I have updated/fixed a couple gifs that I made/transformed:

- chain gif

- machine-made custom formatting in gimp

- gif bigger

- rainbow line to square

Now for some references that I came accross or remembered lately: 

A very learnt essay by Olia Lialina, "A Vernacular Web", a documented history of popular design and the persistance of early "old school" www aesthetics on the web of today, in hidden or cool places. 

Chapters: 1/  The Indigenous and the Barbarians 2/ Under Construction  3/ The Starry Night Background 4/ Free Collections of Web Elements 5/ Links 6/ Midi 7/ Frames 8/ Tilde 9/ Welcome to my Homepage 10/ Mail me
 

An episode of "the show with zefrank" updating his audience about the progress of his "Ugly Myspace Contest", and giving a little lecture on how the networks consumers, by learning the language of authorship tools, disturbed the rules of good taste established by the expert designers.

"weird sandwich for TEH OMGWTFBBQ!!!!"

Artists who have made that aesthetic trendy and systematically fun to watch: 

The Beige Programming Ensemble page and all the pages of their affiliates': Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckman, lektrogirl, Frankie Martins, paperrad, etc.

That's all I can remember from the top of my head. I'll add up links, maybe.

A nice visual & permutation poem by Bruce Andrews quoted by Loss Pequeno Glazier in his essay "Code, Cod, Ode". When Loss was my teacher at Sunny Buffalo (Fall 2005), he showed us Andrews' poem titled "Fidel", and I could have sworn at the time it was a visual poem that lloked like a portrait of Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, I was apparently the only one to see Fidel on the page. What a shame. Also, the version I am showing here does not convey Fidel at all...

p.s.: i talked to someone who told me that, among all the poets that this someone invited to university where he was teaching, Bruce Andrews was the only one to ask for a fee... roooh! just bitching.

George W.Bush should do an internship in Cuba very soon, if he wants to have his bro Ted President next year. Fidel Castro has successfully engaged the "power for the brother" process. Hello Raul! Here is an ascii portrait of Fidel before sending him a goodbye.

 Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Code, Cod, Ode". 

A [...] sense of the parts being greater than the whole occurs in Gertrude Stein's famous utterance:

"A rose is a rose is a rose."

Here, the parts that are greater than the whole are all the same, "rose", and yet placing them as an array seems to almost geometrically increase the overall meaning of them.

As an array, this would appear as something like:

(...)

At this point, I would like to look at two examples of code in my own work. One from "Bromeliads" and the other from "Io Sono At Swoons", both of which are available on my EPC Author Page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/).

In "Bromeliads" variant line possibilities are used to produce alternate readings of the text. These are technically arranged in arrays as follows:

I would like to note the structural and visual shape of this two-element array, and to suggest that the array here is not only content-based but also a visual way of writing. This structural arrangement is a way to organize the possibilities of the onscreen event and as such, the holes here are solid and meaningful, ways of arranging such possibilities. These are possibilities which exist as manifest in the code but can only be realized in the onscreen event of the code's execution. 

I would compare this to another work, "Io Sono At Swoons", a work that assembles texts from a collection of strings, or data elements. The aesthetic contours of "Io Sono" was created by adding spaces, tangible nothing, or holes, into the strings. The result of adding such numbers of spaces into strings could not be anticipated. Thus the only way to work was to insert spaces, compile, then observe the displayed results of the spaces in the onscreen event. Working with the holes, or empty space, became a means to work with the poem.

What is of use in this method is the concept of precise poetic analysis, of the relevance of position, location, and structure. The arrangement of words in a poem or in a program have intense value. Like the empty space beneath arches in a colonnade, writing and programming is a dance around the architectural spaces of its parts.

There are hundreds of them on the internet I believe. I must have read... a couple, so I do not know if the link I am suggesting is comparatively superior to others. In the first pages, they draw interesting links between the history of hacks and activism in the 60/70's: for instance the Yippies, the branch of the Hippies who hacked telephone services. This history could have included William Burroughs' experiments with tape recorders, that he connects with his own theory of word as a virus, in The Electronic Revolution. 

So, from The Signals and Power committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club in 1961 to the Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE) in 1999, here is the [HI]STORY[-TELLING] OF HACKER CULTURES written by the people at ---d-i-n-a---. Also, check out the contemporary context of art in the age of hacking. 

I had heard about this mailing-list crash some times ago, at the occasion of a little research I did on JODI's e-mail interventions -not on Syndicate but on the Eybeam mailing-list, which is also dead. Also, this echoes one of my first post on the subject of mailing-list spam art interventions. See also the Church of the Spaghetti Monster.

Below is an extract of the discourse that the people from Syndicate wrote at the occasion of the death of their mailing-list. It is really interesting to get a sense of what kind of solutions artists and theorists participating in mailing-list suggest in response to the claim that they are cut-off from the world. Full history here.

The extract below is related to the direct concerns of this blog, showing the story of the nn team's interventions as a major factor of the crash of Syndicate.

>>>> 

The net entity nn (Netochka Nezvanova, integer, antiorp,
etc.), a pseudonym used by an international group of artists
and programmers in their extensive and aggressive mailing
list-based online-performances and for other art projects,
had been subscribed to the Syndicate list in 1997. It was,
as the first of less than a handful of people ever,
unsubscribed against its will because it was spamming the
list so heavily that all meaningful communication was
blocked. In January 2001, nn sent an e-mail asking to again
be subscribed to the Syndicate mailing list. (What nn never
bothered to realise was that subscription to the list had
always been open so that, at any point, it could have
subscribed itself - we have always wondered why Majordomo is
such a blind spot in this technophile entity`s arsenal.)
After getting assurances from nn that she was not out to
misuse the list, we subscribed it to the Syndicate list.

Naively, as we had to realise. nn went from one or two
messages every day in February to an average of three to
five message in April and up to eight and ten messages per
day in May and June - and that on a list which had a regular
daily traffic of three to five messages a day. The
distributed nature of the nn collective makes it possible
for them to keep posting 24 hours a day - great for
promoting your online presence, irritating for people who
have a less frantic life rhythm. nn`s messages are always
cryptic, sometimes amusing, often tediously repetitive in
their quirky rhetorics and style, and generally irritating
for the majority of people. Its activity on the Syndicate -
like on many other lists it has used and terrorised - soon
came to look like a hijack. But the sheer mass of traffic nn
was generating, the sheer amount of nn`s presence, was
overwhelming. Perhaps this phenomenon could be compared to
SMEGL, short for super mental grid lock, a term that was
developed to describe traffic jam situations in NYC back in
the eighties (or was this term coined in Berlin-Kreuzberg`s
famous Fischbuero? Who knows, the boundaries get
blurred...).

In the spring of 2001, nn`s and other people`s activities
who use open, unmoderated mailing lists for promulgating
their self-promotional e-mails, triggered discussions about
`spam art`, on Syndicate as well as on other lists.
Actually, given the extreme openness and vulnerability of a
structure like the Syndicate it remains quite astonishing
that this structure survived for such a long time. What
happened in the course of 2000/2001 (not only to Syndicate,
but also to several other mailing lists) was that the
openness of these lists, i.e. the fact that they were
unmoderated, was massively abused, and, finally, destroyed,
by relentless `creative` spamming. One of the basic
principles of the Internet - its openness - suddenly seemed
to become a mere tool for attacking this very principle.
`Netiquette` did not seem to be of much value anymore and
was sacrificed for the egotistical self-expression of
(distributed) artist egos. The irony of this process is
that, like any good parasite, this artistic practice depends
on the existence of lively online communities: it not only
bites, but kills the hand that feeds it. - These parasite
nomads will find new hosts, no doubt, but they have over the
past year helped to erode the social fabric of the wider net
cultural population so much that communities have to protect
themselves from attacks and hijacks more aggressively than
before. Their adolescent carelessness is partly responsible
for the withering of the romantic utopia of a completely
open, sociable online environment. However educational that
may be, we despise the deliberation with which these people
act.

"Draw Jam", by Ian Stevenson

 From Content = No Cache: using gifs, but mainly javascprit, Beiguelman's piece is an overview of the error code situation that can be encoutered while navigating. It is also, seemingly, an homage to some forms of web art like digital poetry (animated/kinetic texts) and net.art (playing with software). 

"Content = No Cache is about the loss of inscription. It talks about error messages."

Beiguelman's perspective is didactic. She is formulating into a representational discourse the characteristics of web art practices.

"Any page on the  web seems  to be only surface. The very metaphor of the screen with the page reinforce the assurance.

Nevertheless, it is just an optical illusion. What is shown is not there. It is hidden. It is the source.

It does not matter if what is seen is text or image.  What can be read depends on a textual route of addressing.

In a phrase:
reading is a matter of placement."

http://desvirtual.com/thebook/english/text.htm

I don't know if this project by mi_ga was actually gone, but I thought the site was down for some time. Today I tried again by chance and here it is! Buy ascii carpets online at triple-double-u.com

carpet/?s is an internet based project that allows you to purchase a 
personalised carpet made out of ascii (American Standart Code for 
Information Interchange). It runs on a php application where internet 
resources are used as yarn to make ascii cloths.
The user only has to do one click and a machine does the rest. The 
program generates textual output, and the ascii is always unique. It is 
based on the time when the surfer goes to a web site. The time in a form 
of hh:mm:ss is then used as a keyword for the results taken from a 
search engine. The program downloads the contents of a second given 
result, rejects html tags and white spaces and puts all textual content 
into a carpet-like form. The produced carpet-like image can be printed 
out or weaved in a factory and then shipped to the addressee.

a little while ago, we-make-money-not-art's Regine made a good summary the key exhibition of 1968 that signed the birth of cybernetic/informatic art. I am rebloging this as an historical landmark of e-textualities that I should have blogged about myself wayyy before. Thank you we-make-money, and sorry for stealing, it is all methodological.

My contribution is:

- this link to an audio conference where Jasia Reichardt describes the event (on radio.sztaki.hu)

- a reference to Eric Mottram's great essay on poetry during the cybernetic era: "Computer theory can help us to understand the nature of information chosen for an environment - with whatever operations of control and randomness. [...] Poems often have as their subject the very nature of control as beauty. The poetic choice [...] is personal, even temperamental: to risk absolute communication or take the risks of extreme control" (p.14)

Eric Mottram, "The Triumph of the Mobile: The Structure of Information, the Language of Computers and Contemporary Poetry", in Intrepid # 23/24, ed. by Allen De Loach Summer/Fall 1972, Buffalo, NY

I already mentioned Eric Mottramon this blog on data processing texts.  

************************************************************

Regine speaking for we-make-money: 

This morning i stumbled upon a mention of a show organised in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Art on London by Jasia Reichardt. Cybernetic Serendipity was one of the first exhibitions of computer art and digital installations.

The show was divided into three major sections:

- 1. computer generated graphics, computer animated films, computer composed and played music, and computer verse and texts. With works like Sine-curve man by Charles Csuri and James Schaffer or early movies by John Withney.

- 2. machines such as a Jean Tinguely's Metamatic that produced a picture every hour or so. There was also Nam-June Paik's Robot-456, the first non-human action artist, it walked around the exhibition and occasionally peed. Bruce Lacey (you might remember his Womaniser) was showing Rosa Bosom and her mate (Mate). Rosa had a large pair of lips that she thrust at unsuspecting visitors. SAM, Sound Activated Mobile, by Edward Ihnatowicz, responded to quiet sounds. If you whispered, the flower-shape ear would turn towards you and bend as if to listen.

- 3. machines demonstrating the uses of computers, such as IBM computers used for making airline bookings!

Jasia Reichardt later said that "People were looking at images like those of the engineer, William Fetter of the Boeing Corporation in the same way that they looked at images in an art exhibition."

I don't know what i'd pay to be able to step in the time machine and visit the exhibition. Computer/electronic/new media art is still in its infancy and something tells me that not that much has changed since 1968.

Via Autonomous Mutations. More information about the show in Mediakunstnetz, Mind the gap, Stuttgart 1960, Parliaments of Art, PDF.

While writing my thesis, I was trying to understand Gisele Beiguelman's critique of the motto What You See Is What You Get in an essay she wrote for p0es1s in 2004. 

Beiguelmam has a dual relationship to the writing of code. In a way, she uses code in a more figurative than active way; her work is not an implementation of code's performance but a representation of it. Like the work from 2000 that I was quoting earlier in this blog, content = no cache, or her "Code Movies" from //**Code_up in 2004, which "investigates image particularities and interrogates the role of code in the meaning construction" ().

These are a kinetic processing of binary code extracted from the digitalization of Antonioni's Blow Up, not running code. It is, contrary to the works of software art, some kind of faux-code. If software art is, in the words of Matthew Fuller, "speculative software", than I guess Beiguelman's work, and also net.art, are more of an example of "critical software".

But what striked me about Beiguelman's critique and work, is that she is playing the ontological suspicion game that the post-modernist (Baudrillard and Lyotard for instance) were trying out. By speaking for the representation and the remediatization of codes, she talks about code as a phenomenon - that which appears and stands for being (the digital), and not that which acts upon in a performative way (the processual), perspective that I 'd rather adopt when I talk about code. But she has a point, because she wipes out the post-modernist  apocalypse now attitude.

Baudrillard says, in Simulations: "The sideration of the mass goes along well with technical programming. Fascination by the maximal norm and the mastering of probability [...] You do not fantasize on the thoroughness of a program. Observing the program is a vertigo in itself. It is like observing a world without a flaw." Baudrillard converts this into an ontological suspicion: this is inauthentic, and this will control you, this is " 'information', a chain reaction, a slow implosion and simulation of spaces where the real is still convincing" (rough translation from the French by me).

Beiguelman seems to answer to this: "Digital text and images are unlinked to the support. Save it in another medium. There is no difference between the original and the copy. There are no originals, there are no copies. Just information codes"

She claims that one tends to confuse (textual) surface and medium, when she criticizes the "inconsequent metaphor of screen as page", criticism that can be applied to MacLuhan's motto (accounted for by Baudrillard), medium = message. It should be remembered that Baudrillard and McLuhan werespeaking in the context of the tv though; so this dialogue that I madeup between Beiguelman and them is really just a pretext I guess.

Beiguelman: "those false parallels and synonyms suppress the most interesting possibility of online writing: it celebrates the loss of inscription by removing all traces of the acts of erasure". The machine does not inscribe monumentally, there is not chaining of the message to the medium, but it does inscribe temporarily. It writes, it erases, it writes, it erases, etc. There is no erasure as a crossed word on a paper, there is pure deletion.

Here come the fun part. I was reminded of the very ASCII series by the ASCII Art Ensemble: "ASCII History of Art for the Blind". It is an extremely vicious piece that plays with both the questions of remediatization of text, image and code and of loss of inscription. They play with the paradox of the unreadable image by making the image into a code-text which on an iconic level you can hardly see, and that you don't want to read. It becomes really wicked when the "image" is the ASCII drawing of a haiku.

It took me half and hour of reformatting this ASCII in all possible monospace fonts I could find and another half hour to perform optical contorsions to decipher this silly little poem. In the end, I came up with this:

From all directions
Winds bring petals of cherry
Into the grebe [??] lake

Oh, and the best about this piece, is the reading of the ASCII texts by a computer voice that is leaving out half of the symbols for the sake of rythm (I suppose - I don't really know). Listen to the haiku. 

So this direct implementation of the loss of inscription made me think about what Mattehw Kirschenbaum says in "Extreme Inscription: Toward a Grammatology of the Hard Drive". Inscription is first a phenomenon of the hard drive: the act of deletion is an act of hiding that sometimes the machine makes mistakes. Kirschenbaum, when he states that posssibility of machine error, is actually answering to the same kind of discourse that Beiguelman is fighting against:


"Computers, as Danny Hillis reminds us, are machines that carefully sustain their illusion of immateriality: “the implementation technology must produce perfect outputs from imperfect inputs, nipping small errors in the bud. This is the essence of digital technology, which restores signals to near perfection at every stage" [...]
The reality is that hard drives make errors all the time; any drive that did not would be operating at such low data densities and speeds as to be unmarketable. Every sector of data on the disk includes error correcting codes derived according to established algorithms; the basic idea is that the mathematics generates a bit sequence that serves as a redundant expression of the original data (this is called hashing). If the two fail to match up during a read or write task then an error is indicated and the task is repeated. Users never see such errors, which are detected and corrected in the space of milliseconds, and this contributes to the way in which the drive is perceived as an abstraction identified only by a letter (“C”) or a crude desktop icon"

At the level of the sign, in the conceptual and abstract environment of code - in which the ASCII Art Ensemble is standing - this phenomenon is translated into what N.Katherine Hayles calls "the flickering signifiers". After all, the symbols on the screen are a mix of this physical inscription of the signal and this arbitrary writing of the sign.

Kirschenbaum, who is quoting Hayles, concludes: "Digital signification, in this model, consists in an open-ended symbiotic exchange (or feedback loop) between computation and representation"


The ontological game is played. The problem is not the media, but how you remediatize and for what purpose. Beiguelman: "Art has lost its contemplative function and this makes all the difference. The ubiquitous quality of cyberspace does not point to dispersion but rather to a multileveled subject, disconnected from the limits that attach representations to supports and that reduce language mediation"

+++++++++++++++++++++references--------------

Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, éd. Galilée, Paris, 1981

Beiguelman, “WYSIWYG or WYGIWYS?”, in p0es1s, The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, ed. par F. W. Block, C. Heibach, K. Wenz, Hatje Catz Books, Germany, 2004, pp. 169-179

Kirschenbaum, “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive”, TEXT Technology: the journal of computer text processing, (online edition), Volume 13, Number 2, 2004, pp.91-125

++ **//Code_up by Gisele Beiguelman  

++++ ASCII History of Art for the Blind by ASCII Art Ensemble

Today, browsing Google Image to find some good text-based MUDs (MultiUser Dungeon/MultiUser Dimension) screenshots. Click the links to see bigger or to see the source. 

And a very cool graphical one

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()() 

Now for Espen J. Aarseth, speaking about MUDs (messy notes that I took from his Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997). Sorry for not reformulating into proper sentences (OOooooooo):

chap7: songs from the MUD: multiuser discourse

there were talks of using MUDs as nonlocal work spaces for academics --> virtual university departement within same field."effective means for the extension of a Bourdieuan field into the digital nonlocality of the global sphere, as do many other closed, non-local, social places, such as invitation-only mailing lists and private IRC channels" (what Muds are not originally thks to anonymity plays and identity experiments). 145

not classifiable as games: there are no immanent rules to regulate social and linguistic behavior: "Any system that must regulate its discourse by social pressure and convention rather than by clearly defined regulations is more than a game - both more real and more perilous" 145

Tiny Muds: "archetypal, as they emulate and combine functions from almost all other writing media in a social setting in which everything is communicated through words"; + seen as a substitute for "real life" ; cf. expression of "virtual communities" 146

rhetorical figure of virtuality: Muds as examples of Derridean "supplement" : "an addition to or expansion of the privileged modes of social interaction but as the same time an inferior substitute, a sinister dark-side consequence of modern technological society"

Muds as contexts rather than texts; non literary form that has to be experienced subjectively, with an interaction that is not enacted to be read as an artifact or designed for an audience uninvolved in it --> Elizabeth Reid

Aarseth: subjective experience does not dismiss textual activity; meaning does not require staging.
"They may not be intended 'to be read as an artifact' (neither were Shakespeare's plays) but they certainly are intended to be read. This makes them textual, and the unique aspects of MUD communication make MUD relevant and interesting and well worth comparing to other types of texts" 149

MUds structure divided into
- construction (designing characters)
- progression (commands)
- negotiation (actions according to rules)
- quasi event (simulation of event made up by a user)
- event

the quasi-event level is dominated by discourse: allows the most significant actions, which is the textual play and interplay of the user. // music improvisation, jamming session
--> the question of the literariness of MUDs becomes self-evident and locatable: not in grand structural schemes, such as prose narratives, adventure game intrigues, or lyrical vision, but as happenings, whose level of success depends  on the competence and performance of the group of players" 158

rules take the form not of an intrigue but of a "netiquette" (coined by Aarseth): "These are usually formulated by individuals who, with the best of intentions, wish to impose a certain standard of polite behavior on the motley and sometimes unpleasant crowds on the Internet, usually by pretending that these formulated rules reflect the wishes and preferences of a mythical majority of net users. (...) it is not a point or position in itself but a contested behavioral envelope of tensions and positions, which may or may not be perceived as such by the inhabitants of the site" 15

The Ron Starr's Poetry Tool's Page. I used the generator Mac Travesty a while ago to work on my Paris Hilton's Slander Lawsuit.

strange pic found on the (French) ALAMO website and which seems weirdly unrelated to the content of the website, dedicated to programming old constrained poetry forms into random-based text-generators, and using as a database works from poets ranging from the 16th to the 19th century.

these days i am finishing up my thesis and going through my old resources links, and i am picking some details that i had overlooked - not about content but about the graphic/design context for instance. also i am simply "bookmarking" these links here so that the blog is an online relay for topics discussed in the body of my thesis. 

thks to joe beuckman for raising awareness about awesome beadworks!! check out aunt molly bead street for more. draw your pattern here:

**************

and today, a new little deformed gif for justin 

(one of the ) album covers and gif animations for the new album Too Slow To Live. Via VVork.

International Obfuscation C Code Contest 

1988 westley  	prints '3.141', circle made of '_-_-_-_' in layout
 

>> best layout 

1994 schnitzi	flips stdin along a diagonal (source mirrored along diagonal)

>> best layout 

2004 arachnid   Curses maze displayer/navigator with only line-of-sight visibility 

>> best use of vision 

2001 rosten	Makes X mouse pointer have inertia or anti-inertia

>> best abuse of the user