"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!

An interesting interview by ArtFagCity with Tom Moody and Michael Bell-Smith: "Geeks in the Gallery", where they discuss about the traditional distinction between low art and high art and bring their new perspective, consisting in making the most out of easy webtools (via an interesting discussion of the animated gifs qualities for instance). 

The phrase Software art as I study can be deceiving: one could think it has to do with super high-tech up-to-date and exepensive software used by experts. Same for the word art, which could easily be interpreted by its application in the high fields of art history and institutions. When the two come together, though, here is the twist: they seem to degrade each other - and that's where the fun is: "art becomes web junk" says M. Bell-Smith. For more qbout gifs, I have illustrated the subject a little bit on my previous blog under the category icons, gifs, cheap art.

Image via Cosmic Disciple

They also develop a non-political stance, and it's interesting to find a way out this boring debate of what is political art. It gives way to an idea of art practice that is not political by representation but by practice, by the context in which it is elaborated, by other stuff that the artist does and that he does not call art; Tom Moody's blog is filled with newspapers' extracts on american political life but in the interview he claims the right to political irresponsibility. I once heard the same words spoken by the net.art duo JODI: "the freedom to be irresponsable in front of one's computer", says Dirk Paesmans (in Matthew Mirapaul's NY Times article "Distorting the digital mechanism" 21/04/03). 

Tom Moody's adds some fuel to the fire there! (this metaphor I just used is irrelevant and comes out of nowhere).

i keep modifying and updating these projects. today, march 17th 2007, i decide to stop. maybe. 

  Following my introductory post, here are some introductory notes and an outline for my Master thesis on Software art according to run_me, written in French. 

i wrote a larger project for a phd grant at Paris 8 next year.

By Etienne Cliquet (may 2005), from ordigami.net

more about Cliquet on this blog. 

Hannah Weiner, related to the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement, had strong ties to conceptual art and the cybernetic reflexion on language. Here is a text she wrote on experimental information procesing, with a spin from numeric to analogous modes of communication.

Also read this post from my old blog on her Code poems.

=======  

[in 0 TO 9, #6 (July, 1969). Edited by Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci]

TRANS - SPACE COMMUNICATION
Hannah Weiner

I am interested in exploring methods of communication that will be understood face to face, or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving.

For three years I have used the International Code of Signals to make poems and poetry events, because this code makes available and possible the translation of simultaneous equivalents:

from the pupils of a French primary school

A new blog has been lauched since October 2006, the "Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club", and is run collectively by a bunch of "profesional bloggers": Travis Hallenbeck, Joel Holmberg, Marisa Olson, Michael Bell-Smith, Tom Moody, Brian Blomerth, John Michael Boling, Peter Baldes, Paul Slocum, Guthrie Lonergan.

These people represent quite well what Trebor Scholz, in a class he was teaching at SUNY Buffalo in Spring 2006, once called "wild theory", not in the scientific meaning of speculation (hypothesis with no proof), or even "insane claim", but in an epistemological perspective. Knowledge (and especially "scholar" knowledge) doesn't match only one context or only one frame : geek culture (for instance) has made the point that erudition is not something limited to university libraries. Research practice can be elaborated in alternative environments and inform the theoretical field in a whacky and smart way. In the case mentioned above, people combine geek culture contexts (and methods of data processing and knowledge displaying) and a scholar research practice (most of them are teachers in universities. I think that's cool. 

See my previous blog on cheap art.

On splasho.com, a baby and dead conveyor. What they say:

"The flow along this conveyor belt represents the rate at which babies are being born on the planet, the flow of coffins represents deaths. You can tick 'Show continent' to display the continent in which they are born. ( Africa, Asia, Australasia Europe, North America, South America). Continents are not yet shown for coffins. On slow systems the babies may bunch up, this appears to perform better on Internet Explorer than Firefox."

Here is the baby and coffin performance gone wrong on Firefox: 

Following a post on my old blog, SpamJam poetry as I called it (and other spam/e-mail art concerns on my previous blog @camillepb::e-textuality), I wrote an essay for the to-be-published new bilingual FR/UK academic review called “regards croisés / crossed looks” (by the researchers of Laboratoire Paragraphe / dept. Hypermedia / Paris 8) that focuses on digital literary forms, with a multicultural and pluridisciplinary perspective (literature, communications studies and new media studies, semiotics, psychology…).

My essay targets non-identified textual forms that help reconsidering the Jackobsonian poetics in the light of the conceptual frame it is derived from: the theory of communication by Claude Shannon. These are interventional processes: the Codeworks of the collectives NN and JODI on virtual communities' listervs. What is new in them which could define these processes as poetic? What is at stake in the context of information processing by a community that both welcomes and rejects them, thus determining their practice as parasitic? I will try to reconsider one of the great metaphor of post-modernist poetry, noise, but I will re-materialize it in the digital context of protocols and codes. Out of this “Spam art”, there is an agency effect which repositions actors in the informational system. A new set of literary metaphors will then emerge, among which a textual economy of noise processing in text and the deprogramming of social conventions.

Essay - in English / in French

more references to e-mail/spam art

- very cool interview of Frédéric Madre (who I mention in the essay but whom I didn't spend enought time on) by Josephine Bosma on the subject of "spam art" (on Rhizome) - and more on F. Madre on Homo Numericus

- a networked artists' community project: "Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour", on the http.uk.net website, initiated by Furtherfield.org. 

------------------------------ 

Today, I went for an update of jodi's web-scams, and not surprisingsly, but still enjoyably, my browser felt weird once again. From the main gate jodi.org, I was redirected towards a new adress: http://www.wwwwwwwww.com, where I had to wait a century to get anything to load. Then a gif appeared on a black background.

Also, a general freeze of my firefox browser prevented me from doing anything, let alone to view the page source. So I opened Internet Explorer and went to b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n's "Code Explorer" - the only place I know where to view code in borwser mode - I entered the new jodi's piece address and scratched my head. Here is the code:

I didn't really know what to make out of it, so I just followed the src hotlink to the gif previously mentioned, that I found inserted in the weirdest java art page ever hosted by a Chinese server: http://toot.myrice.com/wwwwwwwww.htm

It happens that the Firefox browser crash was just incidental, because the piece works fine on Internet Explorer. JODI used a certain Fabio Ciucci's lake java applet. It's funny how my expectations to see JODI go nuts with code led me to a completely wrong interpretation. They are actually being rather simple here, using pre-made easy-to-use tools, with vernacular web nostalgia (as Olia Lialina would say) instead of trendy techno graphics.

 following Guthrie Lonergan's hacking vs defaults table, an exercise in net.art ontology, there was an interesting discussion on Tom Moody's blog about how a distinction about the net art hacking type (that would be represented by Jodi) and the net art default type (that would be represented by Tom Moody) was actually pretty fuzzy, and could blend easily into one another. Here Jodi gives a pretty good example of that, definitely playing in the "default" mode.

Fabio Ciucci's works can be found and downloaded here. My favourite remains another "Lake applet" (the most improbable in dozens) pictured below (click image to see the applet running) - notice the duck.

"Technology gets a guernsey"

(...)

Honours student Mitchell Page has used cutting-edge wearable technology to make basketball uniforms a mine of information - updating and displaying in real-time a player's fouls, score, and even the amount of time left in a game.

"Team sports clothing already acts as a form of communication, about identity and position and team and sponsors," Mr Page says. "Maybe it can also carry statistics and information about the game itself."

He has built four prototype jerseys that he says helped players keep track of games and perform better, and increased spectators' enjoyment and engagement.

He predicts that such technology could transform the way sports are played on the field, and even use the players as billboards for video advertising at half-time. (...) 

(via Information Aesthetics)

After a couple of posts mentioning problems related to the use of one web browser rather than another, a little html art / optical game from Paul Camacho:

the html drawing as you see it in your browser

now, from left to right: screenshots in internet explorer (for mac), in firefox and in safari (size modified but proportions kept):

There was a week-end of talks on the Perl programming language , organized by the association of the French Perls Mongueurs at La Villette (Carrefour numérique) last week-end, that I became aware of only Saturday around midnight, just in time to rush the following morning to the Sunday sessions. I arrived at 11:00 am to attend a talk by Christian Aperghis-Tramoni, "The consequences of hanging out on IRC (Internet Relay Chat)", a very seductive title to me who is always craving on knowing more about programmers' community and leasure time.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get in because of the high entrance fee for the day, but in the end it was very fortunate because I got to talk with the guy at the entrance for a couple of hours, who happened to be one of the main French Perl Mongueurs, David Elbaz. With a few other Perl buffs, they started to explain why Perl was a language that was close to their heart. There was only one guy talking in favor of Python in the bunch, and he was the perfect enemy for the Perl fighters: if Python programming tends to generate the least possible number of solutions for a problem, Perl is based on the motto: "There more than one way to do it", which the Perl buffs are very proud of. This was developed and is still entertained by Perl's inventor Larry Wall, in particular in his famous talk where he tried to prove that Perl was the first post-modern language; his main argument is the fact that Perl was not invented but created by plagiarizing other languages, Wall having extracted the most useful features of several programming languages he knew in order to program an efficient log processing tool when he was working at the NASA. The Perl guys insisted on the fact that Perl, thus, was really invented by and for system administrators, as opposed to a commercial language, and was then to be considered as a toolbox with a high capacity for creativity.

By the way, the "toolbox" is a metaphor that Wittgenstein uses to describe what natural languages are, so it's not a coincidence if Larry Wall underlines the proximity of Perl to natural languages. This transitional status in ontology is often raised to explain why Perl is subject to language plays more than any other programming languages. It is also one of the only languages that has its official "poetry" discipline (cf. HOPKINS, Sharon, “Camels and Needles: Computer Poetry Meets the Perl Programming Language”, in The Perl Review, 'Past, Present, & Future', vol. 0 issue 1, March 01, 2002 ).

In the end, I could get in the conference for the final presentations, the "Light Talk" (Présentations éclairs), a series of very short interventions (5 minutes each, rigorously timed by a gong in the form of a metal block carried by a threatening strong Perl guy).

One of the talks, and regarding the "natural language" perspective of Perl, played with the fact that Larry Wall knows Japanese and attempted to explain how the logic of Perl writing followed the Japanese grammatical basic rules.
(video coming soon)

There was a very cool intervention by someone I forget the name of, but who I remember for his leading role in having chosen and set the color (or material) of the t-shirt of a few Perl events (shameful choices such as pink, or fishnet). So this guy was presenting a little module he programmed, called Acme::Metasyntactic, whose main use (or useless use) is to allow the working programmer to find default expressions to replace to overused foo, bar and baz. He started with a database made out of action sounds from the Batman 60's series, and implemented the module through the IRC channels so Perl mongers could submit ideas for themes and retrieve databases altogether. It was a good echo to the talk I missed earlier in the day on the crazy uses of the IRC by programmers.