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\begin{document}


\title{Entering the Machine and Leaving It Again: Poetics of
Software in Contemporary Art}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{Feb. 7th, 2006}

\maketitle

\section{Abraham Moles and the Situationist International}

The history of algorithmic programming in art is much older than that of
electronics: It includes, for example, word permutation poetry like that
of the 3rd century Latin poet Optatianus Porfyrius and automatic
composition formulas like Athanasius Kircher musical automata of the
17th century (both created in Italy). However, today I would like to
speak about the poetics of software in recent and contemporary digital
art. It is, of course, inseparable tied to modern computing. 
My focus however is less on computing as something that enable or shapes new forms of art, but rather the other way around: on digital art as a speculative appropriation and practical cultural reflection of computing.

In 1962, physicist and philosopher Abraham M. Moles wrote a seminal
programmatic and theoretical outline of computational art, the
\cit{first manifesto of permutational art} (\cit{erstes manifest der
permutationellen kunst}).\footnote{\cite{moles:manifest}} The booklet combines structuralist and
cybernetic theory with examples of mathematics, contemporary
experimental poetry, music, visual art, and even mysticism and erotic
art. Moles' demanded to refound both the poetics and the aesthetics of
art on the grounds of computation: As composition, the new art would 
``narrow down and exhaust the field of possibilities
accessible through a set of rules.'' 

And as aesthetic perception and
criticism, it would work through a reverse formal process based on
mathematical and stochastic analysis, thus eliminating semantic
interpretation.  (Italo Calvino writes a parody of this kind of interpretation of art
and literary works in his novel \cit{Se una notte d'inverno un
viaggiatore}, where a student computes the author's novel with a
statistical program.\footnote{\cite{calvino:notte}, p.~846.}

Moles even speaks of the new art as a ``fundamentally anti-semantic
activity.'' In his conclusion, he writes that artists would turn into
``programmers'' and, quote, ``from now on, artworks will be realized
either by machines or through their own consumers''.
With this statement, Moles set the agenda of the new
computer arts, and today, after almost half a century,  it still phrases
a virulent point. To my knowledge, his ``manifesto of permutational
art'' is the earliest and most concise program of what later would be
called generative art.  

In 1971, he expanded the manifesto into a book
``Art et ordinateur'' that among others included examples of early
computer-generated abstract visual art by Frieder Nake and
others.\footnote{\cite{moles:ordinateur}.} Among
others, it included examples of early ASCII typograms, graphical
interface computing and even the visionary question ``Will
Mickey [Mouse = Topolino] end up in the computer'', that has been
answered just last week when Disney bought up Pixar and announced that
from now on, it would only produce computer-animated films.

However, Moles' implication that computer-generated art would be only
formal and eliminate all cultural semantics, was controversial. Already in 1963,
one year after the manifesto had appeared, it made him subject of a
fierce polemical attack by an other group of contemporary artists and
theorists, the Situationist International. On the surface, the programs
of both Moles and the Situationists shared many common points. Drawing
both from the sociology of Henri Lefebvre, they conceived of industrial
automation as the root of a society of surplus and leisure. In the early
1960s, painter Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio had even promoted a
machine-generated ``industrial painting'' within the Situationist
International. However, the Situationists were not fighting against
semantics, but -- in their indebtedness to romanticist and surrealist
programs -- on the contrary advocating a revolutionary imagination. On
these grounds, Guy Debord attacked Moles as a ``petite tête''
(``small head'') technocrat and told him ``tu es un
robot''.\footnote{\cite{internationale-situationniste},
S.~411.} 

In 1959, the German section of the Situationist International had played
a prank against Moles' main theoretical reference, ally and German editor, the
techno-philosopher Max Bense. Bense had been also leading the formalist
computer experiments of his Stuttgart group of experimental poets and
artists.  The Situationist announced a public lecture of Bense in
Munich. once the audience had gathered, a tape recorder was switched on
and the voice on the tape declared that Bense was unable to come and
would instead give his talk in ``cybernetic form.'' The talk was a
deliberately nonsensical cut-up of German, Latin and French phrases with
garbled quotations from Marx and Hegel.  Yet the audience stayed through
the lecture and applauded in the end.  In the prank, the Situationists
took cybernetic poetics and turned it as a tactical device against
itself.  The stunt displayed that attempts to do away with semantics had
their blind spot precisely in the semantics of his own statements that
negated semantics.

I would like to argue that this schism between a rigidly formalist and a
rigidly ``imaginist'' (to use a word by Situationist Asger Jorn) poetics
obstructed computer arts for almost three decades until the advent of
the personal computer and the Internet.

\section{Synthetic Computer Art}

Before the personal computer and the Internet, computer art was
thinkable only as synthetic creation, i.e. the construction of
algorithms in clean-room laboratories. Of course, this was the
inevitable condition of computer-based generative art and computer
science in general in the 1960s and 1970s when almost all software had
to be written from scratch.  But it is also true from computational art
that did not actually work with electronic computers, and probably not
even think of itself as computational art at all.


\subsection{Proto- and Para-Computer Art}

In 1960, the composer La Monte Young who's know today mainly as a
pioneer of minimal music wrote a piece that consisted solely of the
following instruction:

\begin{quotation}
``Draw a straight line and follow it.''\footnote{\cite{young:line}.}
\end{quotation}

First of all, it's a performance score. But its instruction is
unambiguous and formal enough to be also executed by a machine and
adapted as a computer program. It is, in other words, an algorithm and a
source code. However, it is an impossible algorithm at the same time.
If either the performer or the machine would radically carry out the
instruction, this seemingly simple piece mutates in the most monstruous
art work of all time. One cannot consequently draw a straight line
and follow it without going beyond physical limits and writing a
circular inscription into the whole earth. So the piece implies a
philosophical defiance of space and time constraints, and leaves the
piece in a non-resolvable gap between its physical execution and its
mental, conceptual imagination. Doing so, this score is not only
the founding document of minimal music, but it also creates a
paradoxical union of minimalism and late romanticist Wagnerian total
artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), by the virtue of a source
code that condenses an abundance into one line of instruction.
The piece reverses subject and object: ultimately, the
performers turns into its object, and the line becomes its subject.

In other words, the conflict articulated in the controversy
between Moles and the Situationist exists within the piece. It is not
resolved, but sustained as a paradox.
The fact that La Monte Young and other Fluxus artists who wrote
performance scores -- such as Al Hansen and George Brecht -- did not
conceive of their own work as computational is hardly surprising.
It stands, above all, in the tradition of Western musical score
notation.  Ever since Pythagoras equated music and mathematics, score
notation has been a formalized instruction code and therefore could be
seen as a form of software programming - especially then when those
scores are performed by mechanical instruments like player pianos.

Experimental, free form score notation as it had been introduced by John
Cage and Earle Brown could therefore be seen as an anticipation of code
art; with the difference however that it deliberately detached itself
from formal machine instructions rather than rethinking them.\footnote{
Hans Ulrich Obrist's catalogue ``Do it'' assembles more recent examples
of instruction scores as a medium of contemporary art,
\cite{obrist:do-it}.}


\subsection{Software as Metaphor of Dematerialization}

In the immediate context of American Fluxus and conceptual art,
the notion of ``software'' got introduced in the early 1970s, however in
a semantics that was strangely detached from both Moles' theoretical and
La Monte Young's practical anticipation of software art. In 1973, Lucy
Lippard published her famous book \cit{Six years} with the subtitle
``The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972''.\footnote{\cite{lippard:years}.} The
keyword ``dematerialization'' also sums up how the term ``software'' had
been introduced and understood in contemporary art since 1970.
``Software'' had been the title of an art show curated by critic Jack
Burnham in New York in 1970.  It mostly consisted of concept art works,
partly juxtaposed with experimental computer software development
projects such as Ted Nelson's first prototype of a hypertext system.
However, the emphasis of the exhibition was not algorithms in art, but
immaterial ``software'' as opposed to material hardware. As Edward A.
Shanken puts it in an essay on Burnham's exhibition, the exhibition used
the term software as a ``metaphorical premise'' for the
dematerialization of art, not as a reflection of computation.

In the same year, Sidney Youngblood published his book
``Expanded Cinema'', a reference work on the extension of experimental
film into cinematic performances and installations, including video,
``cybernetic cinema'' and ``computer
films''.\footnote{\cite{youngblood:cinema}.}
It contains a chapter on
``Hardware and Software'' which speculates about programming as future
artificial intelligence, but doesn't go into any specifics of its
artistic application.
 Elsewhere, Youngblood uses the same broad metaphorical 
notion of software as immaterialization as Burnham when he writes:

\begin{quote}
``Just as every fact is also metaphysical, every piece of hardware
implies software: information about its existence. Television is the
software of the earth. Television is invisible. It's not an
object.''\footnote{\cite{youngblood:cinema}, p.~78.}
\end{quote}

Perhaps this phrase was the inspiration for \cit{Radical Software}, an
underground magazine for video artists and activists that first appeared
in the same year, 1970.\footnote{Facsimile scans of the magazine exist
at
\url{http://www.radicalsoftware.org}.}  Despite its name, and under the same
metaphorical premise as Burnharm's exhibition and Youngblood's
paragraph, it was not concerned with computing at all, but propagated an
``Alternate Television Movement.'' The issues combined aesthetic
reflection with political debates about free media and publicly
accessible radio spectrum, much like the contemporary free wireless
network movement. Otherwise,
the journal conceived of ``software'' purely as dematerialized art, and
did not cover computer programming.


\subsection{Software-aided art}

Abraham Moles' idea that artists should become programmers therefore
remained restricted to the specialized field, the ghetto, of electronic
art or ``media art'' as it is still exists today -- although I think it's 
outmoded as a category and likely to be given up soon. 
(The new
motto of this year's transmediale festival, ``festival for art and
digital culture'' is one indication of this, too.) However, most 
artist-programmers in computer arts were rather meta-programmers,
artists who instructed computer programmers to write certain software
for them.
 There is, first of all no computer art without software,
unless the hardware is being used as purely non-computational sculptural
objects -- as bricks. In that respect, all computer art could be called
software art. However, in only rare cases, it is an artistic play with
the software as a medium, but something that should correctly be called
software-aided art. In most computer-generative art, both the software
and the hardware acted as mere catalysts. They functioned as black
boxes. Neither the hardware, nor the code or its processing was
considered the artwork, but only the output: i.e. a computer-generated
image, animation, installation or audiovisual piece. Often, this is
linked to the concept of an autonomous machine creation, in other words
the idea that an artwork is no longer a human product, but a creation by
the computer. If we take the original Greek term poiesis, which
literally means ``making'', we could say that in such artworks, poiesis
turns into poetics, the making of making.  But when making turns
into meta-making, human subjectivity is not abandoned.  Instead, it just
shifts to a second order position, expressing itself in the design of
the formula rather than the design of the product. When critics and
viewers, fixated on the material product, conclude that technology has
done away with human agency behind a work, this is a cognitive fallacy
reminiscent of Plato's cave. It is yet another fallacy to
believe that conversely on the aesthetic side, i.e. that of perception
of the work, viewers would be liberated through the mechanical
variations of the work permitted by the formula.

\subsubsection{Jeffrey Shaw, The Legible City}

To illustrate my point, I would like to fast-forward to the years
1989-1991 and Jeffrey Shaw's computer installation \cit{The Legible
City} at the ZKM media arts
center in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a contemporary classic in the genre
of interactive installation art and consists of a video-projected 3D
simulation coupled with a stationary bicycle. The projection shows
abstract cubic 3D representations of cities of New York, Amsterdam and
Karlsruhe.  The spectator, or player, of the work sits on the
bicycle and cycles, in a ``virtual reality'' simulation, through the
cities. The cityscapes are made up of letters and words written by
Shaw's artistic collaborator Dirk Groeneveld. The work was realized on
Silicon Graphics workstations, and completed two
years before the computer game \cit{Doom} came out and established
immersive first-person 3D navigation games on commodity PCs. 

The \cit{Legible City} could
be called an alternative interface to reading texts on a
computer. The conventional flat two-dimensional emulation of print and
text pages on the screen is being replaced with an immersive
three-dimensional text-scape. The navigation seems to be intuitive
thanks to (a) the simulation of anthropomorphic, euclidian space and (b)
the emulation of the bicycle as a familiar technology of moving through
spaces. So the piece is a perfect example of a concept of digital art
as ``interactive'' simulation and ``virtual reality'', through
anthropomorphist interfaces created with complex, high tech hardware and
software, realized, because of that complexity, as an installation in a
dedicated high tech art space.

Again and again, the ``Legible City'' has been called a seminal work of
digital art. I quote, in translation, from an essay by the German critic
Stephan Porombka:

\begin{quotation}
Nothing that was written for the computer in the 90s could match 
an installation like Jeffrey Shaw's ``Legible City'' -- neither 
technology-wise, nor conceptually. After all, Shaw had employed a
Silicon Graphics Crimson computer that was worth several ten thousand
dollars to achieve the right effects. Only with such a machine, it could
be suggested to the audience that its own activities were synchronized
to the movement of the digital image on the screen.\footnote{``Nichts, was
in den 90ern für den Computer geschrieben wurde, konnte sich mit einer
Installation messen lassen, wie sie etwa Jeffrey Shaw mit Legible City
realisiert hatte -- technologisch nicht und auch nicht konzeptionell.
Immerhin hatte Shaw einen mehrere zehntausend Mark teuren Silicon
Graphics Crimson Computer eingesetzt, um die richtigen Effekte zu
erzielen. Nur mit einem solchen Gerät ließ sich dem Rezipienten
vermitteln, dass die eigene Aktivität mit der Bewegung des digitalen
Bildes auf der Leinwand gleichgeschaltet war'',
\cite{porombka:netzkultur}, S.~58.}

\end{quotation}

Please allow me to disagree with this opinion.  I see Shaw's ``Legible
city'' as hardly anything more than a technology gimmick and a glorified
interface design study.  Its subject of the city inscribed with texts
reminds of Tommaso Campanella's ``Città del sole'', the utopian city
whose walls are covered with educational explanations of all knowledge
and sciences.  Just as Campanella's utopia is naive and even
problematic, so is Shaw's if it was intended as such.  The \cit{Legible
City} is not, as was written, liberating the letter like concrete
poetry. While concrete poetry and Marinetti's ``parole in libertà'' were
about freeing type and language from their conventional typographic and
grammatical constraints and freeing them, as much as possible, from
anthropomorphisms and spatial dimensions, Shaw's system puts them just
under a different restraint -- the anthropomorphic Euclidian space of
the city. It does not take apart writing and reinvents it from scratch,
but puts letters into a pseudo-interactive human kitsch world.  One
could compare this to the treatment of letters in 19th century
children's books or alphabetic toys, only that the latter are
interactive in a much more comprehensive sense than the \cit{Legible
City} -- because they are building blocks of a world outside a black
box. But first of all, Shaw's installation suffers from the fact that it
does not think of itself a toy, but takes itself overly serious as an
``interactive'' and experimental art work. On his web page for the
project, Jeffrey Shaw's writes:

\begin{quotation}

Travelling through
these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the
path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous
juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.\footnote{\cite{shaw:city}.}

\end{quotation}

The text misses to reflect that these allegedly ``spontaneous
juxtapositions and conjunctions'' are not spontaneous at all. They only
exist within the set of possible combinations encoded into the software
that controls the installation. There is no possibility, for example,
that a word appears on the screen that has been inscribed into the
software before, and no conjunction can be made (a) outside the
predetermined possibilities in the program and (b) outside the Euclidian
space constraints of the visual simulation.  It is, in other words, an
illusion of interactivity, spontaneity and intuitivity which the piece
sells. Nothing of this could be criticized if the work would actually
reflect and critically engage with this illusion. But this lack of
reflection, and cognitive fallacy of ``interaction'' and
``spontaneity'', is not only characteristic of Shaw's work, but the
whole field of generative and so-called interactive art. It is struck 
with dangerously simplified notion of interactivity -- a reductive
understanding of interaction as pointing, clicking and other Pavlovian
stimulus-response-reactions within the constraints
of a programmed box.  

Shaw voices this misunderstanding himself when he
writes:

\begin{quotation}
The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle give the viewer
interactive control over direction and speed of travel. The physical
effort of cycling in the real world is gratuitously transposed into the
virtual environment, affirming a conjunction of the active body in the
virtual domain.\footnote{\cite{shaw:city}.}
\end{quotation}

The ``conjunction'' however is a fake since the ``active body'' can only
act within the pre-programmed constraints of the box.  However, the box
masks these constraints through its ``virtual reality'' kitsch
and trompe-l'oeuil. Even as a toy, ``The Legible City'' is restrained 
in comparison classical alphabetic toys which have

\begin{itemize}
\item a much richer interactivity, because they don't force their players into
a restrained brick world, but on the contrary allow players to
integrate their bricks into their own world;
\item nevertheless, a more humble and humorous
understanding of themselves and their own limitations.
\end{itemize}

\cit{The Legible City} could be called a naive piece of art, with
its gap between formal restraints and overblown self-perception.
As such, it is emblematic of the self-gratifying ghetto of ``media
art''. It is art that is most unlikely to receive any acclaim and
be considered relevant outside this ghetto, in the larger context of
contemporary arts.


\section{Analytic Computer Art}

\subsection{Net.art}

In the mid-1990s, net.art embodied a paradigm shift in so-called media
art whose nature was institutional,  poetic and aesthetic at the same
time. In institutional terms, it was the first computer art outside
research labs and highly funded institutional environments. In poetic
terms, it was low tech computer art. In aesthetic terms, it borrowed
from the older low tech artisanship of hacker cultures by adopting its
aesthetics of disruption and digital humorism: network collaboration and
subversion, ASCII art, code poetry, viruses, computer game modification.
While all computer art before had used a synthetical approach, creating
its works from scratch, net.art used an analytical approach of taking
digital information and code as material. It was computer art under the
new conditions of cheap personal computing. Unlike in earlier computer
arts, artists could use ready-made digital information and code ``out
there'' and treat it like Dadaist and Pop art painters treated found
objects in their collage work.

One could call it an informal, playful and performative approach to
digital art. With the example of the work of jodi and other net.artist,
I would like to show how this art developed from experimentation with
network information to experimentation with software, and from
experimentation with software to performances and interventions.


\subsubsection{jodi}

I would like to start with OSS, an early work from
\url{http://www.jodi.org}. Jodi  stands for
\index{Heemskerk, Joan}Joan Heemskerk and \index{Paesmans, Dirk}Dirk
Paesmans, a Dutch-Belgian artist couple.  Their early work \cit{OSS}
makes small browser windows pop up and fly around that evade
manual control.\footnote{\url{oss.jodi.org}.} If one opens the site, it performs a hostile takeover of
one's web browser.  It is a hack, a punk-like aesthetic and
technological hijacking.  It involves no simulation, no
anthropomorphism, no virtual reality, but is the technology itself read
against the grain. It does not simulate an anthropomorphic space in
order to be perceived and experienced, but simply uses everyday
experience with personal computer operating systems and the Internet
as its frame of reference. It is not a high tech installation in
a white cube, but low tech running on any home or office
computer. The whole source code of the pages takes up less than 10
Kilobyte, i.e. has the average size of a short E-Mail, as opposed to a
complex software application with several 100,000 lines of original
source code. It uses ready-made, industrial software -- a web browser
in this case --, however not in an affirmative way, but in an attempt to
hack it and subvert its cultural interface paradigms.  It is ironical
and melancholic to the degree that it promises no computing utopias, and
is not futurist human-machine-interface research, but
ultimately depicts ``interactivity'' inside the computer as a
scam and sad hoax on the users. By forcing
the user to hack the computer in order to regain control -- by killing
the browser, shutting down the machine or perhaps even throw it out of
the window -- it however creates a genuine interactivity outside the box
and outside preempted behavioral patterns in the software.

Contrary to a slick, visually immersive digital art which treated the
computer as a black box, Jodi aestheticize computers as self-immersed,
often absurd generators of contingent data streams.  Contrary to the
``Legible City'', code, software, the machine is no longer hidden from
the actual artwork, but the guts are exposed and made the artwork
proper. Yet Jodi's art does not fall into the reverse fallacy of telling
an imaginary truth underneath the surfaces of software user interfaces.
One could say that it exposes the surrealism of formalisms. Comparable
to the ``Composition 1960'' by La Monte Young, the two poles of
rigid formalism and subjective imagination aesthetically coexist in
jodi's work. However, they don't coexist in a violent tension, but as a
play.  This play involves simulations, too, but unlike the ``Legible
City'' it is not simulation of anthropomorphic space, but simulation of
machine functions. 

Jodi's aesthetics of disruption and noise differs
from the noise and randomness in older avant-garde arts from Dada to
John Cage because it shifts the noise from the work to the transmission
channel, and from ontology to simulacrum.  For Jodi's website reads and
behaves as if it contained intact data disturbed only by faulty net
transmission or computer crashes; but in reality, the line noise is
mocked up within the data itself. Unlike Nam June Paik's visual noise
manipulations of TV sets in the 1960s, jodi's disturbance is not done in
hardware with only partly predictable results, but is a clever
simulation of noise done in software.  And while the chance poetics of Cage and
Fluxus conceived of disturbance and randomness as means of radical
freedom -- an idea still reverberating in Shaw's allegedly
``spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions'' --, their implication is
much more ambivalent in jodi's work. Cage's ontological embracement of chance
is replaced with a tricky rhetoric of simultaneous anarchy and
entrapment, a neo-baroque conceit and discordia concors of surface chaos
with inscribed structure, and vice versa.

\subsubsection{web stalker}

Analogous to jodi, net.artist
Olia Lialina stated that many of her early works were
based on bugs in the Netscape browser and therefore no longer
work on contemporary computer setups. These plays with the web browser
were not only a critical engagement with the Web and its aesthetics, but
also an engagement with the software that shaped its access modes and
interfaces. It was therefore a logical step from subverting standard
browsers to developing alternative browsers. Most famous is the I/O/D,
web.stalker.\footnote{\url{http://www.backspace.org/iod/iod4.html}.}
It turns web browsing upside down by not showing the smooth typographic
rendering, but the otherwise concealed technical layers of the web,
including HTML source code and http protocol communication, in separate
windows and controls. It takes apart the separate components of web
browsing -- ``takes apart'' in the literal meaning of analysis. It thus
achieves two things at once: It frees the cultural technique and the
cultural imagination of web browsing from its conventional interface
metaphors, including that of ``browsing'' itself.  Secondly, it maps the
World Wide Web as a controlled space, controlled by codes. This duality
of freeing the user's imagination and revealing control structures
paradigmatically expresses itself in I/O/D's slogan, ``software is mind
control, get some''.


Jodi reflected the mind control embedded into software, when they
began to write their own web browsers, too, the ``wrongbrowsers'' which
displayed only pages within arbitrarily restricted domain name spaces.
Around the same time in the late 1990s, the international ``browserday''
festival featured experimental browsers programmed by artists and
hackers, among them also an ``analog'' browser in the form of a wooden
window frame with which users should ``browse'' the
city.



\subsection{Software art}

Within net.art itself, there was an increasing shift towards work with
software, and as a result, software manipulated or written by artists.
Critical observers described these works as ``Artware'' (Saul Albert in
1999), ``experimental software'' (Tilman Baumgärtel), ``speculative
software'' (Matthew Fuller), ``artistic software'' (Andreas Broeckmann)
and ``software art'' (Alexander Galloway,
1999).\footnote{Sources: \cite{albert:artware}, \cite{baumgaertel:software}, 
\cite{fuller:blip}, call for entries for transmediale.01,
\cite{galloway:1999}.}
 It was reflection on
the fact that digital artists had first taken software as a transparent
tool, and later began to reflect which influence that tool had on their
own work and aesthetics. The more intensely artists worked with the
computer, the more problematic the alleged tool became -- not because of
some ``objective'' limitation, but because
of the culture, philosophy and subjectivity imposed by the creators of
onto the users of the software.

\subsubsection{Signwave Auto-Illustrator}


The taboo of classical ``transparent tool'' software, like text editors,
graphics programs, sound and video editors, is to not openly interfere
with the artist.  This taboo got most systematically addressed and
subverted in Adrian Ward's computer program \cit{Signwave
Auto-Illustrator}.\footnote{\url{http://www.signwave.co.uk}} It
transforms vector graphics software into a generative program with an
agenda of its own, or rather, of its programmer who codes his
subjectivity into algorithms.  With a user interface that precisely
mimicks the commercial graphics program Adobe Illustrator,
Auto-Illustrator implements, for example, a text tool that writes its
own, randomly generated texts. Other functions turn artwork into
``instant Bauhaus,'' leave ``bugs'' that wander around in the
illustration, or render circles as smilies.  However, the program is
functional.  It generates proper graphics files and has been practically
employed for the graphic design of flyers and record covers.  In the
many years of its development since 2000, Auto-Illustrator has acquired
an encyclopedic wealth of features, similar to commercial software that,
incorporating more and more functions, strives to be the ultimate tool
for its purpose.  Autor-Illustrator highlights the issue of that
pseudo-objective encyclopedism by accumulating eccentricities and
personal fancies, and openly exposing the embedded agenda of its
programmer.

\subsubsection{Codework}

Subjectivity expressed in code is also characteristic of the whole genre
of artistic codeworks whose chief medium are E-Mail messages written
hybrids of English and code fragments from programming languages,
character encodings, markup languages, emoticons and network
protocols.\footnote{\cite{wark:codework}, \cite{sondheim:codework}.}
Jodi were pioneers of this genre of digital art, along with Ted Warnell,
Alan Sondheim, Netochka Nezvanova and the Australian female net artist
mez (Mary Anne Breeze).  One of Alan Sondheim's codeworks reads as
follows:


\begin{verbatim}
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: _arc.hive_@lm.va.com.au
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 17:17:20 -0500 (EST)

sleeping and running zombies through bodies

CPU states:  4.7% user, 5.8% system, 0.0% nice, 89.4% idle:36 processes:
35 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped:1m 4:20pm up 8 min, 1 user,
load average: 0.54, 0.26, 0.11: :Mem:  38664K av, 35084K used, 3580K
free,

[\ldots]
\end{verbatim}


The work is based on the output of the Unix system command ``top'' which
displays a list of running processes, memory and central processor load.
``Zombie'' is a technical Unix term for a program process that can no
longer be terminated with the ``kill'' command.  Sondheim's text takes
these descriptors---or ``semantics,'' as computer science would call
it---literally.  He reads the output of the program as a physical
inscription of bodies, as performance art and a subjective utterance in
the medium of computer software. Yet it is not simply a poetic
metaphorization because the technical apparatus of writing becomes a
part of the text. There is a feedback of textual input, output and
processing inside the text and within the medium of code.  Subject and
object, syntax and semantics, formalism and culture become inseparably
entangled, crisscrossing and writing over each other. As such, the
``codeworks'' by kodi, mez, Alan Sondheim and other artists manifest a
most radical understanding of formalisms as meaningful. They appropriate
languages that were designed to be asemantic---programming languages,
protocol code, shell commands---to unveil and elaborate their
metaphorical and physical inscriptions, implications, and engendered
meaning lurking between the lines.  At this point, that is equally
present in the works of I/O/D, for example, computational art has turned
into a flat-out antithesis and refutation of Abraham Moles' claim that
cybernetic art would be ``fundamentally anti-semantic''. 

This also means, by implication, that there is no difference between
``code'' (or artificial language) on the one hand and ``interface'' on
the other, because the code already is an interface, and the interface
is a code. 

\subsubsection{Bifo}


Vice versa, the fact that computer code executes and thus has
an embedded virulence is used in poetic appropriations. At the ``Digital
Is Not Analog'' Festival in Bologna 2001, Italian subcultural legend
Franco ``Bifo'' Berardi made a public reading of the sourcecode of the
famous ``Loveletter'' computer virus. This reading reappropriates
computer sourcecode as Dada poetry similar to Kurt Schwitters'
``Ursonate'', and like jodi's work exposes its strange aesthetics. On
the other hand, it differs from classical sound poetry because it refers
to the contagious virulence and dangerousness of the code, and tries to
emulate its embedded action, and read it as a subversive
performativity.

\subsubsection{jaromil, forkbomb}

This energy is also embbedded into the twelve characters of jaromil's
forkbomb:

\begin{quote}
\begin{verbatim}
:({ :|:& };:
\end{verbatim}
\end{quote}


Most computer operating systems can be crashed or at least brought to a
grinding halt when users, even those without superuser privileges,
launch an abundant ever-growing amount of programs that eat up all
memory and CPU time. The easiest way to achieve this is a ``forkbomb'',
a little program which does nothing but launch two or more copies of
itself upon startup.\footnote{\cite{nori:love}, S.~62.} Since these copies do the same in turn, this sets
off a chain reaction with an exponentially growing number of processes.
Forkbombs have been popular entertainment among hackers since about the
mid-1990s, but jaromil manages to condense them to a most terse, poetic
syntax, arguably the most elegant forkbomb ever written. 


In other words, if you have access to the terminal prompt of a Unix-like
OS, these twelve characters -- which look like Internet smilies -- can
bring it down. It has become a secret code of recognition among the
initiated, like the stuffed trumpet of the Tristero underground postal
network in Thomas Pynchon's novel \cit{Crying of Lot
49}.\footnote{\cite{pynchon:crying}.}

Unwillingly, this example also reveals a problematic issue of the term ``software
art'': That it is often misunderstood as high programm craftsmanship. In
fact, this understanding has its roots in computer science itself.
Donald Knuth's textbooks \cit{The Art of Computer Programming} or Paul
Graham's recent book \cit{Hackers and Painters} are founded on a
post-classicist notion of art as beauty and high craftsmanship, for
example in the elegance of an algorithm.\footnote{\cite{knuth:art},
\cite{graham:painters}.}

\subsubsection{Negativeland, Squant}


A counter-example to this -- software art that expends programming
skills -- is a rather unknown work of the American
experimental music group Negativeland, the ``Squant'' browser plugin 
\url{http://www.negativland.com/squant/plugin.html}. Negativeland claim
that 

\begin{quotation}
Squant is a color that cannot be seen on traditional RGB
monitors. This plug-in changes the spectral display capabilities of your
system software.  THE NEWHEW SQUANTVIEW PLUG-IN utilizes a new color
model (``RGBS'') to facilitate the visualization of the Squant color
spectrum, in addition to the already-established RGB color model.
\end{quotation}

Negativeland's
website offers downloadable software packages for Windows and Mac OS and a
''Tech Support`` forum. It is filled with actual help inquiries by
people who tried to get the plugin running, failed at one step, were
helped, and still failed. Of course, the plugin and the ''Squant`` color
is a hoax and doesn't work at all. Yet it is a clever artistic reflection of
software as culture that includes vaporware just as much as actually
running code. The false promises, installation nightmares, support
horrors and other frustrations with software, known to any PC user,
become the material of the work and get turned into an social-artistic 
performance.

\subsubsection{ubermorgen.com/Alessandro Ludovico: Google will eat itself}


This tendency is even more pronounced in recent artistic work -- work that has
its origins in the realm of net.art and software art, but is developing
into interventionist performance art both in the Internet and outside.

A very recent example is ``Google will eat itself''
\url{http://www.gwei.org} by ubermorgen.com and Alessandro
Ludovico. ubermorgen.com consists of former etoy member Hans Bernhard
and Liz Haas, Alessandro Ludovico is well known in Italy as the founder
and editor of Neural magazine. 

``Google will eat itself'' is simple to explain: it is a website that
runs ads via the Google ``AdSense'' program, i.e. embedded commercial text
advertising provided by Google, but bought from other companies. 
Google pays website owners a small fee for every click on an ad link;
``gwei.org'' uses this money to buy Google shares. The idea is that
Google will pay the site to get bought up by it. Ideally, gwei.org
should make so much money from Google ad payments that it can buy up all
Google shares. To accelerate this process, ``Google will eat itself''
imploys some hidden dirty programming hacks that trigger automatic clicks on the
advertising so that any user who visits the site will click multiple
Google ads at once. 

It is not only one company eating up another, but also a piece of
software eating up another software.  Google is one of the first world
companies that is a piece of online software, with
search requests as its input, and a double output of search results and
money to the shareholders. This collapsing of software program and corporation 
get turned against itself by gwei.org. It is the net.art of an Internet
that is no longer an open field of experimentation, but a corporate
space.  The dark-humorous actionism of the piece manifests yet
another resolution of the conflict that had originally voiced by Moles
and Debord, technical formalism versus agency.


\subsubsection{dot.walk, psychogeographic computing}

Computation and situationist urban drift ultimately
converge in the ``generative
psychogeography'' of  the
Dutch artistic project
\url{http://www.socialfiction.org}. Its
\cit{.walk} is a ``psychogeographic computer,'' operated by
pedestrians who walk through street grids like electrons flow through
the gates of computer chips. The \cit{.walk} computer can
 execute simple program code like the following:

\begin{quotation}
\begin{verbatim}
// Classic .walk
Repeat
{
1 st street left
2 nd street right
2 nd street left
}
\end{verbatim}
\end{quotation}

Psychogeographic computing has a double effect: It demystifies computing
and turns it into a radically simple and popular low-tech and low-cost
operation. Secondly, it liberates the imagination of what a computer can
be and which purposes it may serve. Socialfiction.org has expanded and
systematized this idea into a broader concept of ``speculative
programming'' in which computing becomes a figure of thought and
reflection not only in theory, but also in artistic practice. 

While the same could be said about Moles' manifesto from 1962, the
implications are contrary.  Where Moles models art, criticism and
aesthetics \emph{after} computing, superimposing the latter on the
former, speculative programming does the opposite,  modelling
computation after the arts and and speculative imagination.

\bibliographystyle{jurabib}
\bibliography{diss}



\end{document}
