Tom Moody has an eye for great anonymous gif makers.  Check this one here, and his own gif works here: http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody

update: another ascii/text-based gif from Moody's blog:

reminds me of "SEXY TRUCK"...

from Wikipedia:

The punch card is an obsolescent recording medium for digital information for use by automated data processing machines, including early mainframe-based computers which used them as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data.

These are beautiful examples of early code writing. Data is held by the card as pattens of punched codes. Below are some I like a lot (cards and code tables) Click on the images for more info on specialized websites. 
 

UPDATE: read about the function of punchcards in a "A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation". 

 Speed Limit Hieroglyphic, by Morris Perrez. Once again I have no idea what this new poet is selling. Thanks to Justin again.

More great poetry: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/34344.html  

i like this line bigger shorter 

i like this line bigger shorter

i like this line bigger shorter

i like this line bigger shorter

i like this square

After a new strange bug that took my blog down once again for a couple days (I keep deleting crucial chunk of codes when I edit my template stuff), I have to thank the people of Elgg for their patience at restoring my blog every time I mess up. 

Lucy took over, better than this, litterally hijacked my wifi connection the other day. I don't know who is Lucy but she is probably not the oldest skeleton ever found on the planet and love-sung by the Beatles. Or maybe the name of the neighbour from which I am stealing the wifi signal, who decided to rebel and kick me out of her network.

I gave my blog some categories!

I also took a couple of icons from the super famous and cute 1000 icons project by famfamfam:

Adding these icons and playing with the gif line on a previous post reminded me of a pretty and smart essay on gifs made by pierre on his blog one year ago:

following some earlier posts about icons, pierre, gifs, and gif modification, here is a gif work made for the coupons≠coupons blog a long time ago. it was borrowed from the Site Meter website - that allows Coupons to trace the blog viewers. in itself, it is already a cool gif , but making it bigger destroys the clean look of an icon gif to give it a blurry futurist look. it is less for the sake of destruction then for the pleasure to force an exchange and a dialogue with (corporate) worlds that i would never be in contact with otherwise. i like to borrwo from languages that i know nothing or so little about, but that i can appropriate by tiny, minimalist modifications (cf. the slander lawsuit trial). there is an effect of sub-theory that is efficient enough, i think, to get a good idea of what you're looking at without having to study it. i also like the fact that you can take a representation, alter it in the simplest way, and change the feel of it so muc; it is more intuitive in a way, like a hack without real expertise in code; more tactical & cheap, and less art/skill-based.

Here is a quite pedagogic illustration to get an idea about programming languages. as a reminder. update+++ i couldn't resist quoting passages of mIEKAL aND hilarious text_TOWER, no matter how little relevancy there is to the Tower of Languages.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

mIEKAL aND's text_TOWER, a collaborative silly project, very funny or dramatic, depending on how you look at it. Here are the first entry, written by mIEKAL aND himself. i like the entries that play the conceptual game of finding formatting tricks to write a textual tower. the best part is when the project is taken over by spammers, that do build brick by brick the textual tower. spammers are actively building textual towers on this very blog, so i thought we should celebrate. you should look in between, though, to see how ironic the fortune of the text_TOWER is.

The tower

The tower begins

The tower begins from

The tower begins from its very

The tower begins from its very
descent.

The tower begins from its very
descent. Such

The tower begins from its very
descent.

Such structure & such a high
towardess.

(...)

Very good site. Thank you.

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 (this post has been deeply modified after a longer time spent with the work of Ted Warnell).

I am not a huge fan of the codeworkers, but somewhat enjoy browsing through Ted Warnell's "Poem by Nari" series, that are visual composition using displayed source code, spam texts, software instructions, and usually 1 or more gifs or html drawing of a very raw nature. It tends to stand as a contemporary and cyber version of found art painting like those of Rauschenberg (in the context of pop art), and there is an artefactual look to them that makes me a little bit nervous. If they weren't on a web page, for sure they would be on a museum wall. But there is a will to gather modern materials which is rather seductive. It is a very representational way to work with the cybernetic regime of the triad message/code/noise, highly referential and submitted to its subject. Nonetheless I like the conceptual and instructional perpective of the works.

Here is an excercpt of"Changing Properties", in Poem By Nari Does Windows:  

I was reading an article on Mez for my thesis, article that just confirmed everything I dislike about her. The author, Rita Riley, states that the codeworkers, in which both Warnell, and, of course Mez, are included, "claim that codework expresses a revolutionary sensibility within the corporatized environment of IT by turning a pragmatic language toward aesthetic purposes; by issuing manifestos on cultural, political and aesthetic themes; by further complicating our postmodern understanding of authorship; and by articulating an anti-aesthetic, anti-bourgeois code of ethical writing practices."

I think that is precisely what makes me not wanting to play the game: they are trying so hard to say something, and building their own frame of recognition, in a very strategic way which has a lot to do with the 'corporate' world they are supposedly fighting against. The aesthetization at work seems like marketing to me, and a while ago I had compared, maybe akwardly though, the little ASCII interventions by mi-ga to marketing buzzes. Sometimes i fear that codeworkers want to sell me their ideas of what a good old chaotic wallpaper is. I prefer straightforward people who try to think about design in context, and don't scream it is poetry when they have changed the hape of a letter: as connected to the marketed world as they are, they give me more food for thought. See a very interesting interview of Erik Spiekermann that I just read on we-make-money-not-art.

It is seems that their 'revolutionary sensibility' is more claimed, i.e., represented, referenced to, then really experimented and implemented; and I truly do not understand what anti-bourgeois ethics are in play here. To me, their politics are pretty conservative: they mimic chaos like a corporation would mimic a youth trend. It is like agreeing with an ideology by learning to speak, no, to reproduce, its jargon. These people seem to have a clear idea of what it is to be on the internet (chaos, cyborgitude, etc. see my previous ranting on technological sublime) and to reference to ideas (on processes) more to processes (Jodi would be more processual to me). Things are not obvious to me and I don't see what is the anti-bourgeois standing out when you are speaking to people that already know how to understand your language. They act out the network more than they participate in the network (or they participate in a very narrow definition of the network. adressing themselves to an audience that is already conquered), and staging leaves a weird taste in the mouth in the informational field. 

But back to Warnell. He has this advantage of, contrary to Mez, being versed in software art. He offers his code and his datasets for the pleasure of reading. The code that he displays is definitely not jargonesque like Mez's or Memmott's. Not only it is executable (but I agree that the interest of code does not reside etirely in its executability), but also it reads the network without necessarly producing a ideologic discourse about what it is to be cyber. The cyber world for Warnell is the "cyberstream", and not a cyborg-attitude. Also, the purely represententional code (not executable), tends to reduce the expressionism by a minamlistic and conceptual approach. This is a poem from the "Realization" section:

The works I am showing are what I prefer, but are not representative of the work as a whole, which seems to be oriented towards generating visual forms through critical code that reprocesses data. His website is a huge database of material, mostly variations on the "Poem By Nari" (>> binary) and other stuff too.

Warnell, at some point (I copied the text and I lost the link!) asks a series of question that matter greatly, but they are weird to me in the sense that they imply immediately that we are in an aesthetic field, that we are dealing with works of art that are poetry: 

Does this proliferation in new media poetry also imply or represent an emergence of a "New Poetics?"

If so, how might this new poetics be described, defined, and implemented?

Does a new poetics suggest a concomitant shift in aesthetics and in culture?

Given multi-media works' growing need for multiple collaborators-- like programmers and technical specialists-- how are the more traditional notions of authorship, ownership, and "poet" called into question by this new poetics?

What are the appropriate roles of the academy in terms of teaching and responding critically to this poetry?

I would like to reverse all the questions, and first because I fear them as myself doing this kind of job (legitimizing experimental textualities for the academy). I would like so much to drop the term poetry and to keep the idea of poetics as ways of doing trhough many environments, not a series of works displayed by self-titled artists in a series if delimited spaces. 

Ted Warnell's blog Codepo() is a huge database for endless lurking at sourcodes. They tend to be long so I will not cite any of them here, but I just want to show his first post:

This poem is interesting because it tunes the blog in the idea of a langage-code that can be read as a score (note the time/measures). In the context of code writing, this score is mot a metaphor as a code text is definitely instructional.

His work as a whole reminded me of the essay "The Aesthetics of Generative Code" by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward, which carries a classical stance but nonetheless opens great perspectives. 

_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_REFERENCES_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

Rita Raley:
Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework - Electronic Book Review

Ted Warnell: warnell.com & an interview on trAce Online Writing.

Poem by Nari, Visual Poetry from the Cyberstream

Codepo(), Ted Warnell's blog 

"The Aesthetics of Generative Code" (2000) by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward

I learnt today via an essay by Florian Cramer ("Language, a virus?", on the website Digital Craft) that one of the first ever prank viruses (the MacMag) was programmed and released by people related to Neoism, that king movement of manifestos. It makes sense in the way that Luther Blisset, one of the pseudonyms of the pan-pseudonym Monty Cantsin, is also the name endorsed by the people from http://0100101110101101.org, who themselves are known for programming a virus at the Venice Art Biennale in 2001 (Biennale.py), when they cloned net.artist Olia Lialina's Teleportacia.org. That is a tight network.

In the first issue of the magazine Plantarchy, there is an essay by Stephen Perkins called "Neoist Interruptus and the Collapse of Originality".

I also came across a reading of the "I Love You" code file by some Italians. Listen here. Here is an excerpt of the code that I found in another essay on Digital Craft, "If () then ()" by Jutta Steidl.

rem barok – loveletter (vbe) < I hate to go to school >
rem by: spyder / ispyder@mail.com / GRAMMERSoft Group/ Manila, Philippines
On Error resume next
Dim fso, dirsystem,dirwin,dirtemp,eq,ctr,file,vbscopy,dow
Eq=””
Ctr=0
Set fso = CreateObject (“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Set file = fso.OpenTextFile (Wscript.ScriptFullname,1)
Vbscopy = file.ReadAll
…
Introduction to the I love you source code
Author: Onel de Guzman (Spyder) 

 

Just read an essay about Hannah Weiner's Code Poems, a book very difficult to get and which sounds quite astonishing, like the rest of her work I think. I want to mention this work here as an important code experiment of the 1960's (apparently only Jackson MacLow was experimenting code poetry at the same time).

Conceptual Art, as mentioned earlier, is an important background, especially the way they handle and process data and reference through instructions. It has a lot to do with program/programmable/generative poetry that is encountered in the digital environment in text generators or obfuscated poetry contests (IOCCC), and that operates tactical recontextualizations that are never fully stopped in their process. 

Hannah Weiner's work seems to be a transition (not in literary history of course, but in terms of logical processes) between these conceptual works, that still perceives code as a way to "machinize" the texte, and actual code poetry experiments, where code emerges and becomes a textual surface in itself (codeworks, Perl Poetry), and where recontextualization is complete (strategically achieved in the poetry field). I like the minimalism and disengagement of the self that is still perceptible is Weiner's pieces, as well as the distance that she maintains with the found language (as opposed to code poetry, that tends to personalize the subject), that seems to allow some room for further critical developments suggested, not imposed. There is still a very interesting "machinic" work at play. 

Following, excerpts form the essay and some extracts of Code Poems.

~~~~~~ 

From the essay "Hannah=hannaH: Politics, Ethics, and Clairvoyance in the Work of Hannah Weiner", by  Judith Goldman

"Code Poems makes the compelling case that the official messages encrypted in the code harbor secrets hidden only from themselves as self-identical: within them lie communiqués of an alternate totality, heterogeneous and coherent.

Devised to facilitate communication between parties possibly unknown to each other aboard separate ships in the middle of the ocean, the code delivers the given messages in the International Code of Signals volume by reducing the message content to letter-strings. These strings of one, two, three, and four letters represent sentence-length messages ("qna All precautions have been taken"), which are often punctuated by blanks ("zmd Your zeal has been particularly noted by __________"), interrogative tags ("qhr Why?"), common nouns ("iog cheese"), modifying phrases ("kov too dear"), and even prepositions ("qgt on"). Individual units of code maintain a one-to-one correspondence with a message content. When the code was first in use in the mid-nineteenth century, the letter-strings were conveyed through a set of hoisted alphabet flags, with each flag standing in for a letter of the alphabet. Later, an answering pennant, as well as hoisting protocols for use with the original letter-flags, were added to signal the kind of information contained in a phrase (i.e., to signal a general state of distress, to designate giving a geographical location, etc.)."

tqb I doubt if it is possible
frw    Barely possible
tqd Is it possible?
tqe     Possibly
tqf Quite possible
fbj     As slow as possible
fbg As quick as possible
fai     As fast as possible
fbo As soon as possible (26)

(...)

edq Any chance of war?
odv     Good chance
ifk No chance of peace
yu     Has war commenced?
yx War has commenced
yw     War between _________ and _________ has commenced
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
zin How many wounded?
pkn     No. of killed and wounded not yet known
zim How are the wounded 
ygj     Without arms
fgx Without assistance
yl     Want immediate medical assistance
cp Cannot assist
nc     In distress. Want immediate assistance
cx No assistance can be rendered. Do the best you can for
        yourselves.
gbt     I shall bear up
gbv May I, or can I bear u

And one more spam poem!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

the last center-spaced poem ever written

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: recounts directly < rymkeil@ancor.dal.asp.ti.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2006 7:02 PM
Subject: [spam] Sat July Celebrity News
To: mufairlabor-owner@yahoogroups.com

Rate HH Dub

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SHOPPING FORUMS MEDIA

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Trailer: See Your

character Say Anything was told

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Caspar Pound Fever

Fishbowl Bill

County Jr. Noir Classics:

paradise Craft: Poetry

M. Paul Giamatti plays

IDEAS

given... talk...In sex drive. What

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Dead: Musical Empire

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Date UPDATED

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ADVICE TOPICS Ask

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Last year, Florian Cramer was the initiator of a radio show called Codeworks: Netart on the border of Language and Codes broadcasting codeworks readings on the KUNSTRADIO. Listen in streaming. Interesting & Germanophile. The first piece is the reading of the I Love You Virus that I blogged about not long ago, but listen on for other stuff.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 

Here is the presentation on the KUNSTRADIO website:  

Since the founding manifesto of the French Oulipo Group in 1962, in which it proposed writing poetry in computer programming language, there have been forms of electronic literature that not only employ computers primarily as text generators or audiovisual media, but also use programming, command, markup, and protocol codes as their medium. Departing from popular forms of this literature in the computer hacker culture, network artists like jodi, antiorp, and mez have been developing new poetic and artistic languages since the mid-nineties, for which the artist and theorist Alan Sondheim has coined the name “Codework.” Codeworks are technically simple e-mails whose text, however, calls to mind associations of computer crashes and interferences, viruses and spam. Initially, they were sent via network art mailing lists as interferences; later entire forums dedicated to the genre, individual styles, and private languages by individual and often pseudonymous code artists began developing. This program attempts for the first time to transpose codeworks from the written source text to radiophony.

i wonder what design purpose this gif could have

real world icon techniques and real diamonds icon ring 

3 situations (+1 reblog) where cell generation is used as a paradigm for creating digital textualities.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

A quick mention to Conway's beautiful Game of Life, because I recently came accross a program written in C and submitted to the International Obfuscated Code Contest (IOCCC), that generates cell patterns according to the rules of the Game. Or you could call them species, in a more delicate and less abstract way, as I was suggested.

The Game is a cellular automaton invented by J.H.Conway in which each of a rectangular grid of cells can be alive or dead, and cells with more than 3 or less than 2 (our of 8) live neighbours die, and empty cells with exactly 3 neighbours give birth. The Wikipedia article says a lot more about it, so go check it. 

Here is a pattern called "Jelly Fish":

Here are some examples of simulation of the program written in C for IOCCC, whose source code can be found here, and the presentation by the IOCCC judges is here. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

A discourse on cell generation, through a metaphoric simulation: Talan Memmott's From Lexia to Perplexia (does not read correctly with OS, find a PC): 

With the permission of 0, 0 becomes 1 -- more than 1, the trans|missive agent of I. The Cell.f, a secondary layer of translucent pigment colorizes the original, inVents the self as immaterial and imaginary. As the trans|missive agent of I, the original Cell.f de.parts from the body to produces feeling there, at the body. This first iteration of Cell.f remains true to the original; yet, in the name of exe.tension, it repeats, doubles the original inTent, making a dual appearance in its own right -- at the points i(g)nitiation and the extinguishment. Cell.f 1.0 is involved in the local mediation of 'court' matter, participating face-to-face with the original. 

What is funny about Talan Memmott's work is that it is all written in Javascript, and is based on a click/mouseover hypertextual system that leaves no room for chance. The only random event is where you are going to click first. But the system of reading is completely pre-determined, not generative at all. Here is one example of what appears in the bottom line of the browser :

javascript:show('terminal-line'); hide('lex00'); hide('EYE00'); hide('greenGRID');

The code (not the codework as code play emerging in the surface of the text, but the actual code executing the work) denies the idea of automaton that Memmott wants to convey, revealing a method of composing limited by metaphor and illusion. The code as a piece of art is pure jargon that represents cprocesses and is used as a flag. The real code contradicts Memmott's discourse on his text being a "transmissive agent".

When Brion Gysin was calling "for all active agents", there was a direct activation of a text: all active agents are the many stochastic texts generated by Gysin's permutation program.

When Talan Memmott is picturing the body of the text as a vritual cell recombination, there is only a staging (or a picture) of the process, and not the process itself. Memmott seems to be aware of this issue: 

The inconstancy of location is transparent to the I-terminal as its focus is at the screen rather than the origin of the image. It is the illusory object at the screen that is of interest to the human enactor of the process -- the ideo.satisfractile nature of the FACE, an inverted face like the inside of a mask, from the inside out to the screen is this same <HEAD>[FACE]<BODY>, <BODY> FACE </BODY> rendered now as sup|posed other.  

it is weird to assume that the "human reader" would only be interested in the representation of the process, adn would be faced with the existential dilemma of the illusion: this is what Baudrillard and the people from the Matrix movie seem to think. Myself i find this pretty boring. This existential staging of digital productions (textual or iconic) as deceptive seems to be an expression of the need to reinject (a lacking) intentionality in the system. 

From out of NO.where, Echo appears in the private space of Narcissus.tmp to form a solipstatic community (of 1, ON) with N.tmp, at the surface. The two machines -- the originating and the simulative -- collapse and collate to form the terminal-I, a Cell.f, or, cell...(f) that processes the self as outside of itself -- in realtime.  

It is highly contradictory: Memmott's seems to want to make his text an implementation of the Theory of Emergence, but the running code of his work denies the random emergence of patterns. Every pattern is deeply intentional, staged, stylistically worked and shaped into a work of art. 

Why trying to force a concept into another? Why not leaving the possibility of having 2 different systems? Why hang on to intentionality? It is as absurd as the idea of Intelligent Design.  

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

N. Katherine Hayles defends the same position as Memmott: she gives credentials to discourses that are metaphorically reproducing scientific theories of the digital universe. Memmott is eloquent regarding that matter: technological evolution is cosmological, a natural phenomenon and expression of the planetray machine ("Minifesto 2", still in From Lexia to Perplexia). Earlier in this blog, I gave a little account of Hayle's thesis with notes from her conference "My Mother Was A Computer".

Hayles is mostly interested in these metaphoric discourses that she studies in fiction. It is of course interesting (as Hayles's method is descriptive and highly informative) but I am a little surprised: there are other textualities (produced under the banner of the aesthetic) which are actual implementations of these theories, so why not study them first, before running for the metaphors? By claiming first their authenticity as works of art, by electing the interpretive method as the key to the literary text, they jump immediatly into theory and forget the rest.

I like Alan Sondheim's criticism of the critical theory of Semiotics - I was pleasantly suprised, because he is the initiator of Codeworks, that are highly determined by the Semiotics theories. After talking about Umberto Eco's thesis of the abstraction of the referent into the interpretation of its sign as cultural convention (which echoes Riffaterre's "integrative transition of signs from the mimesis level to the semiosis high level of signifiance), he says very smartly: 

"This allows the development of the theory as a closed domain, which bypasses any 'raw dialectic'. It seems that an approach which treats communication and signification as occurring within autonomous 'spheres of discourses' relegates itself to detached systems of communication ignoring the deeper issues of signifying processes. [Eco's example of ideology as "a laboratory model":] in it, the ideological issues reveal their inconsistencies precisely because of their detachment. The ideologies are a priori mutually exclusive; they are 'internally' defined as such."

(this is a review of Umberto Eco's Theory of Semiotics (1973) by Alan Sondheim in the Art Journal, Vol.36 No.2, Winter 1976-77, pp.180-186, online on Jstor.org, if you are connected from a university.  The quote of RIffaterre is from Sémiotique de la poésie, 1983)

Metaphor, as a displacement, can also be a detachment. The problem with the metaphoric discourses is that they tend to produce jargon and complexity in a vane and an autotelic way.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

I think reading the IOCCC winning entries as experimental and actual activations of cell generation (for instance) is a way to get out of these closed 'spheres of discourse' that produce ideological detachment while reproducing comfortable dilemmas in literary environments. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

update/reblog:

On We-Make-Money-Not-Art: Life and death in the artificial ecosystem

The essay “Coding Praxis: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Code” (2004), by COX, Geoff, MACLEAN, Alex, WARD, Adrian, is far more interesting then their first one ("The Aesthetics of Generative Code", 2000), which had a disturbing aristetolian touch - but a great deal of examples!!! In "Coding Praxis", the software artists (re)explain their "formalist" stance in a much more critical way, as an engagement in the relations of production and through working with the technical apparatus. I like the idea of presenting oneslf as a cultural producer. 

Here is an excerpt of the introduction and the conclusion of the essay, that I suggest as a possible answer to yesterday's discussion:

(p.167)

(...) In addressing the idea of the limits of the aesthetics of code,the
suggestion is that some of the hidden oppositions between the
intellectual and physical division of labour involved in program-
ming might be revealed as a consequence.In this paper,we aim to
make a further analogy to the dialectical relationship of theory to
practice —in the lexicon of critical theory known as ‘praxis’.Praxis
is a self-creating action informed by theory,and therefore thor-
oughly active and dynamic.Is the analogy of this concept produc-
tive for thinking about the role of code beyond its functional role,
and its implications for offering a program(me) of action? (...)

(p.170-171-172)

self-modifying code
sub bang {
my $self = shift;
# Feedback
$self->code->[3]=~ s/e/ee/;
$self->modified;
}
sub bang {
my $self = shift;
# Feeeeeeedback
$self->code->[3]=~ s/e/ee/;
$self->modified;
}
sub bang {
my $self = shift;
 

Although code is programmed,it is not simply causal and remains
unpredictable.In our example,feedback.pl,a text editor is editing
a piece of code that has the ability to modify itself when executed.
These modifications happen directly to the code being edited in
realtime,opening up the possibility for the code to fundamentally
modify its own behaviour.Of course,this has major implications
upon the act of programming.The programmer must now think
not only of what the software will do and how it will interact,but
also how it will modify itself and remain functional,and continue
to be active.The programmer must take a leap of faith and now
consider the code’s initial logic as well as be able to follow the
code’s logic after it has modified itself,and continue to do so indef-
initely.In a sense,the software itself must contain an understand-
ing of its own performance,and be able to sustain this perform-
ance through its performance.Here,we might speculate on under-
standing code as embedding both theory (of its own agenda) and
practice (of its own action).

Additionally,the speculative distinction between the tool and the
machine is broken here.It is clear that some software exists as
a tool (as an extension of the human body) and some software
exists as a machine (a technique for automation).Coding is the
practice of creating either scenario,but a code that reflects upon
its own making in this way cannot simply be regarded as a tool —
it is reflexive.Nor is it simply a machine,since its actions are high-
ly variable and likely to fail.The similarities between this and the
self-destructive nature of many performances cannot go unno-
ticed.Self-modifying code blatantly breaks the determinism of
code and makes it explicit.

In addressing the idea of the limits of the aesthetics of code,the
suggestion is that some of the hidden oppositions between the
intellectual and physical division of labour involved in program-
ming might be revealed as a consequence.In this paper,we aim to
make a further analogy to the dialectical relationship of theory to
practice —in the lexicon of critical theory known as ‘praxis’.Praxis
is a self-creating action informed by theory,and therefore thor-
oughly active and dynamic.Is the analogy of this concept produc-
tive for thinking about the role of code beyond its functional role,
and its implications for offering a program(me) of action?  (...)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^references&links^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Coding Praxis: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Code"

Geoff Cox's workspace: anti-thesis.net

Alex McLean's projects and writings: yaxu.org 

McLean & Ward's generative music  (cited in ‘The Aesthetics of
Generative Code’) : slub.org

I was talking about Brion Gysin's permutations as an example of (non computer ) generative art. Here a few that I like a lot. You can even see a raw and simple use of code. (Pardon the poor quality, I couldn't find good permutations by Gysin online, and I do not have a scanner, and the pics turned out super bad; click for bigger).

Bonus 1: a permutation poem by Gertrude Stein, quoted in the book from which I extracted the previous texts:

Bonus 2: a warholian gif picturing Brion Gysin found on permuted.org.uk, a curious website about permutations (with a simple program to download) and which carries a passion for urban foxes!

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extracted from The Third Mind, William Burroughs & Brion Gysin