.
I look forward to more postings this month... thank you!</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Patrick Lichty</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 3 Jul 2001 13:15:09 -0700</date>
<content>A few glancing ideas...
Many choose to look
&gt;at the coding and the programming and the "how to" aspects of
&gt;art-as-software, often overlooking the immensely fertile territory that can
&gt;be addressed through a broader look at the phenomenon: why is it important?
There are two views I can think of regarding the use of software as art - one
applies to off-the-shelf, the other to hand-coded... To me, programs like
Photoshop offer few real opportuntiies to redefine its own kind of
interactivity, so I relegate it to the category of 'tool', rather than
'expression'.
I think for one that there are functions and aspects of the technonlgies that
are not being addressed by off-the shelf software. This is the programming
argument. There are larger threads here such as engagement with the technical
part of the electronic culture, which has its own fascinating set of protocols.
&gt;What implications do this trend have on our general understanding of what
&gt;art-making is all about?
Well, it's merely an extension of craft placed within the immaterial milieu if
computers, yes? It's very funny that a great deal of excitement is based
around artists makign their own code. It is a direct attempt to break with the
commonly held public perception that computers are easy and cheap, and thus so
is the art created with them. Many times I have gotten the "How long does it
take you to create that?" question.
This is a very Marxist question. Much of commodification of art has to do with
use value ascribed to the degree of labor expended.
It's an attempt to translate craft to the digital.
Many more broad questions come to mind: why are artists
&gt;attracted to software?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. To use a computer, you have to have
it. It's the yin to the yang of chips. As to why artists are drawn to code, I
think it's a tug of war between the traditional breaking of extant boundaries
(or at least pushing them, which is a ubiquitous theme in art since Modernism)
and the necessity of having to create code to get a computer to do what you
want it to do.
Myself, I tend to be modular in combining functions of many off the shelf
programs. So, in this respect, I would count myself as a hybrid under my own
rubric; a pastiche artist in regards to code.
How does their awareness of software, and its
&gt;availability, influence their art-making strategies?
I think it's quite relevant to how the work is contextualized in regard to the
medium (digital technologies).
How do institutions
&gt;need to respond to this growing interest?
First, the audience for this art is pretty much a niche at this time. For
example, there are a LOT of people out there who still do not know how to
create a folder on their hard drive (trust me), and to them, this art is
largely meaningless, or the subtleties are lost.
Secondly, the institution (in my experience with it) is trying to update
itself, but for the most part, lags far behind the artists. Until recently,
the Smithsonian servers only had RealServer 2.0 (we're at something like v.7
now). Also, the technical support for the work is quite specialized, which
compounds the problems.
Should an institution have a highly trained tech staff for a relatively small
collection, or subcontract? What are the relative costs, logistics, etc?
Is incorporating software nothing
&gt;more than a technology fetish?
NO.
More specific concerns can arise: what
&gt;happens to "improvisation"?
That's dependent largely upon the mode of expression. In the case of off-the
shelf software, the mode of improv is tied to finding novel uses for extant
functions, and in the case of coding, the novelty of codecraft and finding
interesting ways to weave the concept into the code,
To me this is a very important point, for much of this post, it seems that the
conversation has been centered around technique and production, and NOT
CONTENT. This is the technolpolic distraction. In my opinion, with software
as art, code is little different than steel, or clay, or oils.
You can choose to make scenes incorporating banal seascapes, or amish buggies,
or _Guernica_. Maybe I use too broad of a brush here :), but I hope you see my
point.
Now, if you get into the realm of generative art, such as algorithmic music,
Auto-Illustrator, and so on, this is another angle entirely, and sets up
questionsof authorship between programmer and audience, and similar questions
of authorship. In the case of Auto-Illustrator, the statement becomes central
to the question of origins and synergy. Same for generative music software.
In nato software (an addon for the Max programming language for cideo
processing), how much of the intent is the artist's, and how much is nn's?
However, I think I would return to my Bryce analogy.
How is the notion of chance incorporated in
&gt;this type of art?
&gt;What are the boundaries of
&gt;software as an art-making medium?
I think there are boundaries at many levels, both technical and cultural. For
example, one is limited by the technical capabilities of the hardware to
perform certain functions (sound quality, interfacing, graphics), the software
as a certain set of functions and rules that define a protocol, and the culture
defines certain parameters which limit the level of engagement between artist
and audience, depending upon the context within which the work is created. The
challenge is to see whether the piece engages with the public within its given
cultural context in a way that is compelling, and not merely amazing.
I'm tired of being amazed. I want to be confronted by a piece.
A nice example of this is clip.fm by Angie Weller. She has set up phone icons
depicting sensitive subjects that one can send to another via WAP-capable
phone. On one hand hit has some level of technical facility, but on the other
hand, it engages with me in a really visceral way.
Can one talk about software-generated art as ever being
&gt;"finished"?
I have been having a talk about this with a colleague, and we seem be more of
the mind that this is more tied to process than product. This seems to even be
the case with net art anymore. Even with pieces that are supposed to have a
terminal point, in many cases, it seems to be going through endless revisions.
&gt; Do software artists have to be programmers?
To be virtuosic, I would agree with this, at least to an extent.
What is the social
&gt;life of software?
Interesting question. Please elaborate.
&gt;The algorithm seems to replace the creative will of the artist, in many
&gt;cases.
I'm not sure I agree. Perhaps I have a more sculptural approach to this
topic. Does steel replace the creative will of the sculptor, or in Calder's
case, does the motion of the mobile replace his intent? In the case of
generative art, we could go back to Duchamp, Cage, even Mozart. Once again we
arrive at artistic discourse centering upon process, rather than the object
itself. This is a topic that I've been thinking about for quite some time, as
I work in algorithmic sound/video a great deal, and I feel that the end result
is performative in nature. For the reason why I don't believe that it's
performance, I can post a text version of my "Cybernetics of Performance" text.
To take it from another angle, consider the landscape program Bryce. For years
I saw endless megabytes of stunning neo_Adamseque landscapes, holding firmly to
the paradigm imposed by the program. However, as time went on, people like
Bill Ellsworth took the application and used it to create incredible
non-representational imagery, and so on. They became intimate with the
software to the point of virtuosity. To me, this is key, or at least the
ability to make novel inferences about the context and function of the
technological tools in question.
This is exciting to me not because it is technologically marvelous,
&gt;but because of what this implies in how the artist and the audience
&gt;understand each other.
Seriously, do you feel that there has to be some baseline of technical
familiarity in order for that communication to be more satisfying?
&gt;Software is a set of rules. It is the grammar within which a vocabulary of
&gt;computer code makes sense.
And so is language. Arguably, language has been thought to represent a major
portion of how we percieve reality and operate upon objects, both metaphorical
and physical (and vice versa).
My question to you is how the two contexts differ.
As British sociologist Anthony Giddens has
&gt;pointed out, we understand our reality as already existing and seek to
&gt;write scenarios that allow us to act out a role within that reality. \
Good point, but I will not accept this as a priori.
The
&gt;software seems to be the scenario, but it relies on users to act it out.
&gt; What makes software come alive is precisely its social life: how these set
&gt;of instructions are interpreted and enacted. And understanding this
&gt;process of interpretation, of behavior, can fill up pages and pages.
That's engagement with the audience. And, I wonder how this is facilitated by
artists and curators, and wheter there is required a certain common set of
cultural currency in order for the interaction (read: I'm being purposely
ambiguous here) to engage the audience. If not, then how does technology
become transparent to the point where it is almost purely expressive?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Jul 2001 09:42:22 +0200</date>
<content>some of the questions that were raised in relation to my posting have
already been answered by others, so i will try to be brief with some more
responses:
Anthony:
&gt;The algorithm seems to replace the creative will of the artist, in many
&gt;cases. This is exciting to me not because it is technologically marvelous,
&gt;but because of what this implies in how the artist and the audience
&gt;understand each other.
for me it is also interesting because the machinic process that develops
from the algorithm reduces the aspect of intentionality from the artistic
process and puts an autopoietic machine process in its place; the aesthetic
dimension then lies not in the fact that the effect is 'beautiful' or the
code is functional or 'beautifully written'. as with any artistic practice,
there can be different aesthetic modes according to which works or
processes can be judged. for me, the oscillation between control and
idiosyncracy in a computer, this supposedly precise machine, is closely
linked to the aesthetic experience of a work of software art. to observe
how the computer sings itself to sleep, or goes into a mindless delirium.
an example is Antoine Schmitt's Vexation 1, a programme that sends a small
white ball across a black rectangle, finely balanced between a rule pattern
and randomness. (http://www.gratin.org/as)
&gt;&gt; definition that excludes applications of software like director or
&gt;&gt;shockwave;
Ittai:
&gt;On what basis was this decision made?
the idea was to give an award to a piece of original software, rather than
to an application of software that exists as a commercial product. Susan
might be right that there is a 'crafts' idea behind this. another aspect is
that we aim to encourage open source projects, rather than the promotion of
closed and proprietary softwares. director and shockwave are owned by
companies that can choose to withdraw their product from the market any
day, making it illegal for people to continue running their scripts. this
is, obviously, a ludicrous situation, and it cannot happen to you when you
are using free software.
&gt;&gt; How do you 'show' or distribute it?
Dave:
&gt;To interpret this literally: In a code development environment or simulator
&gt;where you can step forward, halt and continue the instruction sequence and
&gt;watch what happens?
&gt;
&gt;If the idea is to establish that software is an Art form then it would be
&gt;logical to show it in a similar context and way as other Art: eg in some
&gt;kind of special space which invokes the necessary awe and aura; in a
&gt;museum/gallery - virtual or otherwise.
i disagree. long, long gone are the days when you needed an auratic space
to present something as art - this idea misses the point of a lot of art
from the last 100 years, and we should not continue to buy into the myth.
'other Art' also gets shown elsewhere.
Dave's first question is interesting and gets us, i think, to the core of
the problem of software art for a curatorial practice. many paintings are
made to be displayed on the wall of a gallery, or an office, or a church.
they make sense there, and they sometimes suffer when they are displayed
out of context, some also win, but there often is a logic to the relation
between an artwork and the environment where it is shown.
how, then, do you 'exhibit' a process that runs on a tiny processor? Daniel
Garcia Andujar recently printed out the source code of the I-Love-You virus
and displayed it on a gallery wall in Dortmund
(http://www.irational.org/tttp) - this is obviously just an ironic gesture.
a piece like Vexation 1 you can show on an IMac, it keeps running endlessly
and is designed as a more or less self-explanatory work. in Adrian Ward's
Signwave Auto-Illustrator (http://www.signwave.co.uk), the best way to
experience it is to interact with the programme on a regular PC which can
but need not be your own. pieces by JODI and nn are probably best
experinced on your own machine because they play with your emotional
attachments to what's on it. whereas the processes involved in a piece like
Daniela Plewe's Ultima Ratio (http://www.sabonjo.de) needs a lot of
explanation and its 'beauty' might only reveal itself to people who have a
deeper understanding of the informatic and logical processes going on in
the computer.
i'll leave it here for the moment.
greetings from sunny berlin,
-a</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Sarah Thompson</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:30:10 +0100</date>
<content>Andreas Broeckmann says that
&gt;software art is only just coming into focus, so it is early days to
&gt;describe, let alone critique its presentation.
While I would agree that it is only just being appreciated in its own right
(software as art), and it is great that Transmediale have acknowledged this
art form, aren't there examples of artists developing their own computer
software during the 20th century which give precedents for making,
appreciating and exhibiting this kind of work?
There is a danger that if this 'lost history' of artists programming
computers is not rediscovered, that their multiple and different strategies
and approaches will be ignored in favour of a more singular definition.
Also, why was their work not appreciated? Why did it fail to, or succeed in
fitting into the art world context? Did the artists want it to fit into
this context or were they trying to _engineer_ a new kind of context for
their work?
As Anthony Huberman puts it:
&gt;What makes software come alive is precisely its social life: how these set
&gt;of instructions are interpreted and enacted.
As such, I really like the critique of different pieces of software &amp; how
to see them by AB:
&gt;the best way to
&gt;experience it is to interact with the programme on a regular PC which can
&gt;but need not be your own. pieces by JODI and nn are probably best
&gt;experinced on your own machine because they play with your emotional
&gt;attachments to what's on it.
While appreciating that Transmediale is about what is happening *now*, I
just wanted to make this point within the broader curating new media
context.
best wishes
Sarah</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Dave Franklin</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Jul 2001 17:31:44 +0100</date>
<content>So far we have only discussed conventional forms of software eg code
executed as a series of instructions (with fixed conditions for branching),
digital states of on/off, logical states true/false etc. This provides
output which is entirely predictable (given that you know the input).
Might it be that we could also look to the domains of fuzzy logic and
Neural Networks or Artificial Intelligence in search of software as Art?
These technologies allow for grey and uncertain states and produce 'code'
which behaves more like biological systems than adding machines. Such
systems can be given the ability to learn and adapt. Their output is not
entirely predictable.
Dave</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Josephine Bosma</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Jul 2001 21:21:46 +0200</date>
<content>Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
&gt; that we aim to encourage open source projects, rather than the promotion of
&gt; closed and proprietary softwares. director and shockwave are owned by
&gt; companies that can choose to withdraw their product from the market any
&gt; day, making it illegal for people to continue running their scripts. this
&gt; is, obviously, a ludicrous situation, and it cannot happen to you when you
&gt; are using free software.
What exactly do you mean by 'making it illegal for people to continue running
their scripts'? Do you maybe mean impossible rather then illegal? This sounds so
strange to me. And if the makers of director et al choose to withdraw their
software from the market that does not mean it cannot be used anymore, does it?
It would not make sense to sell people software that would become illegal to use
once the company does not produce any packets of it (and updates of it) any
more. Transmediale's choice for open source projects is a political statement
and a kind of aesthetic choice too maybe.Your above argumentation against the
other art codes does not seem to make much sense to me. Or is there more?
greetsz
J
*</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.8</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Thu, 5 Jul 2001 09:04:00 +0200</date>
<content>
&gt;Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
&gt;
&gt;&gt; that we aim to encourage open source projects, rather than the promotion of
&gt;&gt; closed and proprietary softwares. director and shockwave are owned by
&gt;&gt; companies that can choose to withdraw their product from the market any
&gt;&gt; day, making it illegal for people to continue running their scripts. this
&gt;&gt; is, obviously, a ludicrous situation, and it cannot happen to you when you
&gt;&gt; are using free software.
&gt;
&gt;What exactly do you mean by 'making it illegal for people to continue running
&gt;their scripts'? Do you maybe mean impossible rather then illegal? This
&gt;sounds so
&gt;strange to me. And if the makers of director et al choose to withdraw their
&gt;software from the market that does not mean it cannot be used anymore,
&gt;does it?
&gt;It would not make sense to sell people software that would become illegal
&gt;to use
&gt;once the company does not produce any packets of it (and updates of it) any
&gt;more. Transmediale's choice for open source projects is a political statement
&gt;and a kind of aesthetic choice too maybe.Your above argumentation against the
&gt;other art codes does not seem to make much sense to me. Or is there more?
hi josephine,
there are people who can explain this much better than i can, but i suggest
you read either the software license agreements that most of us click OK
without checking, or the stuff that Richard Stallman has written about
these things (www.gnu.org/philosophy); the point is that with most software
you buy not the code, but the right to limited usage; that is also why you
are not allowed to pass it on to friends or copy it - the code is not
yours, you just pay for the right to use it. that whole legal field is
completely crazy!! read stallman, he is also entertaining.
greetings,
-a</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>dr susan &amp; tim head</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Thu, 5 Jul 2001 08:52:57 +0100</date>
<content>
I've only been skimming this one...but I agree with Sarah Thomson when she
says
"There is a danger that if this 'lost history' of artists programming
computers is not rediscovered, that their multiple and different strategies
and approaches will be ignored in favour of a more singular definition."
It seems that there are (again) so many different kinds of art/and artists
intentions within this particular thread. For one you have artists such as
David Rokeby...who creates all his own hard and software for his work...but
with works such as his Very Nervous System, has also built it as an
architecture (both soft and hardware versions) for other artists to use in
their own way - and stretch etc...an 'open system' or sturcture is you
like....
and then there are other artists or groups such as IOD with Webstalker where
the very fact that it IS a piece of software is fundamental to its
context/existence et al...
and in answer to Sarah re. examples of artists earlier in the 20th C its worth
mentioning
the artist Harold Cohen who for over 30 years has been developing software to
think about drawing/painting the way he thinks about drawing and painting (for
those of you not familiar, Harold was a very well known painter in the 60's
and then moved to the states - san diego now - and has worked with computers
ever since)...his philosophy is very much that the program is the artwork, but
the program also generates its own artwork (Harold has been present within a
lot of AI discussion etc etc)...according to Harolds own rules and principles.
Far fropm being ignored etc...Harold has had shows in many major museums
(incl. major retrospective at the Tate in London 1983)...and was quite
vociferous in opposition to artists using readymade software (as opposed to
writing their own) when i first met him back in the late 80's...it would be
interesting to know his position on this now.....
best
Susan Collins</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.10</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>tom corby</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Thu, 5 Jul 2001 10:30:43 +0100</date>
<content>&gt; u
&gt; are not allowed to pass it on to friends or copy it - the code is not
&gt; yours, you just pay for the right to use it. that whole legal field is
&gt; completely crazy!! read stallman, he is also entertaining.
&gt;
Just to back Andreas up on this, most people don't realise that when
they buy software, they are buying the right to use it, not buying the software
per se.
You could equate it to hiring a TV/video etc. microsoft, adobe or macromedia
still ultimately own it.
As far as I'm aware, this also applies to products like Director/shockwave that
allow
authoring. I'm not sure what the status of the authored artefact is , but as they
'allow you' to distribute the software/artwork
'under license' as a projector etc. doesn't it follow that macromedia have a part
share in any artwork made using their software?
Maybe someone can clarify this.
Tom</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.11</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>tom corby</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Thu, 5 Jul 2001 10:49:29 +0100</date>
<content>&gt; Might it be that we could also look to the domains of fuzzy logic and
&gt; Neural Networks or Artificial Intelligence in search of software as Art?
&gt;
I think you'll find that many artists have drawn upon these areas, not in every
case
to comment on them, but certainly in terms of injecting emergent agency and/or
unpredictable
states/conditions into their work (e.g. Knowbotics research). David Rokeby has
already been mentioned, but Stephen Wilson has
a long standing interest in AI as well. A lot of the early interest in computer
based art was concerned with simulated agency;
certainly many of the exhibits in Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968) were
concerned with simulated intelligence.
tom</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.12</nbr>
<subject>Re: Software as Art</subject>
<from>Derek Hales</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Thu, 5 Jul 2001 16:39:05 +0100</date>
<content>
remember saying ...i accept
d</content>
</mail>
<mail>
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
<nbr>4.0</nbr>
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
<subject>/// 0100101110101101.ORG /// Want to See Some Really Sick Art?</subject>
<from>[log in to unmask]</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:53:23 +0200</date>
<content>
/// PROPAGANDA /// HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG ///
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
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# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
# HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
/// From "Wired", 27 Jun 2001
/// http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,44728,00.html
Want to See Some Really Sick Art?
By Reena Jana
Nothing sucks more than a computer virus.
Yet the contemporary art world, always hungry for the new, the trendy
and the controversial, is starting to recognize the virus as an art form
-- perhaps because computer viruses embody all of the above.
This year's Venice Biennale -- one of the international art world's most
prestigious events -- served as the launching pad for "biennale.py."
It's the art world's interpretation of the destructive "Melissa" and
"Love Bug" viruses that grabbed headlines in recent years.
At the Biennale, which opened on June 10, a computer infected with
"biennale.py" remains on display until the exhibition closes in
November. Viewers can witness someone else's system crashing and files
being corrupted, in real time, as if it were a creepy performance.
The artsy-fartsy virus was created by the European Net Art Collective
0100101110101101.ORG, in collaboration with epidemiC, another group
known for its programming skills. The virus only affects programs
written in the Python computer language and is spread if someone
downloads infected software or utilizes a corrupted floppy disk.
Because Python is a relatively esoteric language, the artists hope that
the source code, which they've printed on 2,000 T-shirts and published
on a limited edition of 10 CD-ROMs, will be the most contagious form of distribution.
"The source code is a product of the human mind, as are music, poems and
paintings," explained the epidemiC team, which prefers to speak
collectively -- and somewhat pretentiously. "The virus is a useless but
critical handcraft, similar to classical art."
Adds a member of 0100101110101101.ORG, which also prefers to speak
collectively (and anonymously), "The only goal of a virus is to
reproduce. Our goal is to familiarize people with what a computer virus
is so they're not so paranoid or hysterical when the next one strikes."
The artists have created a mini-hysteria over their piece.
More than 1,400 of the shirts have been sold at $15 apiece. And they've
sold three CD-ROMs, at $1,500 each (the collectors chose to remain
unnamed for legal reasons). Yet the potentially damaging code is
available for free on the artists' homepages.
"In theory, we should get sued," said 0100101110101101.ORG's
spokesperson. "But we've gotten almost no complaints. Well, we've gotten
a few e-mails from security experts who want to know who these asshole
artists are."
Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act state it's illegal to send
damaging code in interstate or foreign communications. But the artists
don't feel liable for any damage caused by "biennale.py" because they
sent a warning to major software and antivirus companies including
Microsoft and McAfee.
"We've explained how to disable our virus, so people should know how to
fix it," said the 0100101110101101.ORG spokesperson.
Not everyone's buying this excuse.
"If a thief leaves a note saying he's sorry, do we feel better? No,"
said Jason Catlett, the president of an anti-spam group called
Junkbusters, who has testified before Congress on Internet privacy
issues. "Doing things that are socially undesirable in the name of art
does not redeem the act."
This isn't the first time artists have adopted annoying practices to
gain attention. Spam, for instance, is emerging as an "art form" as
well; the Webby-winning Net art collective Jodi.org sent 1,039 spam
messages through the e-mail list Rhizome Raw this January.
Some media art theorists think that an artistic statement about computer
viruses can only be expressed effectively by spreading a virus itself.
"To talk about contemporary culture, you have to be able to use all
kinds of expressions of contemporary culture," said Lisa Jevbratt, who
teaches media art at San Jose State University. "So a virus can be
considered a legitimate art form. Of course, there will be artists and
pranksters doing interesting new things with such forms. But there will
be artists and pranksters whose actions are merely rehashing critiques."
/// "Yandex", 27 Jun 2001
/// "biennale.py" [ russian ]
http://dz.yandex.ru/dz/article/list_news_last_faced.php
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
///"Cyberp@&#237;s", 21 Jun 2001
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
/// "Venecia y Valencia exhiben virus como una forma de arte" [ spanish ]
http://www.ciberpais.elpais.es/d/20010621/ocio/portada.htm
/// "ExiWebArt", 10 May 2001
/// "Biennale: anteprima sul padiglione sloveno" [ italian ]
http://www.exibart.com/IDNotizia2558.htm
/// "Domus", 8 Jun 2001
/// "biennale.py" [ italian ]
http://www.edidomus.it/domus/Lab/singola_news.cfm?codnews=2072
/// "Telepolis", 8 Jun 2001
/// "Ein Computervirus als Kunstwerk" [ german ]
http://heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/7852/1.html
/// "Geeknews", 7 Jun 2001
/// "A Virus as art" [ english ]
http://www.geeknews.net/article.php?sid=1628
/// "il Corriere", 6 Jun 2001
/// "Biennale, il virus informatico diventa arte" [ italian ]
http://www.corriere.it
/// "la Repubblica", 6 Jun 2001
/// "Ultracorpi robotici e virus a guardia della Biennale" [ italian]
http://www.repubblica.it/online/cultura_scienze/biennalearte/inaugura/inaugura.html
/// "l'Espresso", 6 Jun 2001
/// "Un virus contagia la Biennale" [ italian ]
http://www.espressonline.kataweb.it/ESW_articolo/0,2393,17377,00.html
/// "Vip", 5 Jun 2001
/// "Il Virus della Biennale" [ italian ]
http://www.vip.it/oggi/index2.htm+biennale.py&amp;hl=en
/// "Mediamente", 5 Jun 2001
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
/// "C'&#232; un virus alla Biennale" [ italian ]
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
http://www.mediamente.rai.it
/// "Punto-informatico", 5 Jun 2001
/// "Un virus si infila nella Biennale" [ italian ]
http://punto-informatico.it/p.asp?i=36363
/// "ExiWebArt", 4 Jun 2001
/// "Un virus chiamato Biennale" [ italian ]
http://www.exibart.com/IDNotizia2693.htm
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xml ok
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<nbr>5.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] from hypertext to codework</subject>
haha
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<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
xml ok
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<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
haha
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<date>Fri, 21 Sep 2001 14:15:09 -0500</date>
xml ok
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<content>[Hopefully, this time with the right formatting...]
haha
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Codework
McKenzie Wark
xml ok
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What happens to writing as it collides with new media? I was
thinking about this recently while looking over an exhibition of
William Blake&#8217;s work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. On
display was not just Blake the artist, Blake the poet, or Blake the
quirky revolutionary. Here was Blake the media artist.
haha
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xml ok
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Blake assembled all of the elements of a media practice. As a
writer he experimented with all aspects of the production process.
His aesthetic did not stop with the word on the page. Here, I
thought, was a useful precursor to name for the new
developments in writing that take place on the Internet,
developments I will shortly define as &#8220;codework.&#8221;
haha
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xml ok
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But Blake is interesting in this connection only if one embraces all
aspects of his productivity. There&#8217;s a tendency, in the teaching of
literature and the management of its canons, to separate off the
authoring of the text from the other aspects of writing as a
production. It&#8217;s a tendency that full attention to Blake frustrates,
given how fully he was invested in the implication of writing in all
aspects of its production and circulation. Blake&#8217;s creation did not
stop at the threshold of &#8220;text.&#8221;
haha
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xml ok
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Digging writing out of the prison-house of &#8220;text&#8221; might just be what
is needed to unblock thinking about where the Internet is taking
writing. There has always been more to writing than text, and there
is more to electronic writing than hypertext.
haha
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xml ok
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Hypertext may have come to dominate perceptions of where
writing is heading in the Internet era, but it is by no means the only,
or the most interesting, strategy for electronic writing. Hypertext
writers tend to take the link as the key innovation in electronic
writing spaces. In hypertext writing, the link is supposed to open
up multiple trajectories for the reader through the space of the text.
haha
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xml ok
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Extraordinary claims were made for this as a liberatory writing
strategy. Hypertext has its limits, however. First, the writing of the
text stands in relation to the writing of the software as content to
form. The two are not really brought together on the same plane of
creativity. Secondly, hypertext tends not to circulate outside of the
academic literary community. It has its roots in avant-garde
American and English literature and tends to hew close to those
origins. Thirdly, it doesn&#8217;t really rethink who the writer is, in the new
network of statements that the expansion of the Internet makes
possible. For all the talk of the death of the author, the hypertext
author assumes much the same persona as his or her
avant-garde literary predecessors.
haha
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xml ok
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What is interesting about the emergence of codework is that it
breaks with hypertext strategies on all three points. In many
codework writings, both the technical and cultural phenomena of
coding infiltrates the work on all its levels. Codework finds its
home in a wide range of Internet venues, forming
dialogues&#8212;sometimes antagonistic ones&#8212;with the development
of other kinds of written communication in an emerging electronic
writing ecology. Codework also sets to work on the problem of the
author, bringing all of the tactics of the Internet to bear on the
question of authorship.
haha
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xml ok
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Codework &#8220;entities&#8221; such as Antiorp and JODI approach the
Internet as a space in which to re-engineer all of the aspects of
creative production and distribution. Antiorp is famous&#8212;or rather
infamous&#8212;for bombarding listservers such as the Nettime media
theory list with posts that seem to parody the sometimes
high-serious style of Internet media theory. It was often hard to tell
whether the Antiorp writing emanated from a human source or
from some demented &#8220;&#8216;bot&#8221; programmed to produce the
semi-legible texts.
haha
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xml ok
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Antiorp has spawned a number of alternative identities and
imitators. It is with some trepidation that one would venture to
assign codework texts to discrete authors. It may be best to take
the fabricated heteronyms under which codework is sometimes
published at face value, rather than to attempt to assign discrete
flesh-and-blood authors.
haha
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xml ok
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Some codework frustrates the assigning of authorship as a
means of breaking down the link between authorship and
intellectual property. The Luther Blissett project, for example,
encourages writers to assume the name Luther Blissett. Many
texts of various kinds have appeared under that name and without
copyright.
haha
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xml ok
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Some of the more prolific Luther Blissett authors subsequently
became the Mu Ming Foundation, which claims to be a &#8220;laboratory
of digital design&#8221; offering &#8220;narrative services.&#8221; The Foundation
sees itself as an &#8220;enterprise&#8221; looking for strategies for regaining
control over the production process for codeworkers.
haha
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xml ok
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The &#8220;texts&#8221; JODI produces hover somewhere at the limit of what a
text might be. A sample might look something like this:
haha
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o
xml ok
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|:__::::::::::_&#8212;&#8212;|_::::::::::_&#8212;&#8212;|_:::::::
haha
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:: : :: :
xml ok
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A classic JODI Web page may spit all kinds of &#8220;punctuation art&#8221;
across the screen. This work is neither writing nor visual art but
something in between. The programming involved usually teeters
on the brink of failure. Every technology brings into being new
kinds of crashes or accidents, and JODI endeavors to find those
accidents unique to the authoring of Web pages.
haha
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xml ok
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Integer sometimes makes interventions into discussions on
listservers, all with variations on the same distinctive approach to
breaking up the text and introducing noise into it, not to mention a
somewhat abusive hypercritical persona.
haha
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this - a l l this. = but 01 ch!!!!!!p. uneventful
korporat fascist gullibloon zpektakle.
xml ok
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This might be a mangled machine English, or perhaps an English
written by a machine programmed by someone who speaks
English as a second language, or someone producing a
simulation of some such. The decaying grammar and spelling of
the Internet here becomes a kind of aesthetic alternative.
haha
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xml ok
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Rather than using e-mail and listservers, Alan Sondheim
sometimes uses IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, as a means of
collaboration and composition, as in &#8220;saying names among
themselves,&#8221; which begins:
haha
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IRC log started Mon May 7 00:40
*** Value of LOG set to ON
*** You are now talking to channel
#nikuko
*** Alan is now known as terrible
*** terrible is now known as worries_i
xml ok
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The text proceeds as what appears to be a collaboration between
Sondheim and unwitting collaborators, who may or may not know
that this writing may come to have the status of writing, rather than
chat.
haha
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xml ok
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Many codework texts hover on the brink of legibility, asking the
reader to question whether the author is made of flesh or silicon,
or perhaps whether authoring lies at the level of writing text or
coding software to write text. Kenji Siratori&#8217;s texts may be
machine-made or made to look machine-made.
haha
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Ant PC planetary, MURDEROUS CONSEQUENCES! body line
TREMENDOUS HORROR! drugy miracle ADAM doll
xml ok
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TREMENDOUS HORROR! thyroid falls&#8230;.MURDEROUS
haha
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CONSEQUENCES! vivid placenta world TREMENDOUS HORROR!
machinative angel:her soul-machine discharges MURDEROUS
xml ok
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CONSEQUENCES! speed PC fear&#8230;.MURDEROUS
haha
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CONSEQUENCES!
xml ok
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That text is called &#8220;Alan Sondheim-conference&#8221; and appears to be
a response to a conference report by Sondheim.
haha
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xml ok
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While some codeworkers pounce upon the texts of others as raw
material for codeworking, St&#233;phan Barron asks others to volunteer
texts. In &#8220;Com_post Concepts&#8221; he solicits contributions with a text
that begins:
haha
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xml ok
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Web surfers send in their texts by e-mail. &#8230;All are then
composted! Just as we ourselves are composted! Recycling as
organic and cyclical technology, a technology of intelligence and
responsibility, of the link to the natural and artificial world.
haha
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xml ok
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The sender receives her or his own text back at weekly intervals, in
an increasingly noisy and unintelligible state.
haha
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xml ok
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The Internet emerges in much of this work as a noisy space, in
which the structures of text decay and writing becomes granular, a
chaotic space of temporary orders constantly becoming
randomized. Yet within this chaotic space, the &#8220;destructive
character&#8221; of the codeworker proposes new kinds of sensemaking
that might, for a moment, keep the parasite of noise at bay.
haha
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xml ok
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Another precursor one might mention, besides Blake, for the
emerging world of codework, is the James Joyce of Finnegans
Wake. In Wake, multiplicity can erupt at any point along the textual
surface, not just at discrete hyperlinked nodes. Permutations, a
Web site by Florian Cramer, reproduces in digital form many of the
great combinatory text systems, from Raymond Lullus to Ramond
Queneau. Cramer has also produced a codework machine that
creates permutations on Finnegans Wake, called &#8220;Here Comes
Everybody.&#8221; It works at the level of the syllable, producing a virtual
universe of new portmanteau words out of original Joyce-text.
haha
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xml ok
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The Australian codeworker Mez has developed a distinctive prose
style that she calls mezangelle, producing texts that tend to look
like this:
haha
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.nodal +death+-points swallowed in a dea.th.rush.
.u begin 2 -f][l][ail-, ar][t][][is][ms all awry n caught in webbed
ma][ulers][ws.
xml ok
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Rather than link discrete blocs of text, or &#8220;lexias,&#8221; to each other,
Mez introduces the hypertext principle of multiplicity into the word
itself. Rather than produce alternative trajectories through the text
on the hypertext principle of &#8220;choice,&#8221; here they co-exist within the
same textual space.
haha
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xml ok
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The interest of Mez&#8217;s writings is not limited to this distinctive
approach to the text. While the words split and merge on the
screen, the authoring &#8220;avatar&#8221; behind them is also in a state of flux.
Texts issue, in various forms in various places, from
data[h!bleeder, Phonet][r][ix, netwurker, and many other
heteronyms.
haha
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xml ok
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At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised
approach to language itself. Many of the creative strategies for
making or thinking about writing in the latter part of the twentieth
century drew on Ferdinand de Saussure&#8217;s Course in General
Linguistics. In the hands of poststructuralists, language poets, or
hypertext authors and theorists, this was a powerful and useful
place to start thinking about how language works. But Saussure
begins by separating language as a smooth and abstract plane
from speech as a pragmatic act. Language is then divided into
signifier and signified, with the referent appearing as a shadowy
third term. The concept of language that emerges, for all its purity,
is far removed from language as a process.
haha
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xml ok
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What codework draws attention to is the pragmatic side of
language. Language is not an abstract and homogenous plane, it
is one element in a heterogeneous series of elements linked
together in the act of communication. Writing is not a matter of the
text, but of the assemblage of the writer, reader, text, the text&#8217;s
material support, the laws of property and exchange within which
all of the above circulate, and so on.
Codework draws attention to writing as media, where the art of
writing is a matter of constructing an aesthetic, an ethics, even a
politics, that approaches all of the elements of the process
together. Codework makes of writing a media art that breaks with
the fetishism of the text and the abstraction of language. It brings
writing into contact with the other branches of media art, such as
music and cinema, all of which are converging in the emerging
space of multimedia, and which often have a richer conception of
the politics of media art as a collaborative practice than has been
the case with writing conceived within the prison-house of &#8220;text.&#8221;</content>
haha
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</mail>
<mail>
xml ok
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<nbr>5.5-p.523</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Wed, 24 Oct 2001 09:13:15 +0200</date>
<content>ken,
haha
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xml ok
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this thread was still hanging around ... i want to take issue with your
claim that the codework you reference is an example of collaborative,
non-identity oriented practice.
haha
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xml ok
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&gt;Codework makes of
&gt;writing a media art that breaks with the fetishism of the text and the
&gt;abstraction of language. It brings writing into contact with the other
&gt;branches of media art, such as music and cinema, all of which are
&gt;converging in the emerging space of multimedia, and which often have a
&gt;richer conception of the politics of media art as a collaborative practice
&gt;than has been the case with writing conceived within the prison-house of
&gt;"text."
haha
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xml ok
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i fully respect your examples as artistic/literary practices, but in what
way are jodi, mez, antiorp/nn, sondheim etc. representatives of open
processes? jodi's work is good _because_ jo&amp;di have the code under
control, just as mez is an _author_, machine-aided, style-enhanced, yes,
but an author. just as antiorp/nn - the most collaborative entity in the
series, i guess - poses as one; we all know they are several, but they
exhibit a clear sense of ideological tightness and closure. the identities
may be fictional, but i don't see that any of these breaks out of the
identity shell. nn might be the best gamer, but its insults are too much
for my stomach. [she'll call me a weak imbecile for this remark, won't you,
dear?]
haha
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xml ok
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what you describe are machinic processes, yes, but the kinds of
collaborative practices that heico idensen talks about (in the hypertext
world mainly) - i don't see them in your codework examples. is artistic
codework more authorial than open source programming?
haha
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xml ok
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greetings,
-a</content>
haha
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</mail>
<mail>
xml ok
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<nbr>6.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
haha
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<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
xml ok
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<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
haha
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<date>Fri, 21 Sep 2001 14:15:09 -0500</date>
xml ok
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<content>
haha
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Codework
McKenzie Wark
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
What happens to writing as it collides with new media? I was thinking
about this recently while looking over an exhibition of William Blake's
work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. On display was not just Blake
the artist, Blake the poet, or Blake the quirky revolutionary. Here was
Blake the media artist.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Blake assembled all of the elements of a media practice. As a writer he
experimented with all aspects of the production process. His aesthetic
did not stop with the word on the page. Here, I thought, was a useful
precursor to name for the new developments in writing that take place on
the Internet, developments I will shortly define as "codework."
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
But Blake is interesting in this connection only if one embraces all
aspects of his productivity. There's a tendency, in the teaching of
literature and the management of its canons, to separate off the authoring
of the text from the other aspects of writing as a production. It's a
tendency that full attention to Blake frustrates, given how fully he was
invested in the implication of writing in all aspects of its production
and circulation. Blake&#146;s creation did not stop at the threshold of "text."
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Digging writing out of the prison-house of "text" might just be what is
needed to unblock thinking about where the Internet is taking writing.
There has always been more to writing than text, and there is more to
electronic writing than hypertext.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Hypertext may have come to dominate perceptions of where writing is
heading in the Internet era, but it is by no means the only, or the most
interesting, strategy for electronic writing. Hypertext writers tend to
take the link as the key innovation in electronic writing spaces. In
hypertext writing, the link is supposed to open up multiple trajectories
for the reader through the space of the text.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Extraordinary claims were made for this as a liberatory writing strategy.
Hypertext has its limits, however. First, the writing of the text stands
in relation to the writing of the software as content to form. The two are
not really brought together on the same plane of creativity. Secondly,
hypertext tends not to circulate outside of the academic literary
community. It has its roots in avant-garde American and English literature
and tends to hew close to those origins. Thirdly, it doesn't really
rethink who the writer is, in the new network of statements that the
expansion of the Internet makes possible. For all the talk of the death of
the author, the hypertext author assumes much the same persona as his or
her avant-garde literary predecessors.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
What is interesting about the emergence of codework is that it breaks with
hypertext strategies on all three points. In many codework writings, both
the technical and cultural phenomena of coding infiltrates the work on all
its levels. Codework finds its home in a wide range of Internet venues,
forming dialogues&#151;sometimes antagonistic ones&#151;with the development of
other kinds of written communication in an emerging electronic writing
ecology. Codework also sets to work on the problem of the author, bringing
all of the tactics of the Internet to bear on the question of authorship.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Codework "entities" such as Antiorp and JODI approach the Internet as a
space in which to re-engineer all of the aspects of creative production
and distribution. Antiorp is famous&#151;or rather infamous&#151;for bombarding
listservers such as the Nettime media theory list with posts that seem to
parody the sometimes high-serious style of Internet media theory. It was
often hard to tell whether the Antiorp writing emanated from a human
source or from some demented "bot" programmed to produce the semi-legible
texts.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Antiorp has spawned a number of alternative identities and imitators. It
is with some trepidation that one would venture to assign codework texts
to discrete authors. It may be best to take the fabricated heteronyms
under which codework is sometimes published at face value, rather than to
attempt to assign discrete flesh-and-blood authors.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Some codework frustrates the assigning of authorship as a means of
breaking down the link between authorship and intellectual property. The
Luther Blissett project, for example, encourages writers to assume the
name Luther Blissett. Many texts of various kinds have appeared under that
name and without copyright.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Some of the more prolific Luther Blissett authors subsequently became the
Mu Ming Foundation, which claims to be a "laboratory of digital design"
offering "narrative services." The Foundation sees itself as an
&#147;enterprise&#148; looking for strategies for regaining control over the
production process for codeworkers.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
The "texts" JODI produces hover somewhere at the limit of what a text
might be. A sample might look something like this:
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
o
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
|:__::::::::::_&#151;&#151;|_::::::::::_&#151;&#151;|_:::::::
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
:: : :: :
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
A classic JODI Web page may spit all kinds of "punctuation art" across
the screen. This work is neither writing nor visual art but something in
between. The programming involved usually teeters on the brink of failure.
Every technology brings into being new kinds of crashes or accidents, and
JODI endeavors to find those accidents unique to the authoring of Web
pages.
Integer sometimes makes interventions into discussions on listservers, all
with variations on the same distinctive approach to breaking up the text
and introducing noise into it, not to mention a somewhat abusive
hypercritical persona.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
this - a l l this. = but 01 ch!!!!!!p. uneventful
korporat fascist gullibloon zpektakle.
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
This might be a mangled machine English, or perhaps an English written by
a machine programmed by someone who speaks English as a second language,
or someone producing a simulation of some such. The decaying grammar and
spelling of the Internet here becomes a kind of aesthetic alternative.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Rather than using e-mail and listservers, Alan Sondheim sometimes uses
IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, as a means of collaboration and composition,
as in "saying names among themselves," which begins:
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
IRC log started Mon May 7 00:40
*** Value of LOG set to ON
*** You are now talking to channel
#nikuko
*** Alan is now known as terrible
*** terrible is now known as worries_i
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
The text proceeds as what appears to be a collaboration between Sondheim
and unwitting collaborators, who may or may not know that this writing may
come to have the status of writing, rather than chat.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
Many codework texts hover on the brink of legibility, asking the reader to
question whether the author is made of flesh or silicon, or perhaps
whether authoring lies at the level of writing text or coding software to
write text. Kenji Siratori&#146;s texts may be machine-made or made to look
machine-made.
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
Ant PC planetary, MURDEROUS CONSEQUENCES! body line
TREMENDOUS HORROR! drugy miracle ADAM doll
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
TREMENDOUS HORROR! thyroid falls&#133;.MURDEROUS
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
CONSEQUENCES! vivid placenta world TREMENDOUS HORROR!
machinative angel:her soul-machine discharges MURDEROUS
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CONSEQUENCES! speed PC fear&#133;.MURDEROUS
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CONSEQUENCES!
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That text is called "Alan Sondheim-conference" and appears to be a
response to a conference report by Sondheim.
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While some codeworkers pounce upon the texts of others as raw material for
codeworking, St&#233;phan Barron asks others to volunteer texts. In "Com_post
Concepts" he solicits contributions with a text that begins:
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Web surfers send in their texts by e-mail. All are then composted! Just as
we ourselves are composted! Recycling as organic and cyclical technology,
a technology of intelligence and responsibility, of the link to the
natural and artificial world.
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The sender receives her or his own text back at weekly intervals, in an
increasingly noisy and unintelligible state.
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The Internet emerges in much of this work as a noisy space, in which the
structures of text decay and writing becomes granular, a chaotic space of
temporary orders constantly becoming randomized. Yet within this chaotic
space, the &#147;destructive character&#148; of the codeworker proposes new kinds of
sensemaking that might, for a moment, keep the parasite of noise at bay.
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Another precursor one might mention, besides Blake, for the emerging world
of codework, is the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake. In Wake, multiplicity
can erupt at any point along the textual surface, not just at discrete
hyperlinked nodes. Permutations, a Web site by Florian Cramer, reproduces
in digital form many of the great combinatory text systems, from Raymond
Lullus to Ramond Queneau. Cramer has also produced a codework machine that
creates permutations on Finnegans Wake, called "Here Comes Everybody." It
works at the level of the syllable, producing a virtual universe of new
portmanteau words out of original Joyce-text.
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The Australian codeworker Mez has developed a distinctive prose style that
she calls mezangelle, producing texts that tend to look like this:
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.nodal +death+-points swallowed in a dea.th.rush.
.u begin 2 -f][l][ail-, ar][t][][is][ms all awry n caught in webbed
ma][ulers][ws.
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Rather than link discrete blocs of text, or "lexias," to each other, Mez
introduces the hypertext principle of multiplicity into the word itself.
Rather than produce alternative trajectories through the text on the
hypertext principle of "choice," here they co-exist within the same
textual space.
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The interest of Mez's writings is not limited to this distinctive approach
to the text. While the words split and merge on the screen, the authoring
"avatar" behind them is also in a state of flux. Texts issue, in various
forms in various places, from data[h!bleeder, Phonet][r][ix, netwurker,
and many other heteronyms.
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At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised
approach to language itself. Many of the creative strategies for making or
thinking about writing in the latter part of the twentieth century drew on
Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. In the hands of
poststructuralists, language poets, or hypertext authors and theorists,
this was a powerful and useful place to start thinking about how language
works. But Saussure begins by separating language as a smooth and abstract
plane from speech as a pragmatic act. Language is then divided into
signifier and signified, with the referent appearing as a shadowy third
term. The concept of language that emerges, for all its purity, is far
removed from language as a process.
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What codework draws attention to is the pragmatic side of language.
Language is not an abstract and homogenous plane, it is one element in a
heterogeneous series of elements linked together in the act of
communication. Writing is not a matter of the text, but of the assemblage
of the writer, reader, text, the text's material support, the laws of
property and exchange within which all of the above circulate, and so on.
Codework draws attention to writing as media, where the art of writing is
a matter of constructing an aesthetic, an ethics, even a politics, that
approaches all of the elements of the process together. Codework makes of
writing a media art that breaks with the fetishism of the text and the
abstraction of language. It brings writing into contact with the other
branches of media art, such as music and cinema, all of which are
converging in the emerging space of multimedia, and which often have a
richer conception of the politics of media art as a collaborative practice
than has been the case with writing conceived within the prison-house of
"text."</content>
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</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>6.1</nbr>
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<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>Paul D. Miller</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sat, 22 Sep 2001 19:10:42 -0400</date>
<content>Ken - I'm sitting here in Florida, and just have to sigh a little
bit. This is the problem with the digital media scene - it is SUPER
WHITEBREAD - there is alot more going on.... I'm not attacking you,
I just wish that the computer "art/literary" scene - especially where
it comes to "language as code" - would think about precedents for
theater and spectacle outside of the normal discourse that goes on in
spots like nettime... at the end of the day, the "visual interface"
that most of digital culture uses to create art/text/etc etc is not
neutral, and again, this is a Mcluhan refraction of the old inner
ear/eye thing, but with a little bit more of a technical twist.
There's a great essay that the physicist David Bohm wrote on this
topic called "Thought as a System" - the idea of progress is a
convergence of these "visual cues" that hold the eye and hand
together when we think... Multi valent/multi-cultural approaches to
language and all of the sundry variations its going through right
now, are what make this kind of stuff alot more interesting... Artaud
was the fellow who invented the term "virtual reality" not Jaron
Lanier... think of the media repetitions of the WTC as a scene out of
"Theater of Cruelty" and combine it with how mourning passes through
the media sphere a la Princess Diana's death etc etc and you get the
idea of the whole gestalt of this kind of thing... or even the way
that linguistic permutation has evolved out of music and spoken text
(think of Cab Calloway or Kurt Schwitters or later material like John
Cage's 'mesotics' (I'm writing this off the cuff... did I spell that
right?), and even the way dj's play with words while spinning music
in a set - this in itself is one of the major developments of 20th
century culture: the ability not just to accept the linguistic
regulations of a situation (again, Debord meets Grand Master
Flash...) - but to constantly change them. This is one of the major
issues that Henry Louis Gates wrote about in his "Signifying Monkey"
essay a long while ago, but you can easily see the digital component
of the same system of thought on-line when people play with words as
domain names etc etc.... there's shareware like Ray Kurzweil's
Cybernetic Poet http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/poetry/rkcp_overview.php3
and hip-hop material like Saul Williams and Kool Keith, and even the
way the poetry of algorithms became rhythm (there's a great site on
the history of drum machines... http://www.drummachine.com/
and out of Australia, there's the global digital poetry site that
uses algorithms to create text and hyperlinks:
http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/~komninos/maysites.html
or even the "visual thesaurus" that creates 3-D models of how words
relate to one another...
http://www.thinkmap.com/
and even more MAX/MSP based code material from stuff like composer
Karlheinz Essl's explorations of free jazz and code structures with
his "lexicon-sonate" programs:
http://www.essl.at/works/lexson-online.html
or nifty stuff like Chris Csikszentmihalyi's "Robot Dj" that does
stuff like cuttin' and scratchin' - after all "phonograph" breaks
down to "Sound - writing" i.e. "phonetics of graphology..."
http://www.dj-i-robot.com/
sequencing and figuring out different permutations as core aspects of
code is an archetypal situation at this point... Alan Sondheim is
perhaps the equivalent of an MC for Nettime, but again, the field
could and should be expanded at this point.
the idea here is to point out
1) multi-cultural variations in language (Stephen Pinker does a great
job of describing "patois" and cultural change as linguistic
variation in his "How the Mind Works") as a platform for figuring out
how codes evolve out of linguistic systems
2) multi cultural takes on this are alot more fun... and the parties
are alot better, and the music is alot better...
3) what next? Ken - how about a nick name - "Dj Oulipo" or something...
peace,
Paul</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>6.2</nbr>
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<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sun, 23 Sep 2001 14:02:48 -0500</date>
<content>
Thanks to Paul for
his remarks, but i
think, as they say,
that
i want to break it
down...
&gt;the problem with
the digital media
scene - it is
SUPER
&gt; WHITEBREAD -
there is alot more
going on....
Yes, but when it
comes to entities
like antiorp or
jodi, is it
all that useful to
pose things in
this old
identity-bound
language?
&gt;think about
precedents for
theater and
spectacle outside
of the &gt;normal
discourse that
goes on...
Yes, but i don't
quite have the
freedom of
movement that
you
do, Paul. As an
artist, you can cut
and mix in a way
that one can't
in scholarship. Its
not the medium,
its the genre.
&gt;this is a Mcluhan
refraction of the
old inner
&gt; ear/eye thing,
but with a little bit
more of a
technical twist.
Always been
skeptical about
that aspect of
McLuhan, but I
think Ong is
useful here. He
talks of
'secondary orality',
which
is the orality that
arises within a
literate culture,
but i think
there is also now
a 'secondary
literacy', the
literacy that arises
within an
electro-oral
world....
&gt; Artaud was the
fellow who
invented the term
"virtual reality"
Oh really?
Where? [scholar
mode] "We must
awaken the Gods
that sleep in
museums." Yes,
Artaud is a good
handle for
understanding
the global media
event. My first
book already
covers all this.
&gt; this in itself is
one of the major
developments of
20th
&gt; century culture:
the ability not just
to accept the
linguistic
&gt; regulations of a
situation (again,
Debord meets
Grand Master
&gt; Flash...) - but to
constantly change
them. This is one
of the major
&gt; issues that
Henry Louis
Gates wrote
about in his
"Signifying
&gt; Monkey" essay
a long while ago
Yes, i once wrote
an essay on
Gates' signifying
monkey and
Skooly D, who
has a great rap
about the
monkey, the
faggot
and the fat-assed
pimp. Needless
to say i couldn't
get it
published...
&gt; Alan Sondheim
is
&gt; perhaps the
equivalent of an
MC for Nettime
Alan posts to a lot
of lists and does
a lot of other stuff
besides,
so i don't think he
would want
anyone to see his
stuff here as
representative.
But i think that's a
nice take on it.
Sondheim as
an MC of sense,
of affect, cutting
and mixing the
letter to that
effect. Everything
Alan does is a
proposition about
how to
read.
&gt;but again, the
field
&gt; could and
should be
expanded at this
point.
Its your job to
think like that,
Paul, some of us
have to work in
a different kind of
time. Its not about
slow or fast, but
about
rhythms (all
rhythms are the
same speed as
they all get you
there in the end).
Its about being
untimely. Mixing
past and
present is
another kind of
mix. Blake and
Integer. What is in
that edit? I don't
see it as
invalidated by the
other edits it
passes over in
silence.
&gt; 1) multi-cultural
variations in
language
You're an
American, Paul, to
whom
'multicultural'
means
multi-racial.
That's fine, but it
is not the
definition of
multiplicity with
which the rest of
the world
necessarily
works. I'm not so
keen on the
compression of
difference
down to this
narrow plane so
as to squeeze it
into
American
bandwidth. The
celebration of
multiplicity
going on right
now is a
frightening
reminder of just
how
narrow
conceptions of
difference are in
the United States.
&gt; multi cultural
takes on this are
alot more fun...
Well they would
be, but American
multiculturalism
isn't
much of a
multiplicity. I find
it tone-deaf to
'patois' that isn't
minted locally.
And look at the
basis on which
other kinds
of multiplicity are
annexed to its
needs: the
appropriation
of
postcolonialism,
the Black Atlantic
and so on. All well
and good, but in
the long run just
variations on the
self
image of America
in the world.
So: there's a
problem with the
multicultural
scene, its
SUPER-AMERICA
N. But, again, its
not a criticism of
you,
Paul, but just
indiciative of the
difficulty of
working in this
place and time.
Its hard to see the
context, and how
the
context shapes
the discourse.
Thanks for the
urls, which i'm
looking at and
learning from.
cheers
ken</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>6.3</nbr>
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<subject>[Nettime-bold] from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>Paul D. Miller</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Mon, 24 Sep 2001 12:45:51 -0400</date>
<content>Hey Ken -
1) Artaud - relatively decent Artaud sites:
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/artaud/ab.html
http://www.antoninartaud.org/home.html
and the Artaud reference can be found in the "Theater and It's
Double" at the beginning of the section entitled "The Theater and its
Shadow"
around p.49 in the edition I have "la realite virtuelle" - 1938....
in the section called the "theater and it's shadow" or something like
that... the original context was that humans were inundated with life
as symbolic reality... both me and Erik Davis deal with this in our
respective writings on the topic.
2) There's plenty of room for figuring out how Walter Ong's ideas of
orality and text flow together, his book "Orality and Literacy: the
Technologizing of the Word" remains a pretty good glimpse into how
words became in a word "the noetic navigation of places" - but words
assign place and meaning on-line, but in the world of stuff like Amos
Tutualoa or John Lee (the black hacker on the cover of Wired a long
time ago who was into the whole language as cipher-text etc etc his
crew was called "The Masters of Deception"), it'd be nifty to figure
out on how mantras etc etc fit into this too....
3) your idea that "everything Alan does is a proposition on how to
read..." - well, yep, but again, it's the permutations of the process
that make reading him interesting. Otherwise, no disrespect to Alan,
it'd be like listening to the same beat over and over and over...
even the linguistic origins of jazz (from the French verb "jazzer" -
which means to "have a dialog") - still pertains to what you spoke
about.Some of this relates basically as the "lowest common
denominator" kind of scenario to the "sequencing/spatializing" of the
word that Ong deals with, but again, there's plenty of stuff like
that in electronic music at this point... There's a couple of great
treatments of that topic in Robert Farris Thompson's classic "Flash
of the Spirit"...
4) yep, I agree about mixing styles and genres... in academia, there
are rules and regulations about this kind of thing, but I have a
feeling the next generation of folks will all look at this kind of
thing as a video game or hypertext of a kind of collaborative
filtering or something... speaking of rules, I see that Mark Dery is
now an assistant (junior) professor of Journalism at NYU... ha! ha! -
god help the children who study under him.... But uh... anyway... if
you still have that article around (the one on language and whatnot
with henry louis gates etc etc) we're still working on getting 21C
started up - I've been travelling alot, and that's slowed things
down..... Let me know if you'd be into re-publishing it or something.
I'm going to set up the web version of the magazine first and deal
with the print in a little bit (www.21cmagazine.com is up and
running, but again, there's only 24 hours in the day... I have a
decent amount of articles from various folks, but I need about two
weeks of down-time - which I'm taking in mid-October - to finalize
everything... more on that in a bit)
okay,
peace from Florida
Paul</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.4</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; resending.... from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>Paul D. Miller</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Mon, 24 Sep 2001 22:53:16 -0400</date>
<content>Hey Ken -
1) Artaud - relatively decent Artaud sites:
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/artaud/ab.html
http://www.antoninartaud.org/home.html
and the Artaud reference can be found in the "Theater and It's
Double" at the beginning of the section entitled "The Theater and its
Shadow"
around p.49 in the edition I have "la realite virtuelle" - 1938....
in the section called the "theater and it's shadow" or something like
that... the original context was that humans were inundated with life
as symbolic reality... both me and Erik Davis deal with this in our
respective writings on the topic.
2) There's plenty of room for figuring out how Walter Ong's ideas of
orality and text flow together, his book "Orality and Literacy: the
Technologizing of the Word" remains a pretty good glimpse into how
words became "the noetic navigation of places" - but words assign
place and meaning on-line, but in the world of stuff like Amos
Tutualoa or John Lee (the black hacker on the cover of Wired a long
time ago who was into the whole language as cipher-text etc etc his
crew was called "The Masters of Deception"), it'd be nifty to figure
out on how mantras etc etc fit into this too....
3) your idea that "everything Alan does is a proposition on how to
read..." - well, yep, but again, it's the permutations of the process
that make reading him interesting. Otherwise, no disrespect to Alan,
it'd be like listening to the same beat over and over and over...
even the linguistic origins of jazz (from the French verb "jazzer" -
which means to "have a dialog") - still pertains to what you spoke
about.Some of this relates basically as the "lowest common
denominator" kind of scenario to the "sequencing/spatializing" of the
word that Ong deals with, but again, there's plenty of stuff like
that in electronic music at this point... There's a couple of great
treatments of that topic in Robert Farris Thompson's classic "Flash
of the Spirit"...
4) yep, I agree about mixing styles and genres... in academia, there
are rules and regulations about this kind of thing - and keeping the
boundaries between "zones" in this day and age is getting more and
more problematic, but I have a feeling the next generation of folks
will all look at this kind of thing as a video game or hypertext of a
kind of collaborative filtering or something... if you still have
that article around (the one on language and whatnot with henry louis
gates etc etc) we're still working on getting 21C started up - I've
been travelling alot, and that's slowed things down..... Let me know
if you'd be into re-publishing it or something. I'm going to set up
the web version of the magazine first and deal with the print in a
little bit (www.21cmagazine.com is up and running, but again, there's
only 24 hours in the day... I have a decent amount of articles from
various folks, but I need about two weeks of down-time - which I'm
taking in mid-October - to finalize everything... more on that in a
bit)
okay,
peace from Florida
Paul
&gt;Thanks to Paul for
&gt;his remarks, but i
&gt;think, as they say,
&gt;that
&gt;i want to break it
&gt;down...
&lt;...&gt;</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.6</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>Alan Sondheim</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:49:03 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>There is collaboration in a number of ways. None of us (examples you give)
operate or produce in a vacuum; my work often requires assistance or col-
laboration, to the extent that "my" becomes suspect. The identities I work
with - "Nikuko" and others - are also disseminations across other
practices (IRC, newsgroups, email lists, etc.) and others have also taken/
used the name. There were also projects created for the trAce online
writing group which were all collaborations in the traditional sense; one
of them, Lost, is still running.
Then there is also a question of nettime; what I place on nettime (and
this may be true of others you mention) is what nettime accepts; the
collaborative dance/bodywork has no place or room here; this is also true
for most of the directory material on the cdroms. An email is almost
always signed, leaving its trace; it is a trail which almost literally
hystericizes its identity function in the full header. And again, this
affects, if not effects, what any of us are capable of doing in this
medium.
Alan -</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.7</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Wed, 31 Oct 2001 11:21:28 -0500</date>
<content>Andreas writes,
&gt;i fully respect your examples as artistic/literary practices, but in what
&gt;way are jodi, mez, antiorp/nn, sondheim etc. &gt;representatives of open
&gt;processes?... what you describe are machinic processes, yes, but the kinds
&gt;of collaborative practices that heico &gt;idensen talks about (in the
&gt;hypertext world mainly) - i don't see them in your codework examples. is
&gt;artistic codework more authorial than open source programming?
Well, isn't this a collaborative process, this discussion? Isn't
nettime "collaborative filtering?" There's some limitations in what
the examples given might uphold. Its not as if everything is in
the text. I'm more interested in a new way of thinking about the
practice of writing.
Semiotics and structural linguistics have a lot to answer for. They
created a concept of language as a homogemous plane, which then
entered into relations with the world as something external.
What's interesting about Guattari is the anti-linguistics in which
one thinks of the speech act as an element in a heterogeneous,
temporal series. It seems to me timely to think of some of the new
writing practices in those terms.
Hypertext had its roots firmly in a (post)structural linguistics,
and it shows in the early works composed under its sign. All the
action is in the 'text'. There's not a lot of thought about
the hetereogeneous assemblages into which it might enter.
k</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.8</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; from hypertext to codework</subject>
<from>christopherotto</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Wed, 31 Oct 2001 23:11:50 -0500</date>
<content>I would present as an example of this is the extension of my piece
timeascolor by Brad Borevitz earlier this year.
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~cotto1/timeascolor.html
http://www.onetwothree.net/art/somethingelse/
what i see as interesting in (client-side) net.art is that the text
and visuals of the artist are sent simultaneously and are inseperable from
the perspective of the viewer, possibly in the same way sasseure
visualized signified/signifier/sign as a card with two sides. very
different than seeing a painting and then reading the artist's sketchbook?
I have a short paper that extends this idea - email me personally if you
would like to read it.
christopher otto</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>7.0</nbr>
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<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Software Art After Programming</subject>
<from>Richard</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 18 Oct 2004 21:07:27 +0100</date>
<content>Are people still interested in ART on this list?
Perhaps they are...
Software Art After Programming
Richard Wright, April 2004.
First published in MUTE magazine, no. 28, Autumn 2004
http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=3D1&amp;IdPublication=3D1=
&amp;NrIssue=3D28&amp;NrSection=3D10&amp;NrArticle=3D1397
The history of computing in arts practice is littered with the mental =
debris of its half-forgotten debates, unresolved problems and anxieties, =
and questions that have now become as obsolete as the Commodore 64s and =
VAX mainframes that accompanied them. Who can remember the art and =
technology projects of the sixties when the question of 'Can the =
computer make art?' allowed a generation of isolated computer artists to =
position themselves as a team of intrepid explorers setting out to cross =
a new continent without first waiting to find out whether it could =
support life. Under what conditions was the question ever first =
considered worthy of posing in the first place? Did the computer offer =
input into specific art issues, such as arts relation to other forms of =
scientific knowledge, to language, representation or the abandonment of =
the object? Or was it just intuitively realised that 'computer art' was =
at the forefront of a slow, inexorable computerisation of twentieth =
century society which would eventually demand access to every facet of =
human culture?
As computer hardware and the programming skills needed to operate it =
became more accessible, the question 'Can the computer make art?' was =
asked less and less often. By the beginning of the '80s artists were =
using the first personal computers to produce more varied kinds of work =
until, with all this activity growing, the question of whether art was =
possible on a computer lost all sense. There was a moment when the =
parameters of the question were redrawn, from 'Can the computer make =
art?' to 'Can a computer be an artist?', redirecting it into issues of =
simulated creativity and artificial intelligence. It was at this point =
that the first cracks of a coming schism in the community of computer =
artists became noticeable; this would go on to form the next stage in =
the debate. It seemed to a growing number of artists that as the =
complexity of software increased, so many new possibilities for the =
human artist were appearing that the prospect of deferring to a machine =
artist seemed almost indicative of a lack of imagination.
Although the computer seemed to have made its case as a machine of =
creative potential, there now emerged the question of how to efficiently =
leverage all this creativity. By the late eighties, the interactive =
interfaces and simplified menu commands of personal desktop systems that =
had helped to cause this ground swell of activity had firmly refocused =
questions on the artists themselves. Were the pre-packaged functions, =
options and parameters of the new art applications sufficient to cover =
all artistic fields of inquiry, all aesthetic nuances, all personal =
idioms? Or would it always be necessary to have recourse to the =
precision and particularities of programming languages in order to =
ensure that no desire was left uncatered for? 'Do artists need to =
program?' became the burning question at SIGGRAPH panel sessions and =
electronic art festivals.
To some extent this divergence between programmers and program users =
masked the fact that they had become two sides of the same coin. As the =
argument went, the artist-programmer would regard '.software not as a =
functional tool on which the "real" artwork is based, but software as =
the material of artistic creation', as the Transmediale Software Art =
jury statement would phrase it much later in 2002. On the other hand, =
for program users, programming was only ever a means to an end. Yet it =
was their fixation on this end that hastened their acquiescence to the =
means of their programs and the reconfiguration of their practice by =
programmers. 'Is the computer a medium or a tool?' Yes, it was true that =
some artists were only interested in software 'tools' that were totally =
subservient to their subjectivity, but it was a subjectivity that was =
now mapped onto minutely variable parameter lists and option check =
boxes, mirroring the remoteness of the artist's precious and peculiar =
visions by burying its origins deep within the recesses of multiple menu =
layers. Aided by the runaway success of packages like Amiga's Deluxe =
Paint, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, software manufacturers were =
redefining the creative process as a decision making process converging =
towards a predetermined ideal goal.=20
The problem was also attacked from the opposite direction by a top-down =
system design employing pre-sets, wizards, helpers, macros and plug-ins =
that pre-empted the creative process by offering a one button solution =
to achieve those essential lens flares, ripples, rollovers and drop =
shadow effects. The users of programs now found themselves programmed by =
their very own favourite artistic effects, expressed as a suite of easy =
to use software extensions. In the end, both artist programmers and =
artist program users produced artwork that was about the software that =
had produced it. Both became caught up in a wider move to rewrite =
society in terms of information processing.
By the early '80s the artist Harold Cohen had developed software to =
automate his own personal artistic style. A former successful gallery =
painter, Cohen still works on a suite of artificial intelligence =
programs called AARON that seek to encode his earlier painting practice. =
Cohen had always insisted that the content of his work was the software =
itself, and always exhibited the entire process in the form of a live =
computer connected up to a mobile painting device or 'turtle' that would =
scuttle over his canvases. As he told his students, 'Don't ask what you =
can do with the software, ask what the software can do.' But Cohen's =
work now seems to function more as evidence of a historical transition =
that occurred over his working life and reached its culmination during =
the '90s. While we have been watching Cohen's computer prove it can =
recreate art, other computers have been recreating our whole society in =
their own image. But this new image is not the image of the expressive =
subject that is simulated in Cohen's work. It is the image of the =
subject as a node, a switching station for providing feedback to =
calibrate the central processing system, the individual's expressive =
utterances only called upon to ensure their movements are correctly =
synchronised. The artist programmer of today exists in relation to a =
whole culture that has the computer as its central organising =
technology. The pervasive quality of software culture and the resultant =
normalisation of computer use have made it impossible to maintain the =
conceptual categories that underpinned previous debates. In a world =
where artists use software to write software that will be seen by virtue =
of other software, questions about the 'aesthetics of the code' become a =
symptom of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Programming is =
not only the material of artistic creation, it is the context of =
artistic creation. Programming has become software.
One interesting example of the end game of the debate on 'Computer Art' =
is a piece of artist's software called Auto-Illustrator. Written by =
Adrian Ward around the year 2000, Auto-Illustrator was the prize winner =
of the first competition for Software Art organised by Berlin's =
Transmediale media art festival in 2001. Ward describes the work as a =
parody of commercial art and design packages like Adobe Illustrator, =
specifically of their pretensions to provide functionality and user =
control. In contrast, Ward fills his package with 'generative art' tools =
that explicitly try to automate the drawing process. The appearance of =
Auto-Illustrator when running is much like a typical menu driven art and =
design package with the exception that the tool palette and effects =
filters incorporate generative algorithms. For instance, the Pencil tool =
adds wiggles or sweeps to your strokes, while the Oval tool will use =
settings like 'childish' or 'adult' to control a sprinkling of little =
faces. Some tools like Brush seem entirely random in operation, while =
some filters like 'Instant Mute Design' will reproduce an entire =
iconography designed to appeal to the Digerati generation.=20
In fact, many of these generative techniques are strikingly reminiscent =
of various experiments in computer art from over the last thirty years. =
The line tools generate scribbles using algorithms almost certainly =
related to the stochastic perturbations of Frieder Nake or Peter Beyls =
while the 'bug' tool roves around the screen using the same principles =
as Harold Cohen's turtle graphics engine. Even the icons of the 'Instant =
Mute Design' effect are almost identical to Edward Zajec's permutations =
of cubic modules. In this way, Auto-Illustrator is like a compendium of =
classic computer art programs but now presented as a list of menu =
options with conveniently editable parameters. Presented in this =
context, the individual aesthetics of each of these venerable pioneering =
practices are erased, leaving us with more of a confusion of =
idiosyncratic styles. From this viewpoint, Auto-Illustrator's =
'generative tools' actually pastiche the chaotic 'feature mountain' of =
bloated modern software systems, as they are commonly disorganised by =
the superabundance of toolbars, drop-down lists and floating inspectors. =
Instead of defining a drawing function, it might have been more relevant =
for Ward to have his 'bug' tunnelling into the dizzying depths of =
cascading sub-menus and option boxes to find that single cherished =
function with which the user nurtures their unique individual style. =
Ward actually states that wider issues such as interface design are of =
no interest to him and describes 'consumer-based application software' =
as his chosen medium. Auto-Illustrator is successful in its intention to =
parody the functionality-as-expression of mainstream software design, =
but only at the level of coding. By not addressing the wider user =
experience it is unable to think outside of the window box in which this =
functionality is now defined.
Since Auto-Illustrator's release there has been at least one attempt to =
account for a contemporary digital aesthetic with reference to the =
design of a family of software packages and related technologies. In =
2002 the theorist Lev Manovich published 'Generation Flash', an essay in =
which he tried to characterise a then prevalent cultural sensibility. =
Manovich referred to the prevailing visual style of Flash, Shockwave and =
Java based multimedia as 'soft modernism', a reaction against the =
clutter of postmodern eclecticism that returns to an elemental =
'rationality of software'. Aesthetic motifs are defined by Manovich in =
terms of technologically motivated processes: instead of appropriation =
we simply have the sample, a basic operation in the new mode of cultural =
production. Another cultural building block is the network, and =
therefore also one of the terms of a new critical language. These =
operations (networking, sampling) are applied in new modes of expression =
like data visualisation. This can be seen, for instance, in =
Futurefarmer's They Rule project in which the directors of the USA's top =
corporations are cross referenced to purportedly reveal a web-like =
pattern of interrelated allegiances. For Manovich this kind of work =
replaces older forms of authored representation by giving us the tools =
to objectively analyse raw data and deduce the necessary conclusions.
Although Manovich's detailed analysis of the structural basis of new =
media adds an absolutely essential dimension to new critical tools, the =
approach risks being interpreted as a form of technological determinism =
once we lose sight of a specifically cultural perspective. For example, =
our understanding of the workings of the corporate world order do not =
arise automatically out of its most common data visualisations, such as =
the stock market fluctuations diagrammatically portrayed on the =
Financial Times website. Not all visualisations are equal. At one point =
Manovich argues that the 'neo-minimalism' of the Flash style arises =
quite naturally from the practice of programming - the pixel thin grid =
lines, restricted colour palettes, abstracted symbols 'ALWAYS happens =
when people begin to generate graphics through programming and discover =
that they can use simple equations, etc' (Manovich's emphasis). This is =
indeed the case where programming is taught within a certain computer =
science tradition, but it is now impossible to discount the influence of =
scripting environments such as Flash. Not all programming practices are =
equal.
Other discussions of Flash have merely tended to shift the technological =
focus, such as whether the limited bandwidth of the web was the most =
significant reason for the linear aesthetic of vector graphics. At other =
times it moved on to question the 'openness' of the Flash graphics =
standard, whether Macromedia would ultimately allow programmers to =
leverage the full potential of its functionality. However, the =
'functionality', 'rationality' or 'potential' of software will always be =
strictly unknown. It is the 'user experience' of software, the values =
generated by the way it is meant to be used, how it gives shape to a =
practice, how easily a technical 'potential' can be perceived and =
engaged with that should form the basis of software critique. It is =
possible to trace many formative influences on the Flash style not to =
the code itself, but to the conditions in which it is written. =
Programming is now often practised in the form of 'scripting' languages =
that are integrated into mainstream art and design software =
applications. This makes artist programmers and program users both =
subject to the same philosophies of system design that hold sway in =
point-and-click style desktop packages. By examining these environments =
we can find many ways in which they funnelled Flash Actionscript or =
Director Lingo programming practice into nourishing certain wider =
cultural sensibilities during this period.
Multimedia scripting languages like Flash Actionscript tend to differ =
from conventional programming languages by offering access to a library =
of functions that are specific to that particular multimedia =
application. This easy access to a set of predefined 'events' such as =
mouse clicks, drag actions and rollovers is somewhat analogous to the =
way a software user's practice is structured in terms of the predefined =
configuration of menu commands, option boxes and plug-in effects. These =
library functions that populate the programmers imagination with a =
readymade vocabulary of discrete interactive 'behaviours' can be coded =
up and attached to individual multimedia objects - button triggers, =
sprite actions, sound effects, linkages, etc. Actionscript therefore =
tended to differ from typical program development environments by =
identifying code with graphical and other concrete entities that would =
become principle actors in the interactive scenario. This also tended to =
discourage the writing of long passages of control logic and instead led =
to the writing of terse mathematical expressions to manipulate an =
object's properties, movements and relationships to other objects. When =
combined with the instancing abilities of the Object Orientated =
Programming philosophy, Actionscript became very efficient at applying =
these code segments to multiple copies of 'semi-automated' graphic =
elements, sprites, movie clips and sounds. As implemented in multimedia =
authoring software like Flash, Object Orientated Programming actually =
fostered an 'object orientated' approach to interactive art and =
animation.
The point here is to look at Flash at the moment at which its patterns =
of techniques and processes re-emerge as motifs that can enter =
consciousness and practice on an aesthetic level. To start with we have =
an authoring system that orientated the user towards the replication (or =
'birthing') of multitudes of objects and orchestrating complex yet =
concise interactions between them. It is even possible to identify the =
most common form of mathematical expression that was used to regulate =
this interaction during the millennial Flash period. There is a single =
line of code that appears over and over again, a simplified expression =
that produces a distinctive dampening effect on a moving object before =
it finally comes to rest. It was easy for Flash users to apply this =
expression to any or all of ones objects and events until it produced =
the classic Flash 'wobble'. A Flash site became a constellation of =
rippling, bobbing, trembling buttons, icons, eyeballs, legs and rollover =
items as if someone had poured a bucket of water into your computer =
monitor. In the open source spirit, the Flash community ensured that =
such expressions were quickly disseminated until they became an almost =
universal kinetic attribute.
The Flash style was integrated, via its web browser plug-in, to other =
desktop based work and leisure patterns of activity. By keying into the =
internet gold rush fever, Flash art was turned into a highly visible =
design component of the dotcom boom era. This new informal space imbued =
Flash art with the role of a distraction, a demo or toy, making any more =
demanding appreciation of its fluid stylistic and tactile qualities =
unnecessary. The net culture of the time also provided a preexisting =
discourse in which it's visual aesthetic could be interpreted and =
flourish. Echoing the ubiquitous net-cultural meme of the 'digital Gaia' =
- an ecological interpretation of the web of globally interconnected and =
independent agents - foremost Flash designer Joshua Davis commented: =
'.our work should reflect the nature of a fern and be comprised of tiny =
little objects that all talk to each other. The more we add these little =
objects, the more complex and intense the nature of our work becomes.'=20
There are many more factors that could be marshalled to 'explain' the =
Flash style. But as far as practising artists are concerned, how can we =
get a handle on such a deluge of widely different factors, some of which =
seek to align us with a particular model of subjectivity and others =
which just seem like arbitrary collections of protocols? How can we =
forge a path through layer after layer of designed information to form =
ways of working not pre-empted by the predicates of current software =
culture?
There are some emerging ideas that might help. One of these is the =
'techno-aesthetic' - different motifs that permeate these technological, =
social and cultural levels. The idea is rooted in materialist notions of =
social process, but a society now constituted through IT. The emphasis =
is on how specifically cultural forces can form technology into a means =
of expression that is able to exceed its most obvious properties and =
structures. One software art example of this in action is Mongrel's =
often-cited Linker project of 1999. Developed to support a series of =
story telling workshops for the non-expert computer user, the software =
is a highly stripped down system that simply allows users to load and =
make connections between a collection of digital elements - images, =
text, video, sounds. For a start, this transfers an emphasis on the =
practice of the software to the practice of the user. Compared to the =
other examples, Linker coheres around a figure that unites its levels of =
thought and construction yet retains an open space in which imagination =
can breathe. As theorist Matthew Fuller described Linker, 'It relies on =
the simple function of doing exactly what the name says it does - link =
things. Here, the poetics of connection forms a techno-aesthetic and =
existential a priori to the construction of a piece of software.' This =
aesthetic is made explicit when the software is first launched - it =
displays a map image of its three by three grid of interconnected =
regions. Linker is constructed around this image of itself that =
communicates and instantiates its underlying algorithmic structure, =
creative use and conceptual model. It is this figuration of itself as an =
idea that makes Linker art as well as software.
The debate about Linker was unfortunately always limited to its mode of =
production and the social constituency of its intended user group as =
though it had been designed as a tool of social engineering, ready to =
arise fully formed out of a sub-menu check-box list of community =
'needs'. But discussions of DIY empowerment, Open Source and the =
'sociability' of software are presumptuous without any attention to the =
context in which imaginative ideas can grow. When we look at the kinds =
of applications that have actually resulted from Linux we simply see =
copies of standard Microsoft functionality. The Open Source model of =
production is a dead end without an equivalent 'model of creativity', =
defaulting instead to a wannabe culture. Instead we should look for =
inspiration in practices that could nourish a poetics of data =
'copyability' such as plagiarism and detournement, as noted by writer =
Josephine Berry. But unfortunately free software developers do not =
prioritise this aesthetic context which is what has the power to =
determine whether software will enable or restrain its user's =
perceptions and mode of action.=20
It is not a matter of the different technical abilities of software or =
of how much it costs, but of how easily a technical potential can be =
perceived by the user in a way that motivates engagement. When software =
is written, choices must be made about which data fields carry value, =
how the display of information forms contours of meaning, how the =
modelling of the interface moulds the subjectivity of the user. The =
question of whether artists should learn to program is replaced by the =
question of what kind of programming. Which programming practice has the =
most 'open aesthetic', capable of making software that is not just the =
product of an arbitrary confluence of techniques or a slavish mimicry =
but is aware of all its possible formative cultural and philosophical =
categories and values.
For the first generation of artist programmers there was hardly any =
information society in existence, certainly not one within reach. In the =
early eighties during a period when the launch of the personal computer =
marked a radical shift in computer culture, artist Harold Cohen stressed =
the importance of asking the right questions. Now that we live in a =
world in which his AARON program is downloadable as a screen saver it is =
time for us to extend his question - 'Don't ask what the software can =
do, ask what it can do to other software.'
URLS:
Auto-Illustrator: www.auto-illustrator.com
Joshua Davis: www.joshuadavis.com
Linker &amp; 9: www.linker.org.uk, 9.waag.org
AARON screensaver: www.kurzweilcyberart.com
Acknowledgement
This article was based on research supported by a grant from the Arts =
and Humanities Research Board.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>8.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
<from>RSG</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 17 Jun 2002 15:41:20 -0400</date>
<content>How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
By RSG
"Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and
healthy acts."
--Empire, Hardt &amp; Negri
Ethernet was invented at the University of Hawaii. Scientists there in
the early 1970s faced a unique problem: How to network different
campuses, each on different islands separated by water. The solution was
to use the free airwaves, to transmit data through the air, or "ether,"
using radio. There were no wires. Like a radio station, each node sent
messages broadly over the sea to other islands. A protocol was developed
to avoid collision between simultaneous communications. Ever since,
Ethernet has been based on an open transmission model. The protocol
translated well to wire-based networks too, and is now the most widely
used local networking protocol in the world.
Since Ethernet is based on an open broadcast model, it is trivial for
listeners to make themselves "promiscuous" and eavesdrop on all
communications, not simply those specifically addressed to them. This
technique is called packet-sniffing and has been used by systems
administrators and hackers alike for decades. Ethernet, sniffers, and
hacking are at heart of a public domain surveillance suite called
Carnivore (http://rhizome.org/carnivore) developed by RSG and now used
in a civilian context by many artists and scientists around the world.
Hacking
Today there are generally two things said about hackers. They are either
terrorists or libertarians. Historically the word meant an amateur
tinkerer, an autodictat who might try a dozen solutions to a problem
before eking out success.[1] Aptitude and perseverance have always
eclipsed rote knowledge in the hacking community. Hackers are the type
of technophiles you like to have around in a pinch, for given enough
time they generally can crack any problem (or at least find a suitable
kludge). Thus, as Bruce Sterling writes, the term hacker "can signify
the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest and deepest
potential of computer systems."[2] Or as the glowing Steven Levy
reminisces of the original MIT hackers of the early sixties, "they were
such fascinating people. [...] Beneath their often unimposing exteriors,
they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists...and the ones
who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary
tool."[3] These types of hackers are freedom fighters, living by the
dictum that data wants to be free.[4] Information should not be owned,
and even if it is, non-invasive browsing of such information hurts no
one. After all, hackers merely exploit preexisting holes made by
clumsily constructed code.[5] And wouldn't the revelation of such holes
actually improve data security for everyone involved?
Yet after a combination of public technophobia and aggressive government
legislation, the identity of the hacker changed in the US in the mid to
late eighties from do-it-yourself hobbyist to digital outlaw.[6] Such
legislation includes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 which made
it a felony to break into federal computers. "On March 5, 1986,"
reported Knight Lightning of Phrack magazine, "the following seven
phreaks were arrested in what has come to be known as the first computer
crime `sting' operation. Captain Hacker \ Doctor Bob \ Lasertech \ The
Adventurer [\] The Highwayman \ The Punisher \ The Warden."[7] "[O]n
Tuesday, July 21, 1987," Knight Lightning continued, "[a]mong 30-40
others, Bill From RNOC, Eric NYC, Solid State, Oryan QUEST, Mark
Gerardo, The Rebel, and Delta-Master have been busted by the United
States Secret Service."[8] Many of these hackers were targeted due to
their "elite" reputations, a status granted only to top hackers. Hackers
were deeply discouraged by their newfound identity as outlaws, as
exemplified in the famous 1986 hacker manifesto written by someone
calling himself[9] The Mentor: "We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."[10] Because of
this semantic transformation, hackers today are commonly referred to as
terrorists, nary-do-wells who break into computers for personal gain. So
by the turn of the millennium, the term hacker had lost all of its
original meaning. Now when people say hacker, they mean terrorist.
Thus, the current debate on hackers is helplessly throttled by the
discourse on contemporary liberalism: should we respect data as private
property, or should we cultivate individual freedom and leave computer
users well enough alone? Hacking is more sophisticated than that. It
suggests a future type of cultural production, one that RSG seeks to
embody in Carnivore.
Collaboration
Bruce Sterling writes that the late Twentieth Century is a moment of
transformation from a modern control paradigm based on centralization
and hierarchy to a postmodern one based on flexibility and
horizontalization:
"For years now, economists and management theorists have
speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution
would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything
is top-down and centrally controlled. Highly trained "employees"
would take on greater autonomy, being self-starting and self-
motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great
speed and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of
people spontaneously knitting together across organizational
lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer-
aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they came."[11]
From Manuel Castells to Hakim Bey to Tom Peters this rhetoric has become
commonplace. Sterling continues by claiming that both hacker groups and
the law enforcement officials that track hackers follow this new
paradigm: "they all look and act like `tiger teams' or `users' groups.'
They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt
to meet a need."[12] By "tiger teams" Sterling refers to the employee
groups assembled by computer companies trying to test the security of
their computer systems. Tiger teams, in essence, simulate potential
hacker attacks, hoping to find and repair security holes. RSG is a type
of tiger team.
The term also alludes to the management style known as Toyotism
originating in Japanese automotive production facilities. Within
Toyotism, small pods of workers mass together to solve a specific
problem. The pods are not linear and fixed like the more traditional
assembly line, but rather are flexible and reconfigurable depending on
whatever problem might be posed to them.
Management expert Tom Peters notes that the most successful contemporary
corporations use these types of tiger teams, eliminating traditional
hierarchy within the organizational structure. Documenting the
management consulting agency McKinsey &amp; Company, Peters writes:
"McKinsey is a huge company. Customers respect it. [...] But there is no
traditional hierarchy. There are no organizational charts. No job
descriptions. No policy manuals. No rules about managing client
engagements. [...] And yet all these things are well understood-make no
mistake, McKinsey is not out of control! [...] McKinsey works. It's
worked for over half a century."[13]
As Sterling suggests, the hacker community also follows this
organizational style. Hackers are autonomous agents that can mass
together in small groups to attack specific problems. As the influential
hacker magazine Phrack was keen to point out, "ANYONE can write for
Phrack Inc. [...] we do not discriminate against anyone for any
reason."[14] Flexible and versatile, the hacker pod will often dissolve
itself as quickly as it formed and disappear into the network. Thus,
what Sterling and others are arguing is that whereby older resistive
forces were engaged with "rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies," hackers
embody a different organizational management style (one that might be
called "protocological"). In this sense, while resistance during the
modern age forms around rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic power
structures, resistance during the postmodern age forms around the
protocological control forces existent in networks.
Coding
In 1967 the artist Sol LeWitt outlined his definition of conceptual art:
"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important
aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of
art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made
beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea
becomes a machine that makes the art."[15]
LeWitt's perspective on conceptual art has important implications for
code, for in his estimation conceptual art is nothing but a type of code
for artmaking. LeWitt's art is an algorithmic process. The algorithm is
prepared in advance, and then later executed by the artist (or another
artist, for that matter). Code thus purports to be multidimensional.
Code draws a line between what is material and what is active, in
essence saying that writing (hardware) cannot do anything, but must be
transformed into code (software) to be affective. Northrop Frye says a
very similar thing about language when he writes that the process of
literary critique essentially creates a meta text, outside of the
original source material, that contains the critic's interpretations of
that text.[16] In fact Kittler defines software itself as precisely that
"logical abstraction" that exists in the negative space between people
and the hardware they use.[17]
How can code be so different than mere writing? The answer to this lies
in the unique nature of computer code. It lies not in the fact that code
is sub-linguistic, but rather that it is hyper-linguistic. Code is a
language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language
that is executable. As Kittler has pointed out, "[t]here exists no word
in any ordinary language which does what it says. No description of a
machine sets the machine into motion."[18] So code is the first language
that actually does what it says-it is a machine for converting meaning
into action.[19] Code has a semantic meaning, but it also has an
enactment of meaning. Thus, while natural languages such as English or
Latin only have a legible state, code has both a legible state and an
executable state. In this way, code is the summation of language plus an
executable meta-layer that encapsulates that language.
Dreaming
Fredric Jameson said somewhere that one of the most difficult things to
do under contemporary capitalism is to envision utopia. This is
precisely why dreaming is important. Deciding (and often struggling) for
what is possible is the first step for a utopian vision based in our
desires, based in what we want.
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Pierre L&#233;vy is one writer who has been able to articulate eloquently the
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possibility of utopia in the cyberspace of digital computers.[20]
"Cyberspace," he writes, "brings with it methods of perception, feeling,
remembering, working, of playing and being together. [...] The
development of cyberspace [...] is one of the principle aesthetic and
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political challenges of the coming century."[21] L&#233;vy's visionary tone
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is exactly what Jameson warns is lacking in much contemporary discourse.
The relationship between utopia and possibility is a close one. It is
necessary to know what one wants, to know what is possible to want,
before a true utopia may be envisioned.
Once of the most important signs of this utopian instinct is the hacking
community's anti-commercial bent. Software products have long been
developed and released into the public domain, with seemingly no profit
motive on the side of the authors, simply for the higher glory of the
code itself. "Spacewar was not sold," Steven Levy writes, referring to
the early video game developed by several early computer enthusiasts at
MIT. "Like any other program, it was placed in the drawer for anyone to
access, look at, and rewrite as they saw fit."[22] The limits of
personal behavior become the limits of possibility to the hacker. Thus,
it is obvious to the hacker that one's personal investment in a specific
piece of code can do nothing but hinder that code's overall development.
"Sharing of software [...] is as old as computers," writes free software
guru Richard Stallman, "just as sharing of recipes is as old as
cooking."[23] Code does not reach its apotheosis for people, but exists
within its own dimension of perfection. The hacker feels obligated to
remove all impediments, all inefficiencies that might stunt this quasi-
aesthetic growth. "In its basic assembly structure," writes Andrew Ross,
"information technology involves processing, copying, replication, and
simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private
information property."[24] Commercial ownership of software is the
primary impediment hated by all hackers because it means that code is
limited-limited by intellectual property laws, limited by the profit
motive, limited by corporate "lamers."
However, greater than this anti-commercialism is a pro-protocolism.
Protocol, by definition, is "open source," the term given to a
technology that makes public the source code used in its creation. That
is to say, protocol is nothing but an elaborate instruction list of how
a given technology should work, from the inside out, from the top to the
bottom, as exemplified in the RFCs, or "Request For Comments" documents.
While many closed source technologies may appear to be protocological
due to their often monopolistic position in the market place, a true
protocol cannot be closed or proprietary. It must be paraded into full
view before all, and agreed to by all. It benefits over time through its
own technological development in the public sphere. It must exist as
pure, transparent code (or a pure description of how to fashion code).
If technology is proprietary it ceases to be protocological.
This brings us back to Carnivore, and the desire to release a public
domain version of a notorious surveillance tool thus far only available
to government operatives. The RSG Carnivore levels the playing field,
recasting art and culture as a scene of multilateral conflict rather
than unilateral domination. It opens the system up for collaboration
within and between client artists. It uses code to engulf and modify the
original FBI apparatus.
Carnivore Personal Edition
On October 1, 2001, three weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the
Radical Software Group (RSG) announced the release of Carnivore, a
public domain riff on the notorious FBI software called DCS1000 (which
is commonly referred to by its nickname "Carnivore"). While the FBI
software had already been in existence for some time, and likewise RSG
had been developing it's version of the software since January 2001,
9/11 brought on a crush of new surveillance activity. Rumors surfaced
that the FBI was installing Carnivore willy-nilly on broad civilian
networks like Hotmail and AOL with the expressed purpose of intercepting
terror-related communication. As Wired News reported on September 12,
2001, "An administrator at one major network service provider said that
FBI agents showed up at his workplace on [September 11] `with a couple
of Carnivores, requesting permission to place them in our core.'"
Officials at Hotmail were reported to have been "cooperating" with FBI
monitoring requests. Inspired by this activity, the RSG's Carnivore
sought to pick up where the FBI left off, to bring this technology into
the hands of the general public for greater surveillance saturation
within culture. The first RSG Carnivore ran on Linux. An open source
schematic was posted on the net for others to build their own boxes. New
functionality was added to improve on the FBI-developed technology
(which in reality was a dumbed-down version of tools systems
administrators had been using for years). An initial core (Alex
Galloway, Mark Napier, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, and others) began to
build interpretive interfaces. A testing venue was selected: the private
offices of Rhizome.org at 115 Mercer Street in New York City, only 30
blocks from Ground Zero. This space was out-of-bounds to the FBI, but
open to RSG.
The initial testing proved successful and led to more field-testing at
the Princeton Art Museum (where Carnivore was quarantined like a virus
into its own subnet) and the New Museum in New York. During the weekend
of February 1st 2002, Carnivore was used at Eyebeam to supervise the
hacktivists protesting the gathering of the World Economic Forum.
Sensing the market limitations of a Linux-only software product, RSG
released Carnivore Personal Edition (PE) for Windows on April 6, 2002.
CarnivorePE brought a new distributed architecture to the Carnivore
initiative by giving any PC user the ability to analyze and diagnose the
traffic from his or her own network. Any artist or scientist could now
use CarnivorePE as a surveillance engine to power his or her own
interpretive "Client." Soon Carnivore Clients were converting network
traffic to sound, animation, and even 3D worlds, distributing the
technology across the network.
The prospect of reverse-engineering the original FBI software was
uninteresting to RSG. Crippled by legal and ethical limitations, the FBI
software needed improvement not emulation. Thus CarnivorePE features
exciting new functionality including artist-made diagnosic clients,
remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume
buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software
license. Reverse-engineering is not necessarily a simple mimetic
process, but a mental upgrade as well. RSG has no desire to copy the FBI
software and its many shortcomings. Instead, RSG longs to inject
progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and
transformative technology, packet sniffing. Our goal is to invent a new
use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero/terrorist dilemma
and instead dreams about a future use for networked data.
http://rhizome.org/carnivore/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Robert Graham traces the etymology of the term to the sport of golf:
"The word `hacker' started out in the 14th century to mean somebody who
was inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity (such as a golf
hacker). In the 1970s, the word `hacker' was used by computer
enthusiasts to refer to themselves. This reflected the way enthusiasts
approach computers: they eschew formal education and play around with
the computer until they can get it to work. (In much the same way, a
golf hacker keeps hacking at the golf ball until they get it in the
hole)" (http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/hacking-dict.html).
[2] Bruce Sterling The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 51.
See also Hugo Cornwall's Hacker's Handbook (London: Century, 1988),
which characterizes the hacker as a benign explorer. Cornwall's position
highlights the differing attitudes between the US and Europe, where
hacking is much less criminalized and in many cases prima facie legal.
[3] Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York:
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), p. ix.
[4] This slogan is attributed to Stewart Brand, who wrote that "[o]n the
one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the
other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it
out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two
fighting against each other." See Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49.
[5] Many hackers believe that commercial software products are less
carefully crafted and therefore more prone to exploits. Perhaps the most
infamous example of such an exploit, one which critiques software's
growing commercialization, is the "BackOrifice" software application
created by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow. A satire of
Microsoft's "Back Office" software suite, BackOrifice acts as a Trojan
Horse to allow remote access to personal computers running Microsoft's
Windows operating system.
[6] For an excellent historical analysis of this transformation see
Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. Andrew Ross explains this
transformation by citing, as do Sterling and others, the increase of
computer viruses in the late eighties, especially "the viral attack
engineered in November 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris
on the national network system Internet. [.] While it caused little in
the way of data damage [.], the ramifications of the Internet virus have
helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday
`computer culture.'" See Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science,
and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 75.
[7] Knight Lightning, "Shadows Of A Future Past," Phrack, vol. 2, no.
21, file 3.
[8] Knight Lightning, "The Judas Contract," Phrack, vol. 2, no. 22, file
3.
[9] While many hackers use gender neutral pseudonyms, the online
magazine Phrack, with which The Mentor was associated, was characterized
by its distinctly male staff and readership. For a sociological
explanation of the gender imbalance within the hacking community, see
Paul Taylor, Hackers: Crime in the digital sublime (New York: Routledge,
1999), pp. 32-42.
[10] The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker," Phrack, vol. 1, no. 7,
file 3. http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/manifesto.html
[11] Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p. 184.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for
the Nanosecond Nineties (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 143-144. An older,
more decentralized (rather than distributed) style of organizational
management is epitomized by Peter Drucker's classic analysis of General
Motors in the thirties and forties. He writes that "General Motors
considers decentralization a basic and universally valid concept of
order." See Peter Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), p. 47.
[14] "Introduction," Phrack, v. 1, no. 9, phile [sic] 1.
[15] Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," in Alberro, et al.,
eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999),
p. 12. Thanks to Mark Tribe for bring this passage to my attention.
[16] See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1957). See also Fredric Jameson's engagement with this same subject in
"From Metaphor to Allegory" in Cynthia Davidson, Ed., Anything
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
[17] Friedrich Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge-Toward a
Theory of Hardware," nettime
(http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199902/msg00038.html).
[18] Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge."
[19] For an interesting commentary on the aesthetic dimensions of this
fact see Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward's "The Aesthetics of
Generative Code" (http://sidestream.org/papers/aesthetics/).
[20] Another is the delightfully schizophrenic Ted Nelson, inventor of
hypertext. See Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, WA:
Tempus/Microsoft, 1987).
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[21] Pierre L&#233;vy, L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du
cyberspace (Paris: &#201;ditions la D&#233;couverte, 1994), p. 120, translation
haha
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mine.
[22] Levy, Hackers, p. 53. In his 1972 Rolling Stone article on the
game, Steward Brand went so far as to publish Alan Kay's source code for
Spacewar right along side his own article, a practice rarely seen in
popular publications. See Brand, "SPACEWAR," p. 58.
[23] Richard Stallman, "The GNU Project," available online at
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html and in Chris Dibona (Editor),
et al, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol,
CA: O'Reilly, 1999).
[24] Ross, Strange Weather, p. 80.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
<from>Morlock Elloi</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 17 Jun 2002 21:28:20 -0700 (PDT)</date>
<content>&gt; Ethernet was invented at the University of Hawaii. Scientists there in
&gt; the early 1970s faced a unique problem: How to network different
&gt; campuses, each on different islands separated by water. The solution was
Nonsense.
I fart in your general direction with indignation.
Facts:
1970 - N. Abramson at the University of Hawaii designed ALOHA, ground based
radio packet network.
1972 Roberts, also of UoH, improved the bandwith by using time slots - "Slotted
ALOHA".
1976 - Metcalfe and Boggs of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto, CA) published a description
of a coaxial cable network, Ethernet.
=====
end
(of original message)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]</subject>
<from>nettime's digestion</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Jun 2002 14:28:40 -0400</date>
<content>Table of Contents:
How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
"clement Thomas" &lt;ctgr {AT} free.fr&gt;
Re: [thingist] How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
Peter von Brandenburg &lt;blackhawk {AT} thing.net&gt;
Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
RSG &lt;rsg {AT} rhizome.org&gt;
Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
Morlock Elloi &lt;morlockelloi {AT} yahoo.com&gt;
Re: &lt;nettime&gt; "How We Made Our Own "Carnivore""
Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck {AT} transmediale.de&gt;
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:18:18 +0200
From: "clement Thomas" &lt;ctgr {AT} free.fr&gt;
Subject: How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
rectificandoque !!
internet is invented in france by pavu.com and frederic Madre !!
and we farte the board with olive oil !
It is Marilyn Monroe who was invented in Hawai !
and 028 in Toulouse !
- --
OG
-------------
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:44:57 -0400
From: Peter von Brandenburg &lt;blackhawk {AT} thing.net&gt;
Subject: Re: [thingist] How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
Visita
Interiora
Terrae
Rectificando
Invenies
Occultem
Lapidem
clement Thomas wrote:
&gt; rectificandoque !!
&gt;
&gt; internet is invented in france by pavu.com and frederic Madre !!
&gt; and we farte the board with olive oil !
&gt;
&gt; It is Marilyn Monroe who was invented in Hawai !
&gt; and 028 in Toulouse !
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 13:47:54 -0400
From: RSG &lt;rsg {AT} rhizome.org&gt;
Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
true, Metcalfe and Boggs's invention was called "Ethernet." but by
attributing Ethernet to them, you will miss why Ethernet was designed the
way it was. all the important innovations were Abramson's, particularly
his solution to the problem of packet collision. sourcing the Ethernet
technology in radio also explains why it is based on an open broadcast
model and hence can be sniffed.
Metcalfe &amp; Boggs even cite Abramson's work in the introduction to their
1976 paper: "The Aloha Network at the University of Hawaii was originally
developed to apply packet radio techniques for communication between a
central computer and its terminals scattered among the Hawaiian
Islands..." (http://www.acm.org/classics/apr96/)
think before you fart.
- -RSG
http://rhizome.org/RSG
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 11:03:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Morlock Elloi &lt;morlockelloi {AT} yahoo.com&gt;
Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
&gt; true, Metcalfe and Boggs's invention was called "Ethernet." but by
&gt; attributing Ethernet to them, you will miss why Ethernet was designed
&gt; the way it was. all the important innovations were Abramson's,
&gt; particularly his solution to the problem of packet collision. sourcing
&gt; the Ethernet technology in radio also explains why it is based on an
&gt; open broadcast model and hence can be sniffed.
This is a bit off nettime topic ... it can be claimed for any bit moving
protocol that it descended from a previous older one. Technology learns
from it's history. I could enumarate tens of differences between ethernet
and Aloha - - whoever is interested in this should peek in, say,
Tannenbaum's Computer Networks. I could also prove that ATM is based on
switched ethernet. Or Sonet. And that ethernet itself is, in fact, morse
telegraph code with immaterial improvements.
So it's a matter of quantities and shades.
But no one today confuses ATM with ethernet and this is the first time I've
heard that Aloha and ethernet are essentially the same.
&gt; think before you fart.
Au contraire, it was carefully premeditated.
=====
end
(of original message)
Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 18:52:18 +0200
From: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck {AT} transmediale.de&gt;
Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; "How We Made Our Own "Carnivore""
dear RSG,
&gt;How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
although sympathetic to the exercise in general, it is difficult to
understand why in this new text posted on the discussion forum *nettime*
(apparently written for the ars electronica book, given the rhetoric) you
address neither the critique of 'screen saver art' that has been raised
against the program's clients, nor discuss the technical analysis offered
by the Moscow-jury which, from what i understand as a techno-idiot and
reading against the grain, basically says that your Carnivore program
offers nothing new under the sun??
given the self-acclamation of your text, it would be interesting if you
also were to engage the criticism.
best regards,
- -a
CARNIVORE by RSG http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/7/
Bosses currently use all kinds of elaborate software to spy on their
workers. Products like MailCensor (http://www.mailcensor.com) encourage
bosses to check for "unauthorized transmission of Email containing
confidential data" and "provide a safe and productive work environment for
employees, by filtering out offensive/inappropriate email from the
Internet."
On some networks, software can be installed by users to spy on their bosses
as well. Packet sniffers, used by systems administrators to diagnose
network problems, can often be used or modifed to do just that. Some
packet-sniffing software is expensive, some free:
http://www.tucows.com/, search on sniffer
http://www.softpile.com/search.phtml?query=sniffer&amp;pp=10&amp;in=title
The trouble is, most of this software wouldn't be easy for a non-technical
user to convert into a tool for gathering useful information. Those
products that are easy to use for corporate spying tend to have pricetags
that are easy for bosses and companies to afford but not for employees.
Among currently available sniffing products, the jury likes Ethereal
(http://www.ethereal.com), a free, cross-platform diagnostic tool that can
be used fairly easily by employees to spy on their boss's e-mail,
websurfing and other network communications.
An upcoming version of Rhizome's Carnivore is planned to make it easier for
an art audience to get involved in corporate spying. The jury hopes it
will do this. Since Carnivore is open source software, other people with
the appropriate programming expertise can also write such modifications
themselves. For now, Carnivore only runs on specialized servers, and it
doesn't gather data in a human-readable form.
The relationship of Rhizome's Carnivore to the FBI's spying tool of the
same name seems to be a matter of concept and hipness-value, but it is not
explained and is not very obvious.
...
&gt;The RSG Carnivore levels the playing field,
&gt;recasting art and culture as a scene of multilateral conflict rather
&gt;than unilateral domination. It opens the system up for collaboration
&gt;within and between client artists. It uses code to engulf and modify the
&gt;original FBI apparatus.
...
&gt;The prospect of reverse-engineering the original FBI software was
&gt;uninteresting to RSG. Crippled by legal and ethical limitations, the FBI
&gt;software needed improvement not emulation. Thus CarnivorePE features
&gt;exciting new functionality including artist-made diagnosic clients,
&gt;remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume
&gt;buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software
&gt;license. Reverse-engineering is not necessarily a simple mimetic
&gt;process, but a mental upgrade as well. RSG has no desire to copy the FBI
&gt;software and its many shortcomings. Instead, RSG longs to inject
&gt;progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and
&gt;transformative technology, packet sniffing. Our goal is to invent a new
&gt;use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero/terrorist dilemma
&gt;and instead dreams about a future use for networked data.
------------------------------
# distributed via &lt;nettime&gt;: no commercial use without permission
# &lt;nettime&gt; is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.3</nbr>
haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]</subject>
<from>RSG</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:32:59 -0400</date>
<content>&gt;From: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck {AT} transmediale.de&gt;
&gt;[...] discuss the technical analysis offered by the Moscow-jury which,
&gt;from what i understand as a techno-idiot and reading against the grain,
&gt;basically says that your Carnivore program offers nothing new under the sun??
as stated in our original post, Carnivore Personal Edition is rich with
new features not included in its FBI counterpart. Here are a few of
them:
1) artist-made diagnosic clients created by leading net artists around
the world
2) remote access--meaning clients can access CarnivorePE data streams
from other computers via the Internet
3) full subject targetting--meaning all users are sniffed, not just a
single user
4) full data targetting--all data is sniffed, not just email
5) volume buffering--to avoid packet storms, CarnivorePE can buffer
packet output to either 1, 5, 20, or 100 packets per second.
6) transport protocol filtering--meaning CarnivorePE can sniff on TCP or
UDP packets, or both
7) output channels--meaning clients can request one of three output
channels: "carnivore" for full packet data in ASCII, "hexivore" for full
packet data in hex, or "minivore" for packet headers only
8) an open source software license (a dramatic improvement over its
chief rival, Etherpeek, which isn't open source and costs $1,295)
9) a distributed rather than centralized architecture
most of these features are also missing in the various other sniffers
available including Snort and tcpdump.
instead of stumbling over technical details, perhaps the nettime
community can engage in a deeper critique of the software and its uses?
-RSG</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.4</nbr>
haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]</subject>
<from>Pit Schultz</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Jun 2002 03:55:36 +0200</date>
<content>* costs of success *
certainly this hacker tool is well crafted in many ways (2), reading about
it i first thought 'build for success', but does it's success make it a
'good' art work, a work one might talk about in a few years in a
respectful way? Surely it is symptomatic, but is carnivocre a work of art
which started an own genre, which made oneself look at the possiblities of
making art in a new way, a work of art which made it impossible to
continue to produce an accepted form of art in the old way? i don't say
that successful art (or software) is to be dismissed because of it's
success, but because what it might sacrificed to become successful (3),
beeing secondary consumers in the food chains.
* conceptual confusion *
i think carnivocre is as rationally planned as it is conceptually
confused. it doesn't provide a proper idea about the art context in its
relation to software. it provides an interface service. it hardly carries
an own concept of itself beeing software, nor beeing a piece of art. it is
neither social, nor critical but includes the discoursive gestures of
those features. especially if the techniques you mention are all
implemented properly, it is exactly this ambitious featuritis on all
levels which make the piece questionable as a piece of art, yes a filter,
but art? if it is not conceptual than why does it need such a long
description, if it is conceptual than why does it need to prove to perform
so well practically? if it is context sensitive then, isn't it first and
for all the context of the media art discourse it is produced for
providing a romantic version of the strange and beautiful digital
landscape of the united states? why then all the reference to be
functional outside of it? and if it will become a wildly used sniffing
tool, what is it that makes it different from other sniffing tools other
then aesthetification of the politics of packet sniffing?
* dog shows *
by beeing conformative to all sides and on all levels, carnivocre achieves
seemingly a high degree of customization. affirmative and critical, open
source and mysterious, practical and aesthetical, software and art, it
generates a heterogenous homogenity which has something for everyone but
says nothing in general. it doesn't make clear cuts but it boroughs from
all contexts one might think of as relevant for the targeted market. as
such it is designed like a new car model, a hyperopportunistic piece of
project management and it clearly reports more about the culture from
which it derives than about all the sources it tries to nourish itself
from. there is only one slight possibilty, that in another dimension by
showing all this, the work tries to overcome itself and all the meaning it
carries, beeing a parody of a pastiche (1), sending the observer in a loop
of salon data art for the purpose of salon data art, to produce a
beautifully crafted confused inertia.
1) pastiche, A work of art using a borrowed style and usually made up of
borrowed elements, but not necessarily a direct copy. A pastiche often
verges on conscious or unconscious caricature through its exaggeration of
what seems most typical in the original model. (Thames &amp; Hudson)
2) my critique on the softwareculture list, from 30Apr02
&gt;&gt;take the case of "carnivocre". it seems to include technological
criticism, but it is also working on the marketplace of forms, including
various 'styles' from ascii, to distributed networks, global maps,
surveillance, programming, p2p, and the beauty of code on the ground level
of tcp/ip. but finally it is showing the highest perfection on the level
of project management. the critique is symbolic, as there is no real
effect outside the art context. the technique is without relevance as
noone outside the art context is using it. but to the art system it looks
like it comes from the "other side", it interfaces it, makes it
'understandable' and fulfills the need for a criticism which doesn't
hurt.&lt;&lt;
3) see the discoursive meltdown arround Martin Walser's new (e)book in
germany. also on textz.com</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.5</nbr>
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]</subject>
<from>integer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Jun 2002 05:29:00 +0200 (CEST)</date>
<content>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]
ABSTRAKT: by looking through others' garbage.
&gt;&gt;instead of stumbling over technical details,
unfortunately your software is simply.technical
+ inspired by others software which is simply.permit someone to smile at your genetik garb.
&gt;perhaps the nettime
&gt;community
yes. prove it
&gt;can engage in a deeper critique of the software and its uses?
&gt;
&gt;-RSG
it is almost as interesting + elegant as 0101's life sharing
ie. it is almost as interesting + elegant as looking through others' garbage [genetik garbage if you like. sch....
difference being 0101 aren't americans hence aren't as ugly not terribly dressed
as rhizome simply.cheap fresh from the ny streets smurfs. [don't despair -
everyone works the streets more or less. artists just do it more oftenly]
nn
-
-
-
/_/
/
\ \/ i should like to be a human plant
\/ __
__/
i will shed leaves in the shade
\_\ because i like stepping on bugs
*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--
Netochka Nezvanova nezvanova {AT} eusocial.com
http://www.eusocial.com
http://www.ggttctttat.com/!
n r . 5 !!! http://steim.nl/leaves/petalz
*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*-- --*--*--*--*--*--*--</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.6</nbr>
haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Jun 2002 13:24:22 +0200</date>
<content>&gt;1) artist-made diagnosic clients created by leading net artists around
&gt;the world
what do these carnivore clients do? the engine replicates network
surveillance technology and the clients turn them into pretty images. is
there any level of agency involved? these 'diagnostic clients' come across
as _pure illustration_ and work best as screen-savers. what will be the
therapy that follows _this_ diagnosis?
i've said this before: i believe that it is grossly negligent to pretend
that somebody who looks at such an illustration understands anything about
the political background and impact of network surveillance systems. it is
all too slick and too pretty. in fact, the project would in my eyes first
have to prove that it is not exactly the kind of applied art project that
the FBI would commission in order to show how benign and in fact
_beautiful_ such control systems can be. i realise that the technology that
you have developed may be smart and differ from the fbi-carnivore - but
what are the chances that the clients will ever do anything more than what
they are doing now, in this important and prize-winning period? (maybe the
success should have been delayed?)
alex, you have to realise that it would be irritating and politically
counter-productive if somebody hyperbolically pushed a project called
ECHELON that would take feeds from all sorts of data streams and turn them
into ear-candy.
'Carnivore' - are we talking lions, wolves, dinosaurs? unfortunately and so
far, the flock of rsg-carnivores looks like dinosaurs on prozac, painted
pink and blue. the system may have teeth, but at least for the moment, it
has a digestive problem, for what comes out are not farts from hell, but
baby-poops. 'xcuse the language.
regards,
-a
ps:
&gt;instead of stumbling over technical details, perhaps the nettime
&gt;community can engage in a deeper critique of the software and its uses?
if you are really interested in this critique, why then use this
feature-happy promo-language of 'leading net artists around the world'
pasted over the layer of stardom-bound 'rsg' anonymity instead of 'engage
in a deeper critique of the software and its uses'?
(maybe you could also point out the ratio of artists living in
NYC/USA/beyond of this 'around the world' artists group? out of the 11
projects mentioned, 2 seem to be from outside the US - belgium and italy;
i'm sure both these failed imperial powers will be glad to represent 'the
world' ;-)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.7</nbr>
haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
xml ok
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<from>eye scratch&#129;</from>
haha
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<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Jun 2002 14:17:49 -0400</date>
<content>
[ this carnivore craze seems to find its spiritual ancestor in dancing --
you snatch a rhythm here, a beat there, a slight movement that denotes --
a melody. like sniffing packets to then create an assemblage, who knows --
perhaps we'll learn to read the results somehow, and respond --
like some huge cardiovascular system, limbic in essence --
again you can tune in to us on SUNDAY {AT}http://share.ffem.org --
take it to the grain -- es ]
MILLION MERMAID MARCH (Mermaid Parade tomorrow, Saturday)
June 13, 2002, New York, NY -- Legalize Dancing NYC (LDNYC) and The Dance
Liberation Front (DLF) are joining forces to fight NYC's cabaret laws in the
2002 Coney Island Mermaid Parade and extending an open invitation to all of
New York City to join us in the fight for our right to dance!
The two groups are sponsoring a "Million Mermaid March" float and inviting
all Mermaids (as well as Neptunes and other aquatic life forms) to march with
us in fighting to deregulate dance in New York City.
You can join "the Million Mermaid March" at West 16th Street in Coney Island
between 10 a.m.-- 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 22nd where we will be
decorating vehicles and ourselves. The Mermaid Parade commences at 2:00 p.m..
We are encouraging everyone to bring percussion instruments and/or whistles.
To get to Coney Island by train take the F, Q or W trains to Stillwell
Avenue-Coney Island (the last stop) which will let you out on Surf Ave. 16th
Street is a couple of blocks away. Be on the lookout for after party
on the beach! (w/ soca and hip hop from Danny Casolaro, BK)
While it may sounds like a joke, the NYC cabaret laws are very real and have
for the last several years adversely affected our city's economy, culture and
community. These antiquated statutes were originally written during
prohibition in the 1920s and made it illegal to dance in any establishment
without a cabaret license--which are now virtually impossible to obtain. The
cabaret laws were resurrected the in the late-90s by the Giuliani
administration and were selectively enforced causing hundreds of
establishments undue economic hardship and damaging NYC's once-vibrant dance
culture.
We assert that dancing is a fundamental right that need not be regulated by
government; that a flourishing dance culture is good for the NYC economy and
culture; and that dancing fosters positive social relations making for a
stronger and healthier community. Outside of the dance regulations, our group
supports safety codes, capacity limits, noise statues, drug and alcohol laws,
and any other laws in the best interest of the NYC community.
Legalize Dancing NYC is currently working with City Councilmen Alan Gerson,
other pro-dance organizations (DLF, Yehoodi, Mother, etc.), the New York
Nightlife Association, civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, NYU Law Professor
Paul Chevigny, the Bloomberg administration, local business owners, and the
NYC community at large to introduce pro-dance legislation to the New York
City Council. With your support, these laws will be repealed. We are planning
a massive rally in Tompkins Square Park for late September to coincide with
the legislation. We are also holding a fundraiser July 17th at the Slipper
Room in Manhattan.
For more information on the Mermaid Parade go to:
http://www.coneyisland.com/mermaid.shtml
To join Legalize Dancing NYC and find out what's going on in our efforts to
legalize dance send a blank email to
nodancingallowed-subscribe {AT} yahoogroups.com
For more information on the cabaret laws log onto www.nodancingallowed.com
To volunteer to help out with the Million Mermaid March and/or Legalize
Dancing NYC email NYCandyg {AT} aol.com or call 212-673-4182 and press #2 to leave
a message.
To read a Village Voice articles about Legalize Dancing go to::
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/sotc.php (last item)
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/romano.php (Last item)
--
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N!C3 S!MULC4ST STR34M!!! hTTp://share.ffem.org</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.8</nbr>
haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sat, 22 Jun 2002 01:36:29 +0200</date>
<content>Am Thu, 20.Jun.2002 um 15:32:59 -0400x schrieb RSG:
&gt; &gt;From: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck {AT} transmediale.de&gt;
&gt; &gt;[...] discuss the technical analysis offered by the Moscow-jury which,
&gt; &gt;from what i understand as a techno-idiot and reading against the grain,
&gt; &gt;basically says that your Carnivore program offers nothing new under the sun??
&gt;
&gt; as stated in our original post, Carnivore Personal Edition is rich with
&gt; new features not included in its FBI counterpart.
FBI's "Carnivore" is, as far as known, an Ethernet sniffer set up to do
very specific/particular tasks, like sniffing only E-Mail of only one
person (see: &lt;http://www.howstuffworks.com/carnivore3.htm&gt;). As the FBI
puts it itself:
"The Carnivore device works much like commercial "sniffers" and other
network diagnostic tools used by ISPs every day, except that it
provides the FBI with a unique ability to distinguish between
communications which may be lawfully intercepted and those which may
not."
"RSG Carnivore" has no such encoded sniffing rulesets. It is yet another
of the many Ethernet sniffing programs out there, except that its output
is meant for "Net.art" visualization front-ends or, to use your
terminology, "plugins".
The "RSG Carnivore" we - i.e. the Moscow read_me 1.2 jury - reviewed was
a simple Perl script wrapper around the well-known standard Linux/Unix
program "tcpdump" and another third-party program that converted the
latter's binary output into ASCII. "tcpdump" did the actual sniffing (or
"surveillance", the "Carnivore" Perl scripts only transferred the output
to the web so that it could be used by Net.art visualization "plugins".
This, I assume, was also the version of "RSG Carnivore" which the ars
electronica jury reviewed and awarded.
The new "RSG Carnivore PE" differs from the old "RSG Carnivore" in that
it is not a Linux/Unix, but a Windows program, and that it doesn't need
to be installed on servers. It is written in Visual Basic instead of
Perl and uses the third-party software WinPcap
&lt;http://winpcap.polito.it/&gt; as its sniffing engine, instead of tcpdump.
Of the 9 differences you find in "RSG Carnivore" as opposed to other
Ethernet sniffing tools, I could validate at least the first:
&gt; 1) artist-made diagnosic clients created by leading net artists around
&gt; the world
Concerning the rest:
&gt; 2) remote access--meaning clients can access CarnivorePE data streams
&gt; from other computers via the Internet
Trivial to implement if you combine an ethernet sniffer with a webserver
or file sharing tool, like
tethereal -x &gt; sniffdata.txt
...and then share this file in Gnutella or a locally running webserver.
&gt; 3) full subject targetting--meaning all users are sniffed, not just a
&gt; single user
Any network sniffing software I know does this. (Ethereal, dsniff,
ettercap...)
&gt; 4) full data targetting--all data is sniffed, not just email
As above.
What you write sounds reads a hackish prank; a hack to sell
trivial/commonplace functionality as extraordinary to people who, due to
their non-technical background, can't judge it.
man ethereal:
The following is a table of protocol and protocol fields that are
filterable in Ethereal.
802.1q Virtual LAN (vlan)
[...]
802.1x Authentication (eapol)
[...]
AOL Instant Messenger (aim)
[...]
ATM (atm)
[...]
Address Resolution Protocol (arp)
[...]
Appletalk Address Resolution Protocol (aarp)
[...]
[...]
Cisco Auto-RP (auto_rp)
[...]
[Skipping dozens and hundreds of protocols]
&gt; 5) volume buffering--to avoid packet storms, CarnivorePE can buffer
&gt; packet output to either 1, 5, 20, or 100 packets per second.
man ethereal:
-b If a maximum capture file size was specified, cause Ethereal to
run in "ring buffer" mode, with the specified number of
files. In "ring buffer" mode, Ethereal will write to
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several capture files; the name of the first file, while the cap&#173;
haha
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ture is in progress, will be the name specified
by the -w flag, and subsequent files with have
.n appended, with n counting up.
&gt; 6) transport protocol filtering--meaning CarnivorePE can sniff on TCP or
&gt; UDP packets, or both
man ethereal, continued from 4):
User Datagram Protocol (udp)
udp.checksum Checksum
Unsigned 16-bit integer
udp.checksum_bad Bad Checksum
Boolean
udp.dstport Destination Port
Unsigned 16-bit integer
udp.length Length
Unsigned 16-bit integer
udp.port Source or Destination Port
Unsigned 16-bit integer
udp.srcport Source Port
Unsigned 16-bit integer
man ettercap:
-u, --udp
sniff only UDP packets (default is TCP).
&gt; 7) output channels--meaning clients can request one of three output
&gt; channels: "carnivore" for full packet data in ASCII, "hexivore" for full
&gt; packet data in hex, or "minivore" for packet headers only
man ethereal:
It can assemble all the packets in a TCP conversation and
show you the ASCII (or EBCDIC, or hex) data in that conversation.
Display filters in Ethereal are very powerful; more
fields are filterable in Ethereal than in other protocol
analyzers, and the syntax you can use to create your filters is
richer. As Ethereal progresses, expect more and more protocol
fields to be allowed in display filters.
&gt; 8) an open source software license (a dramatic improvement over its
&gt; chief rival, Etherpeek, which isn't open source and costs $1,295)
Looking up...
/usr/doc/ethereal/copyright:
[...]
GPL, as evidenced by existence of GPL license file "COPYING".
(the GNU GPL may be viewed on Debian systems in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL)
/usr/doc/dsniff/copyright:
[...]
Copyright: Copyright (c) 1999, 2000 Dug Song &lt;dugsong {AT} monkey.org&gt;
All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. The name of author may not be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
/usr/doc/ettercap/copyright:
[...]
Ettercap is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
The GPL licence can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses on modern
Debian systems.
&gt; 9) a distributed rather than centralized architecture
&gt;
&gt; most of these features are also missing in the various other sniffers
&gt; available including Snort and tcpdump.
(See point 2.)
&gt; instead of stumbling over technical details, perhaps the nettime
&gt; community can engage in a deeper critique of the software and its uses?
A deeper critique would be that the
developer team of "Ethereal", a free cross-plattform (Linux/Unix and
Windows) tool which offers everything you describe except the Net.art
"plugins", should have run
s/Ethereal/Carnivore/g
over their sourcecode and sold it as a "critical", "political",
"subversive", "provocative" etc. piece of software (art), and that
perhaps this is what the RSG hacktivism is actually about. Next we sell
"Norton Unerase" + some fancy "Net.art" visualization backend as a
critical software art piece on personal data privacy.
The bottomline: "RSG Carnivore" is a packet sniffer for the purpose of
creating aestheticized visualizations. I appreciate that because I often
run packet-sniffers to entertain myself with accidental concrete poetry
(particularly radical and sexually intense if you sniff on Gnutella
connections). But you agree that, as aesthetic sniffing, it is
different from the targetted law-enforcement packet sniffing of FBI
Carnivore whose algorithmic intelligence is spent on the input backend,
not on the output frontend.
I am also in in tune with exploiting ready-made software concepts and
tools. (I even think RSG could have saved much effort by working with a
high-level cross-platform tool like "Ethereal" right away instead of
writing its own Perl/Visual Basic wrappers around low-level sniffing
engines.)
The difference between FBI Carnivore and commonplace packet sniffers
shows that the difference is in the targetting and the particular
application. In the Moscow jury, we just failed to see the rhetoric
implied in the title "Carnivore" (and the subsequent political rhetoric
you posted here) backed-up in the piece.
Meanwhile, though, I changed my mind and think our objections were
premature. While the targetting and application of "RSG Carnivore" might
be different from FBI Carnivore on the technical level, it is not so
different on the discursive level. Because "RSG Carnivore", as it turns
out, are not those who run it and let it sniff their networks, but the
net.art world itself, as obvious in this thread it provoked. "RSG
Carnivore" was sophisticatedly at work when Olga Goriunova posted the
read_me 1.2 jury statement, but rhizome-digest of June 2nd, 2002
included it in a version modified by the rhizome editors that skipped
all of our frivolous remarks about "RSG Carnivore", passing it as Olga's
original E-Mail though, without any editorial annotation or typographic
[...] markup. This was Carnivore at work: The implied appeal to readers
to critically question media-fabricated truth (whether by the
syndication of, say, ABC News and Disney or rhizome.org and RSG
Carnivore) by matching rhizome-digest against rhizome-raw showed what
the piece was actually about. Contrary to what Andreas criticized, the
"Net.art"-themed screensaver output turned out to be a clever means of
tactical distraction from thei actual piece.
You call your award-winning piece "Carnivore" instead of (seemingly more
appropriate) "Rhizome Community Network Sniffer"; this honesty is much
appreciated!
Florian</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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haha
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<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
<from>Are Flagan</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sat, 22 Jun 2002 13:02:43 -0400</date>
<content>On 6/21/02 7:36 PM, "Florian Cramer" &lt;cantsin {AT} zedat.fu-berlin.de&gt; wrote:
&gt; The bottomline: "RSG Carnivore" is a packet sniffer for the purpose of
&gt; creating aestheticized visualizations.
First: A word of appreciation for the technical outline Florian Cramer
provided.
Due to the _transcoding_ principle, the net art scene has of course become
inundated with projects that offer a visual and highly anesthetized
treatment/display of data streams, collected by various methods such as user
input, network sniffing, search engines, and so on. What seems almost
collectively to be lacking in this _artistic_ processing are efforts to
invoke an intelligence at the front end: why those algorithms, this
appearance, these rules? At this juncture, these endeavors may rise from the
level of ability to utility (like the FBI has made very clear). Any critique
leveled at the increased surveillance of the network must surely start from
the base presumption that the bitstream channels knowledge and not pretty
pictures for the screen.
-af</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>8.10</nbr>
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sat, 22 Jun 2002 21:11:24 -0400</date>
<content>The question that Florian Cramer raises -- whether or not RSC Carnivore is
technically innovative or simply repackaging existing functionality -- is
valid. I accept his technological knowledge, amply displayed, based on
which he claims that, indeed, the project is mainly repackaging. However,
the critique also strikes me as overly narrow.
The FBI Carnivore is not just a sophisticated packet sniffing program, but
it is part of a larger techno-administrational set-up in which the program
performs very specific things that no other packet sniffing software does:
providing intelligence for secret law enforcement operations. Carnivore
only is Carnivore because it's embedded in a framework that allows the US
government to act upon intelligence gathered through it.
The difference between Carnivore and other sniffers is that Carnivore can
get you detained. If you're unlucky these days, indefinitely without a
trial. In other words, Carnivore is not just a program, but an integral
element of a law enforcement strategy.
Any critique of the an art work dealing with FBI's Carnivore must consider
how it addresses the various aspects of the entire process of carnivore,
ie. the all those things that turn the packet sniffing program to Carnivore.
&gt;From: Randall Packer &lt;rpacker {AT} zakros.com&gt;
&gt;Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"
[....]
&gt;In my mind, it is important to keep in mind that the Carnivore
&gt;software itself is the focal point of the project. At this early
&gt;stage, I think the applications being developed are skimming the
&gt;surface of what is possible. The use of network data to generate
&gt;real-time visual and musical experiences is clearly in its infancy.
Randall Packer points approvingly to what strikes me as the real problem
with RSC Carnivore. Despite iclaims to the contrary -- and including
"Carnivore" in the title is a strong claim to political relevance -- its
objectives are primarily aesthetic. Traffic data is taken to be input for
visual displays. Their quality is dertimed by the fact that they were
"created by leading net artists around the world," rather than by the fact
that they reveal otherwise hidden patterns in the data streams.
However, the claim that we now have "our own Carnivore" somehow suggests
that we have your own intelligence gathering capacities. It implies that we
can somehow turn the tables, that were are not only spied on, but we have
the ability to observe back, and to observe in a meaningful way. And with
meaningful I mean that the process of observing yields information that
allows us to act effectively upon the observed.
&gt;From what I have seen, RSA Carnivore offers little in this regard. So,
perhaps rather than calling the explanatory essay "How we built our own
Carnivore" it seems to have been more accurate to call it "How to visualize
data traffic". I admit this is less sexy, but at least it doesn't come
dangerously close to false advertising.
Felix</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>9.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Concepts, Notations, Software, Art</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 6 Jun 2002 17:00:59 +0200</date>
<content>[Note: This paper was written for the catalogue of read_me 1.2/Moscow
and is also reprinted in the user manual of Signwave Auto Illustrator. -
It's an both an update on an older paper On Software Artt I wrote with
Ulrike Gabriel &amp; attempt to clarify (a) what 'software [art]' is and (b)
how software art may differ from older generative art. - The paper is
also available at:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software_art/concept_notations//concepts_notations_software_art.pdf
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software_art/concept_notations//concepts_notations_software_art.html
-Florian]
t
$Id: concepts_notations_software_art.tex,v 1.1 2002/03/25 01:09:31 paragram Exp $
Concepts, Notations, Software, Art
Florian Cramer
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c/o Freie Universit&#228;t Berlin
Seminar f&#252;r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
H&#252;ttenweg 9
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D-14195 Berlin
cantsin {AT} zedat.fu-berlin.de
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin
March 23rd, 2002
Software and Concept Notations
Software in the Arts
To date, critics and scholars in the arts and humanities have considered
computers primarily as storage and display media, as something which transmits
and reformats images, sound and typography. Reflection of the as such invisible
layer of software is rare. Likewise, the term ``digital art'' has been
associated primarily with digital images, music or audiovisual installations
using digital technology. The software which controls the audio and the visuals
is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes.
``Interactive'' room installations, for example, get perceived as a
interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as
systems running on code. This observation all the more applies to works in
which it is not obvious at all that their production relied on programmation
and computing. John Cage's 1981 radio play ``Roaratorio'', for example, appears
to be a tape montage of a spoken text based on James Joyce's ``Finnegans
Wake'', environmental sounds recorded in several cities of the world and Irish
folk music, edited with analog recording technology. Yet at the same time it is
an algorithmic artwork; the spoken text was extracted from the novel using a
purely syntactical, formal method (mesostychs of the name ``James Joyce''), and
the montage was done according to a random score generated on a computer at the
Parisian IRCAM studios. While the book-plus-CD set of ``Roarotorio'' documents
the whole composition extensively, containing the audio piece itself, a
recording and a reprint of John Cage's reading, a recording and a reprint of an
interview, an inventory of the cities where sound was recorded, it includes the
computer-generated score itself only in a one-page excerpt and nothing at all
of the computer program code which generated the random score.{1}
The history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history
of ignorance against programming and programmers. Computer programs get locked
into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota,
coding slaves who execute other artist's concepts. Given that software code is
a conceptual notation, this is not without its own irony. In fact, it is a
straight continuation of romanticist philosophy and its privileging of
aisthesis (perception) over poeisis (construction),{2} cheapened into a
restrained concept of art as only that what is tactile, audible and visible.
The digital arts themselves participate in this accomplicity when they call
themselves [new] ``media art''. There's nothing older than ``new media'', a
term which is little more than a superficial justification for lumping together
a bunch of largely unrelated technologies, such as analog video and computing,
just because they were ``new'' at a particular time. If one defines as a medium
something that it is between a sender and a receiver, then computers are not
only media, but also senders and receivers which themselves are capable of
writing and reading, interpreting and composing messages within the limitations
of the rule sets inscribed into them. The computer programs for example which
calculate the credit line of checking accounts or control medical instruments
in an emergency station can't be meaningfully called ``media''. If at all,
computer processes become ``media'' only by the virtue that computers can
emulate any machine, including all technical media, and by the virtue of the
analog interfaces which transform the digital zeros and ones into analog sound
waves, video signals, print type and vice versa.
A Crash Course in Programming
A piece of software is a set of formal instructions, or, algorithms; it is a
logical score put down in a code. It doesn't matter at all which particular
sign system is used as long as it is a code, whether digital zeros and ones,
the Latin alphabet, Morse code or, like in a processor chip, an exactly defined
set of registers controlling discrete currents of electricity. If a piece of
software is a score, is it then by definition an outline, a blueprint of an
executed work?
Imagine a Dadaist poem which makes random variations of Hugo Ball's sound poem
``Karawane'' (``Caravan''):
KARAWANE
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jolifanto bambla &#244; falli bambla
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grossiga m'pfa habla horem
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&#233;giga goramen
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higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
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&#252; &#252;&#252; &#252;
schampa wulla wussa &#243;lobo
hej taat g&#244;rem
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eschige zunbada
wulebu ssubudu uluw ssubudu
tumba ba-umpf
kusagauma
ba-umpf
The new Dada poem could simply consists of eight variations of the line ``tumba
ba-umpf''. The author/performer could throw a coin twice for each line and,
depending on the result, choose to write down either the word ``tumba'' or
``ba-umpf'', so that the result would look like:
tumba tumba
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf
ba-umpf ba-umpf
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf
The instruction code for this poem could be written as follows:
1. Take a coin of any kind with two distinct sides.
2. Repeat the following set of instructions eight times:
a. Repeat the following set of instructions twice:
i. Throw the coin.
ii. Catch it with your palm so that it lands on one side.
iii. If the coin shows the upper side, do the following:
# Say "tumba"
iv. Else do the following:
# Say "ba-umpf"
b. Make a brief pause to indicate the end of the line.
3. Make a long pause to indicate the end of the poem.
Since these instructions are formal and precise enough to be as well executed
by a machine (imagine this poem implemented into a modified cuckoo clock), they
can be translated line by line into a computer program. Just as the above
instruction looks different depending on the language it is written in, a
computer program looks different depending on the programming language used.
Here I choose the popular language ``Perl'' whose basic instructions are rather
simple to read:
for $lines (1 .. 8)
{
for $word (1 .. 2)
{
$random_number = int(rand(2));
if ($random_number == 0)
{
print "tumba"
}
else
{
print "ba-umpf"
}
print " "
}
print "\n"
}
The curly brackets enclose statement blocks executed under certain conditions,
the $ prefix designates a variable which can store arbitrary letters or
numbers, the ``rand(2)'' function generates a random value between 0 and 1.9,
``int'' rounds its result to either zero or one, `` '' stands for a blank, ``
n'' for a line break. This program can be run on virtually any computer; it is
a simple piece of software. Complex pieces of software, such as computer
operating systems or even computer games, differ from the above only in the
complexity of their instructions. The control structures - variable
assignments, loops, conditional statements - are similar in all programming
languages.
Unlike in the instruction for throwing coins, the artists' work is done once
the code is written. A computer program is a blueprint and its execution at the
same time. Like a pianola roll, it is a score performing itself. The artistic
fascination of computer programming - and the perhaps ecstatic revelation of
any first-time programmer - is the equivalence of architecture and building,
the instant gratification given once the concept has been finished. Computer
programming collapses, as it seems, the second and third of the three steps of
concept, concept notation and execution.
Contrary to conventional data like digitized images, sound and text documents,
the algorithmic instruction code allows a generative process. It uses computers
for computation, not only as storage and transmission media. And this precisely
distinguishes program code from non-algorithmic digital code, describing for
example the difference between algorithmic composition on the one hand and
audio CDs/mp3 files on the other, between algorithmically generated text and
``hypertext'' (a random access database model which as such doesn't require
algorithmic computation at all), or between a graphical computer ``demo'' and a
video tape. Although one can of course use computers without programming them,
it is impossible not to use programs at all; the question only is who programs.
There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no
digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or
design themselves.
To discuss ``software art'' simply means to not take software for granted, but
pay attention to how and by whom programs were written. If data doesn't exist
without programs, it follows that the separation of processed ``data'' (like
image and sound files) from ``programs'' is simply a convention. Instead, data
could be directly embedded into the algorithms used for its transmission and
output to external devices. Since a ``digital photograph'' for example is
bit-mapped information algorithmically transformed into the electricity
controlling a screen or printer, via algorithmic abstraction layers in the
computer operating system, it follows that it could just as well be coded into
a file which contains the whole transformation algorithms themselves so that
the image would display itself even on a computer that provides no operating
system.{3}
Software Art
Executable Code in Art
If software is generally defined as executable formal instructions, logical
scores, then the concept of software is by no means limited to formal
instructions for computers. The first, English-language notation of the Dadaist
poem qualifies as software just as much as the three notations in the Perl
programming language. The instructions only have to meet the requirement of
being executable by a human being as well as by a machine. A piano score, even
a 19th century one, is software when its instruction code can be executed by a
human pianist as well as on a player piano.
The Perl code of the Dada poem can be read and executed even without running it
on machines. So my argument is quite contrary to Friedrich Kittler's media
theory according to which there is either no software at all or at least no
software without the hardware it runs on:{4} If any algorithm can be executed
mentally, as it was common before computers were invented, then of course
software can exist and run without hardware. - A good example are programming
handbooks. Although they chiefly consist of printed computer code, this code
gets rarely ever executed on machines, but provides examples which readers
follow intellectually, following the code listings step by step and computing
them in their minds.
Instead of adapting Dadaist poetry as software, one could regard some
historical Dadaist works as software right away; above all, Tristan Tzara's
generic instruction for writing Dada poems by shuffling the words of a
newspaper article{5}:
To make a Dadaist poem:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out
the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a
bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they
left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a
sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
The poem is effectively an algorithm, a piece of software which may as well be
written as a computer program.{6}. If Tzara's process would be adapted as Perl
or C code from the original French, it wouldn't be a transcription of something
into software, but a transcription of non-machine software into machine
software.
Concept Art and Software Art
The question of what software is and how it relates to non-electronic
contemporary art is at least thirty-two years old. In 1970, the art critic and
theorist Jack Burnham curated an exhibition called "Software" at the Jewish
Museum of New York which today is believed to be first show of concept art. It
featured installations of US-American concept artists next installations of
computer software Burnham found interesting, such as the first prototype of Ted
Nelson's hypertext system ``Xanadu''. Concept art as an art ``of which the
material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound'' (Henry
Flynt's definition from 1961{7}) and software art as an art whose material is
formal instruction code seem to have at least two things in common:
1. the collapsing of concept notation and execution into one piece;
2. the use of language; instructions in software art, concepts in concept art.
Flynt observes: ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with language,
concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language''.{8}
It therefore is not accidental that the most examples of pre-electronic
software art cited here are literary. Literature is a conceptual art in
that is not bound to objects and sites, but only to language. The trouble
the art world has with net.art because it does not display well in
exhibition spaces is foreign to literature which always differentiated
between an artwork and its material appearance.
Since formal language is a language, software can be seen and read as a
literature.{9}
If concepts become, to quote Flynt again, artistic``material'', then concept
art differs from other art in that it actually exposes concepts, putting their
notations up front as the artwork proper. In analogy, software art in
particular differs from software-based art in general in that it exposes its
instructions and codedness. Since formal instructions are a subset of
conceptual notations, software art is, formally, a subset of conceptual art.
My favorite example of both concept art in Flynt's sense and non-computer
software art is La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'', a piece of paper
containing the written instruction ``Draw a straight line and follow it''. The
instruction is unambiguous enough to be executed by a machine. At the same
time, a thorough execution is physically impossible. So the reality of piece is
mental, conceptual.
The same duplicity of concept notation and executable code exists in Sol
LeWitt's 1971 ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'', a series of book pages giving
the reader exact instructions to draw lines on them or strike out specific
letters.{10} LeWitt's piece exemplifies that the art called concept art since
the 1970s was by far not as rigorous as the older concept art of Henry Flynt,
La Monte Young and Christer Hennix: While the ``Composition 1961'' is a concept
notation creating an artwork that itself exists only as a concept, mentally,
LeWitt's ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'' only is a concept notation of a
material, graphic artwork. Unlike the concept art ``of which the material is
`concepts''', LeWitt's piece belongs to a concept art that rather should be
called a concept notation art or ``blueprint art''; an art whose material is
graphics and objects, but which was instead realized in the form of a score. By
thus reducing its its own material complexity, the artwork appears to be
``minimalist'' rather than rigorously conceptualist.
A writing which writes itself, LeWitt's ``Plan'' could also be seen in a
historical continuity of combinatory language speculations: From the
permutational algorithms in the Sefer Jezirah and ecstatic Kabbalah to the
medieval ``ars'' of Raimundus Lullus to 17th century permutational poetry and
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Mallarm&#233;'s ``Livre''. The combinatory most complex known permutation poem,
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Quirinus Kuhlmann's 1771 sonnet ``Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen'' consists of
13*12 nouns can be arbitrarily shuffled so that they result in 10114
permutations of the text.{11} Kuhlmann's and La Monte Young's software arts
meet in their aesthetic extremism; in an afterword, Kuhlmann claims that there
are more permutations of his poem than grains of sand on the earth.{12} If such
implications lurk in code, a formal analysis is not enough. Concept art
potentially means terror of the concept, software art terror of the algorithm;
a terror grounded in the simultaneity of minimalist concept notation and
totalitarian execution, helped by the fact that software collapses the concept
notation and execution in the single medium of instruction code. - Sade's ``120
days of Sodom'' could be read as a recursive programming of excess and its
simultaneous reflection in the medium of prose.{13} The popularity of spamming
and denial-of-service code in the contemporary digital arts is another
practical proof of the perverse double-bind between software minimalism and
self-inflation; the software art pieces awarded at the transmediale.02
festival, ``tracenoizer'' and ``forkbomb.pl'' also belong to this category.
La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'' not only provokes to rethink what
software and software art is. Being the first and still most elegant example of
all artistic jamming and denial-of-service code, it also addresses the
aesthetics and politics coded into instructions. Two years before Burnham's
``Software'' exhibition, the computer scientist Donald E. Knuth published the
first volume of his famous textbook on computer programming, ``The Art of
Computer Programming''.{14} Knuth's wording has adopted in what Steven Levy
calls the hacker credo that ``you can create art and beauty with computers''.
{15} It is telling that hackers, otherwise an avant-garde of a broad cultural
understanding of digital technology, rehash a late-18th century classicist
notion of art as beauty, rewriting it into a concept of digital art as inner
beauty and elegance of code. But such aesthetic conservativism is widespread in
engineering and hard-science cultures; fractal graphics are just one example of
Neo-Pythagorean digital kitsch they promote. As a contemporary art, the
aesthetics of software art includes ugliness and monstrosity just as much as
beauty, not to mention plain dysfunctionality, pretension and political
incorrectness.{16}
Above all, software art today no longer writes its programs out of nothing, but
works within an abundance of available software code. This makes it distinct
from works like Tzara's Dada poem which, all the while it addresses an
abundance of mass media information, contaminates only the data, not its
algorithm; the words become a collage, but the process remains a synthetic
clean-room construct.
Since personal computers and the Internet became popular, software code in
addition to data has come to circulate in abundance. One thus could say that
contemporary software art operates in a postmodern condition in which it takes
pre-existing software as material - reflecting, manipulating and
recontextualizing it. The ``mezangelle'' writing of mez, an Australian net
artist, for example uses software and protocol code as material for writings in
a self-invented hybrid of English and pseudo-code. Her ``net.wurks'' are an
unclean, broken software art; instead of constructing program code
synthetically, they use readymade computations, take them apart and read their
syntax as gendered semantics. In similar fashion, much software art plays with
control parameters of software. Software artworks like Joan Leandre's
``retroyou'' and ``Screen Saver'' by Eldar Karhalev and Ivan Khimin are simply
surprising, mind-challenging disconfigurations of commercial user software: a
car racing game, the Microsoft Windows desktop interface. They manage to put
their target software upside down although their interventions are technically
simple and don't involve low-level programming at all.
Software Formalism vs. Software Culturalism
Much of what is discussed as contemporary software art and discourse on has its
origin in two semi-coherent London-based groups. The older one around Matthew
Fuller, Graham Harwood and the groups I/O/D and Mongrel is known, among others,
for the experimental web browser ``WebStalker'', which instead of formatted
pages displays their source code and link structures, the ``Linker'', a piece
of ``social software'' (to use a term by Fuller) designed to empower
non-literate users to design their own digital information systems, and
``natural selection'', a politically manipulated web search engine. Fuller also
wrote a scrupulous cultural analysis of Microsoft Word's user interface and an
essay with the programmatic title ``Software as Culture''. The other group
involves the programmer-artists Adrian Ward (whose ``Auto-Illustrator'' won the
transmediale.01 software art prize) and Alex McLean (whose ``forkbomb.pl'' won
the transmediale.02 software art prize), the theoretician Geoff Cox and
participants in the mailing list ``eu-gene'', the web site http://
www.generative.net and the ``DorkBot'' gatherings in London (which involve
poetry readings of program code). Both groups take exactly opposite standpoints
to software art and software criticism: While Fuller/Harwood regard software as
first of all a cultural, politically coded construct, the eu-gene group rather
focuses on the formal poetics and aesthetics of software code and individual
subjectivity expressed in algorithms.
If software art could be generally defined as an art
* of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or
* which addresses cultural concepts of software,
then each of their positions sides with exactly one of the two aspects. If
Software Art would be reduced to only the first, one would risk ending up a
with a neo-classicist understanding of software art as beautiful and elegant
code along the lines of Knuth and Levy. Reduced on the other hand to only the
cultural aspect, Software Art could end up being a critical footnote to
Microsoft desktop computing, potentially overlooking its speculative potential
at formal experimentation. Formal reflections of software are, like in this
text, inevitable if one considers common-sense notions of software a problem
rather than a point of departure; histories of instruction codes in art and
investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still
remain to be written.
References
[Cag82]
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John Cage. Roaratorio. Ein irischer Circus &#252;ber Finnegans Wake. Athen&#228;um,
K&#246;nigstein/Taunus, 1982.
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[CWM01]
Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward, and Alex McLean. The Aesthetics of Generative Code,
2001. http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/index.html.
[Fly61]
Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors, An
Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961).
[Hon71]
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Klaus Honnef, editor. Concept Art. Phaidon, K&#246;ln, 1971).
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[Kit91]
Friedrich Kittler. There is no software, 1991. http://textz.gnutenberg.net/
textz/kittler_friedrich_there_is_no_software.txt.
[Kuh71]
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Quirinus Kuhlmann. Himmlische Libes=k&#252;sse. ?, Jena, 1671.
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[Lev84]
Steven Levy. Hackers. Project Gutenberg, Champaign, IL, 1986 (1984).
[Mol71]
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Abraham A. Moles. Kunst und Computer. DuMont, K&#246;ln, 1973 (1971).
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[Tza75]
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Tristan Tzara. Pour fair une po&#269;me dada&#271;ste. In Oeuvres compl&#269;tes.
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Gallimard, Paris, 1975.
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&#352;This document can be freely copied and used according to the terms of the Open
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Publication License http://www.opencontent.org/openpub
Footnotes:
{1} [Cag82] - Regarding randomness generated with computers, the software
artist Ulrike Gabriel says that it doesn't exist because the machine as a fact
by itself is not accidental.
{2} A similar angle is taken in the paper ``The Aesthetic of Generative Code''
by Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean, [CWM01]
{3} I would not be surprised if in a near future the media industry would embed
audiovisual data (like a musical recording) directly into proprietary one-chip
hardware players to prevent digital copies.
{4} [Kit91]
{5} [Tza75]
{6} My own Perl CGI adaption is available under "http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/
~cantsin/permutations/tzara/poeme_dadaiste.cgi"
{7} [Fly61]
{8} ibid.
{9} But since formal language is only a small subset of language as a whole,
conclusions drawn from observing software code can't be generally applied to
all literature.
{10} [Hon71], p. 132-140
{11} [Kuh71]
{12} ibid.
{13} As Abraham M. Moles noticed already in 1971, [Mol71], p. 124
{14} knuth:art
{15} according Steven Levy [Lev84]; among those who explicitly subscribe to
this is the German Chaos Computer Club with its annual ``art and beauty
workshop''.
{16} which is why I think would be wrong to (a) restrict software art to only
properly running code and (b) exclude, for political reasons, proprietary and
other questionably licensed software from software art presentations.
"*star[.dot]*star" &lt;netwurker {AT} hotkey.net.au&gt;, [dis|in|con|verse|vective|text]
[. s.(mike)hunt.ing............................................]
::burst[ing].thru.yr. ][drenched][ groomed (as per)fumed n.odes
[f][ye ][old.ing body weaponed plague singe.rs//polarised
][s][winger-as-a-typo.graphic-yearning//head
tag.cocked*flicking//autho(g)r.it(t)y stances in poser ta(c)[tile]unts]
::in.Verse inve.C][li][t.ories
[n.gauging d.ream.bouy &amp; life
][pre][serve.her.grr(ow!)l//s.tam(e)ping.my.blistering.context.foot(er vs
h[r]eaders)//pornoesque.slickness.beads.yr.unborn.mouth]
::context dynam][j][ism][ick!][ ah.lur][ch][t
[clik shi(rt)f][lif][ters &amp;
][syn][tax][oh!g(e)nomic][.grabblers//sten][ograph][.ching.of.yr.pedal.stall(ing)//u.sw.eat.&amp;.shit//symb[ch]o.lick.yr.project.g.land(ing
gear).]
. . .... .....
blind [t]rusting.txt
.
.
*star[.dot]*star
www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/
http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/71/index-en.html
.... . .??? .......</content>
</mail>
<mail>
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<nbr>9.1</nbr>
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<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; the form, the social, the rest. re: 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art'</subject>
<from>matthew fuller</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 7 Jun 2002 13:15:51 +0100</date>
<content>Dear Florian,
Thank you for your useful essay, 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art'
recently posted to nettime. In the spirit of it being a new version of
an old text, I'd like to suggest a plug-in.
At the very least, a brief patch may be required if we are not to have
a repetition of the usual scission, in the last few paragraphs, between
the simply 'formal' and simply, and woollily, 'social'. (The twentieth
century is dotted with too many of such debates.) I'd like to make two
short suggestions:
1 'Formal' operations do not occur alone. There is clearly a current
of art using computer networks or instructions which believes itself to
be primarily formalist. However, this belief is the result of a
particular perspectivalism that cleaves the work from it's more messy
or productive implications and connections. In order to clarify this,
two examples drawn from the text:
1.1 Hugo Ball's poem Carawan. Do we misunderstand the work if it is
read in relation to certain of the Dada Zurich artists' ostensive
reference to 'African' speech and symbolism, to further read this in
relation to the predatory colonialism of Europe, or in relation to
Ball's own yearning for a mystical language of immediacy (along the
lines of that which you usefully describe in 'Language as Virus') which
could be accessed via such poetry?
1.2 Sol LeWitt. LeWitt's work exists both as a series of instructions,
and their execution. There are two ways in which we can understand
this simple formalist limit to the work as requiring an expansion.
1.2.1 Organisation: the work is addressed to a possible executor - a
socius of two or more is thus composed. This at the very least allows
the work to be carried out and shown without any trouble to the artist,
one can also note that it is one of the mechanisms which allowed
conceptual exhibitions to be mounted by post and by phone in across the
world in several locations at low cost. (See Katherine Moseley's
excellent catalogue, 'Conceptions, the conceptual art document'.)
Further, if you wish to include an authorised LeWitt in an exhibition
it is necessary to contact his representative in order to receive
permission to carry out the particular set of instructions you wish to
have realised. As is common in much of the conceptual work begun in
the sixties there is a deployment of a particular set of apparatuses
which define roles, often by contract: representative,
artist/instructor, executor, and so on. It is clear that such
arrangements are immediately 'social' in a variety of ways. Making the
notary an explicit rather than implicit transactor of some art systems
is one of the minor ways which certain conceptual works addressed
themselves to the political and economic dimensions of such systems.
1.2.2 Material 'substrate': one of the problems of an approach which
allows for a simple formalism is that it reduces the components of its
realisation to a simple 'substrate' through which the work is realised.
A kind of matter is captured and given form by an idea. What might
usefully be proposed instead is that particular works, including those
you discuss, operate by arranging combinations of material,
organisation, perception etc. LeWitt's work here for instance might
be seen to operate as a particular realisation of a certain combination
of the propensities of: postal and fax networks; orthography, geometry,
and the materials wall/paper and pen/pencil for their actuation;
alphabetised language, linguistic technologies of description; art
economies of desire, command, and authorship, art economies of objects
and spaces, of publications, or theorisations and naming; the pleasure
of repetitive exercise and expectation in the person/s of those
actuating the work, the conditions of employment of gallery assistants
who carry out such work; etc.
The particular compositional terms by which such an arrangement is
made, correspond in some way with what is reductively described as the
'formal'. However, such a way of engaging with a work immediately
connects art to the question of what to do with life, with the world,
without loosing any of the power assigned to it under the schismatic
and reductive term, 'formal'.
2 Such compositional terms are dynamics are generated in order to be
launched into an outside. To name or describe such a system, the modes
of a dynamic, the terms of an arrangement, calls it into being - with
one or another degree of virtuality. Each such act depends on the
arrangements that it is part of in order to become actuated and
mobilised.
For purposes of presentation, Forkbomb.pl, for instance, uses both the
actual script and the operation of the program within a computer where
a sound / graphics generation program is also running. Forkbomb
'competes' with this program for resources as it gradually uses them
up. As the number of fork commands increases it gradually makes the
operation of this other program impossible, producing variation in
sound and image.
This variation allows the perception of the two programs' interactions
to become perceptible in a different way - to different senses and
aesthetic codes, and in terms of duration. The production of sound and
image is also notably varied by the configuration of the particular
machine that the work is being run on.
Part of the work in deciding how to best mobilise Forkbomb is
therefore to bring it into some kind of arrangement with the contexts
it operates in, as well as cpan and the normal routes for code
distribution, these include exhibitions and conference presentations.
Part of a work is also its means of promotion, its mobilisation in
'secondary' contexts, the way it appeals to certain kinds of
interpretation, or of remobilization by or participation in certain
kinds of discourse - such as this. Utilising various ways of making it
'sensible' are a way of generating its operation in an 'outside', the
contexts in which it appears and to which it is addressed. (This does
not of course preclude things occurring or being repurposed in other
contexts).
To remove the possibility of such a work being understood as 'social'
would therefore seem to deny part of what is important in what is
brought together in its different actuations.
I have not touched up the presence of what you describe as simply
'formal' in the those works you describe as simply 'social' because for
the purposes of this text that would be unnecessary. The work
mentioned, other related work, as well as the texts around them give no
grounds for the repetition of this doubly useless scission.
The above couple of proposals of course make only a slight amendment to
the tail-end of what is otherwise a valuable argument - I look forward
to seeing more!</content>
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<mail>
xml ok
2020-01-20 06:30:11 +01:00
<nbr>9.2</nbr>
haha
2020-01-12 13:24:58 +01:00
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Concepts, Notations, Software, Art</subject>
<from>olia lialina</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Jun 2002 18:29:09 +0200</date>
<content>&gt; If software art could be generally defined as an art
&gt; * of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or
&gt; * which addresses cultural concepts of software,
i know two projects that indeed address cultural and esthetical and
technical concepts of software
http://a-blast.org/~drx/net/mbcbftw/war.wrl
2000
http://entropy8zuper.org/olia/herboyfriendcamebackfromthewar.swf
2000
best
olia</content>
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