"Have you ever dreamt of having a piece of software art you could call truly yours? Or had the feeling that most media art is dull, and that you could do it better? Or had a marvelous idea you could not realize for lack of time, commitment or expertise?
Well, your chance has come."

These are words by Leonardo Solaas, an Argentinean programmer and net artist, in his introduction to the project Outsource Me, run in the context of the Readme 100 festival (November 4-5, 2005). Solaas takes on the role of a worker looking for an employer who would be keen to have a work done for nothing (in that case, the making of a software art piece). Instead of waiting to be given the possibility to "emerge" (as it is said that outsourcing industries are a factor for the emergence of third-world countries), Solaas creates his own emergence through this art project.

I am hinting to this project as a way to introduce my own work, which is another type of outsourcing. After a Master in Contemporary Literature dedicated to the investigation of new forms of aesthetic writing through informatic codes (in French: "Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique", sept. 2006), I am working now on a new Master, this time in Information and Communication Sciences, based on Software art.

I would like to understand how programmers write their programs and accompany them with critical discourses. My outsourcing is illegitimate because, in spite of researching within an institution, the works I am interested in do not need (or should not need) any critical support: they produce it themselves. I am not trying to bring anything new to them (myself I am not a programmer), but something new to my peers in the university: writing software art, a "speculative" (Mathew Fuller) technique, a political "praxis" (Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean), wraps network usage in a critical and playful mode that is not always acknowledged in the scholar discourses about new media. In terms of appropriation and tactique there is a lot to think about. I will also look in the direction of conceptual art and conceptual and/or cybernetic poetry for a better understanding of these textual forms.

For my previous master I have ran until today a blog (on elgg already) that was for me a didactic tool to organize my discoveries in a field (electronic textualities) that was new to me. That is what I am starting to do again with this blog. Here is a selection of the posts that were about code in the previous blog.

For now I am going to investigate the works of the runme.org community and further into software and programming practice that I find interesting. Also I will write down notes about critical works in progress.

Cheerio!