(scroll down for )

A little while ago, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied started a new website that I warmly recommand: Contemporary Home Computing. Besides from publishing a couple of great essays on web culture (among which Lialina's lesson on "The Vernacular Web" that I mentioned in my old blog while refering to amateur design), they have set up 2 blogs, which work as a dyptich. "Car Metaphors" (maintained by Lialina) and "Idioms" (by Espenschied) perform a mirrored reflexion on cultural jargon emerging from technological practice. 

In the words of Espenschied, describing how "Idioms" relates to "Car Metaphors": "metaphors popularize a conservative view on digital culture. When computers are continuously explained with cars, networks with highways, search engines with the human brain, even Email with classical postal service, the actual properties and possibilities of the computer are lost. That is why this blog is trying to do it the other way round, to popularize idioms and metaphors that come from the computer to the so called real life. There has to be a healthy balance of cultural exchange from both sides."

The perspective of drawing meaning from a daily internet consumption is pretty attractive and I consider this kind of critical presence on the web to be part of what I am trying to define as wild theory (very poorly until now I reckon). Here I guess wild theory would imply the informal approach to critical discourse these artists are experimenting with: by making the most of the blurry boundaries and the polylogic structure of blogs, by making the distinctions between text and image, object and language or code and data fuzzy enough so they all become elements of a critical discourse (not that they all blend into one another but the hierarchical and ontological differences are replaced with discursive jumps and continuity relationships). I think this mode of writing contributes to enriching the conversation a lot. A debate in this wild theoretical field does not require a methodical discourse to be deployed among participants, but anything can be suggested as a contribution to building up collective thinking (a link or an image are becoming worthy elements of a theory, for instance).

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: a similar project has been ongoing at Furtherfield for a while now. It's called Rosalind, "an upstart new media art lexicon" in which you can find expressions such as "mail listlessness - Anxiety and ennui due to overwhelming list mail in inbox as a consequence of phobic sense of missing something which is not there." Cool too!

Should I also remind the Jargon File while I'm here? Less arty, more nerdy, it's a great place to spend a sunday afternoon.

Terminal junkie: n.

A while ago, I was wondering about use in terms of dealing with software or net artworks. Of course, "use" is a very broad term that should be considered carefully depending on the angle of observation one chooses. Usage (which would belong to a socio-technic approach I guess), usability (engeneering?), usefulness (pragmatism?), etc.

When it comes to art discourse, I feel like the term is never really defined; the use of "use" is blurry. I find in Saul Albert's really interesting essays, and particularly "Useless Utilities"(2001), an attempt to define technological art as "relevant in multiple context, [...] between use value and conceptual value" - he is following here Matthew Fuller's engaging theory on works that are "not just art", a practice that "rejects the dead end-dichotomy of culture vs. counter-culture and suggests hybridised, developmental, unstable cultural forms that can sustain themselves outside of art's frame of reference and financial backing". The ("not just") artworks he promotes are interfaces between 2 subjectivities: the author's and the user's, the former allowing the later to re-invent his relationship to technique by reprogramming the software as a way of making, thus reprogramming use in an alternative way. 

Albert is merely rephrasing the discourse on the artist's power to disrupt dogma and to disturb doxa with an added critical value, an axiom that never really convinces me because it relies on an undefined set of notions (particularly the definition of what "use" is, as I said previously). 

But what I find a little more accurate and strong is when Albert gets into the specifics of how the artist reorganizes the context(s) around his work: precisely when the economy of the artwork is expanded beyond the simple museal relationship that conducts most of art consumerism. Albert shows the examples of Adrian Ward's and NN's software artpieces when the art audience is indeed treated as it should be, that is consumers - with corporate-like mailing-lists giving advices about how to use the "product", etc . The brackets here around "product" are not meant to reduce these works to a task of criticism via irony or parody of the corporate world by super-smart artists. On the contrary, the art piece is taken seriously as a product (and this ends the stupid debate over art as process or object). 

The question is not whether the art consumer will be able to use the art piece for pragmatic purpose or not, but if she will be integrated with consequences into an informational economy - information as medium, and not as message, though the line between the two is more difficult to draw than people like to think.

Somewhere else but I don't remember where, Albert talks about how conceptual art has been reduced to a "service" provider by the institutions that were feeding the artists with funds/subventions - "service" as in "artists should educate the people". Of course, the "political mission" that avant-garde art has given itself for a while now is not triggered only by evil institutions but also by an intricate internal system of reputation. But speaking about "service" gives a good idea of how artists are confused about their social role play. Along with that confusion of tasks, information tends to become a message again and artists tend to think of themselves as super-heroes. 

The expression "use" might be filled with meaning when thought of as a critical means to organize contexts around a practice, to remediate experience. The word "utility" comes in handy to define the use of artwork both by art makers and art consumers (with challenged authority and all that). A kind of utilitarianism without the moral obligation, but with the notion of reorganizing society (or social practices) around you (not necessarily society as a whole, by the way). Utility as "software utility" should also be considered, because it is a use oriented for a specific purpose; what appeals to me here is not really the goal of the purpose, but the scale of the purpose ("small range of tasks"). I like the idea of working on a small scale. But I am hesitant as it might be a seductive and not very good metaphor - after all, Adrian Ward's piece (Autoshop) described by Albert is more of an application than a utility. I don't know but this should be discussed further. 

In this situation, the practice of art is not exclusive when it comes to reorganizing contexts but does come up with funny and alternative ways. Albert has a nice ASCII diagram in which what I call "use" is described as "intervention". Though Albert says that the artist's intervention is a short-circuit between software producers and media producers, I believe that this intervention is also the art/media consumer's, thus making the user's role a little bit more interesting than it is generally allowed to be. 

This diagram reminded me of a very famous other graph, made by the net/conceptual/entrepreneurial art duo MTAA Enterprises Worldwide (T.Whid & M.River) in their early career (1997 I think). They also challenge the idea of context as something that is eminently variable - and thus able to organize a real economy that you can act upon, and not only accept as unproblematic (and the economy of art is often seen as unproblematic). 

I don't know how to conclude this, so I will just point out their Artainment Manifesto and their Website Unseen (1999-2002) series. 

Received this in the mail today from the Leonardo Reviews. I publish the review in its entireity although you can read it on the website's Review category. Also, a series of images tagged from an "Aesthetic + Computing" Google search, to make the reading more entertaining. Scroll down for the dubious little comment of mine.

< Aesthetic Computing >
Paul Fishwick, Editor
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006
Reviewed by Michael Kelly, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina

Let me start with two brief disclaimers to make it clear what aesthetic computing is not, since it is a new field and there is naturally some unclarity about its identity.  Aesthetic computing is not the application of computer artifacts – models, programs, data, codes, interfaces, and the like – to art or aesthetics.  There is such a field and it's called computer art or computer aesthetics.  Also, aesthetic computing is not directly concerned with the development of new art mediums such as interactive art, software art, internet art, and the like, though these mediums may enter the discussion because they embody some of the results of aesthetic computing.

Rather, aesthetic computing is about the application of the arts and aesthetics to computing.  According to Paul Fishwick, aesthetic computing takes the computing discipline itself as its raw material and explores how aesthetics might productively shape computing (including programming languages, AI, HCI, graphics, visualization) (pp. 7-8)?  Or in the words of Roger Malina, the aim of aesthetic computing is "to transfer ideas and techniques from the arts to computer science and engineering" (p. 44). 

In elaborating on the impact and scope of this transfer, Malina highlights a dichotomy within aesthetic computing, or indeed within computing as a whole: Is the computer to be understood as a transparent "information appliance" or as a "medium for reshaping perception and cognition" (p. 44).  If the computer is an appliance, aesthetic computing is a matter of design aimed at making the computer as transparent as possible so that we can achieve the desired results, such as effective communication or legible visualization.  But if the computer is capable of shaping perception and cognition, aesthetic computing is a way to understand how perception and cognition can be shaped by and, in turn, shape, technology.

Following the structure of this dichotomy, Malina outlines two kinds of claim, weak or strong, that can be made on behalf of aesthetic computing, depending on whether we're talking about the design of the finished products of computer technology or the codes underlying computer software.  "The weak claim is that by stimulating the flow of ideas and methods from the arts to computing, computer scientists and engineers will achieve their objectives more easily, quickly, or elegantly" (p. 47; italics added).  For example, artists can demonstrate how computing devices are more likely to be adopted by the public if they are found aesthetically appealing; these insights might, in turn, inspire innovation in future research projects (with the Apple iMac or iPod often sited as exemplary success stories).  By contrast, the strong claim about aesthetic computing is "that by introducing ideas and methods from art and design into computing, new practices and approaches will emerge responding to new objectives that would not naturally have evolved within the computing sciences and engineering" (p. 48).  Here, the claim is that aesthetic insights gained from artistic practice do not merely allow computer scientists to achieve ends formed without taking aesthetic considerations into account but that these insights actually shape the objectives of computing enough "to redirect the future development of computing, provoking new developments and inventions that would otherwise have been impossible.  A different computer science and engineering may emerge" (p. 50). This is a strong claim indeed, which Fishwick corroborates by claiming that one of the "core goals" of aesthetic computing is "to modify computer science through the catalysis of aesthetics" (p. 11).

In contrast to this account of aesthetics, many contributors to this volume seem to attribute Beauty to artworks and thus to computers.  For example, Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer emphasize complexity, diversity, and emergence as the properties in HCI, with a special focus on "users' interaction input" ( pp.169-183); Jonas Löwgren identifies a set of nineteen qualities tied to HCI (pp. 383-403); Stephan Diehl and Carsten Görg understand beauty in terms of the sum of elementary properties (pp. 229-37); and, finally, Michael Leyton develops aesthetic rules: maximization of transfer and maximization of recoverability (pp. 289-313).  But this focus on Beauty as a property is what I'm claiming is problematic.  Beauty is a property of relations or interactions among humans (which may very well be what the above authors have in mind) rather than of the works that occasion such relations or interactions.  Aesthetics is the understanding of what makes such relations or interactions possible, not just what makes them more effective, more pleasurable, and the like, though by understanding what makes them possible, we'll presumably be in a better position to address these other concerns.  Aesthetic computing is the same type of understanding connected directly to computers.   In a word, if aestheticians now work with computer scientists, as I now expect they will, it will be a natural extension of what they've been doing all along.

Fishwick provides a good example of the first case, for he argues that aesthetics will alter not only the design of computer software at the point that users begin to interface with it, but also the very programming that makes software possible (pp. 9, 13-20).  The rationale for this strong claim is that programming will change as computer scientists alter their objectives as a result of attaining a better understanding of the aesthetics of HCI.  Put simply, programming will have to change to create the desired interface – an obvious point, but one that is now coming with an aesthetic imperative attached.  Norm Tractinsky's and Dror Zmiri's research on "skinnability" (alternate interfaces to commonly used applications) is a good example here because they focus on interaction, while taking consumers' interest in skinnability as evidence of their interest in the aesthetics of computing (pp. 405-22).

Concerning visualization, there are two types which fall under the general heading of data visualization: scientific visualization, which is the creation of visual representations of scientific data from physics, biology, or any of the natural or social sciences; and information visualization, which involves visual models of information from all sorts of sources: business, government, the sciences, or elsewhere.  Both types involve aesthetics since visualization is, in Donna Cox's words, "the creative translation of data into visual representation" (p. 94).  She provides a systematic and clear analysis of the aesthetics of visualization by explaining the basic metaphorical structure of the translation of data into visual models (pp. 89- 114).

Now, some people also speak of knowledge visualization, which, if I understand it, is a meta-level of visualization that articulates the epistemological implications of the two types.  For in knowledge visualization the claim is that you're not just visualizing or illustrating what is already known; rather, in the words of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, "artistic works in the area of aesthetic computing must lead to a synthesis of sensory perception and cognitive insight, yielding new ways of thinking and models of experience" (p. 131).  How this perceptual/cognitive interface works is a basic subject matter of aesthetics.  For example, Aaron Quigley uses the expression "relational information," which is very similar to the idea of beauty as a "relational property" or "interactive property" (pp. 316-33).  So there's a natural role for aesthetic computing in visualization.

 
Finally, in the third area of computer science, HCI, we have the following picture, to quote from Frieder Nake and Susanne Grabowski: "Interface aesthetics is different from the aesthetics of packaging," the design approach to aesthetic computing, "in that the interface to software belongs to the software.  Software never appears without its interface.  The human-computer interface is, first of all, the face of its software" (p. 67).  In this light, the weak and strong claims about aesthetic computing would be better characterized, as they are by Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala, as the inside and outside of computers, meaning the code and the interface (pp. 369-82).  So we don't have to choose between the weak or strong claims any more than we have to choose between the code and the interface.  Rather, the interaction between the code and the interface is the basis of HCI and, in turn, the basis of aesthetic computing.

At the end of his introductory essay, Fishwick asks whether aesthetic computing is something new or whether it just "rehashed old material."  He and his expert contributors argue that technology has developed to the point today where it is not only possible to pay attention to aesthetics, but there is now a sense of urgency coming from computing.  In Fishwick's words: "We have had to wait for the technology to become available to leverage the arts" (p. 13).  If this is accurate, what we have here is a new field called aesthetic computing.  And what we have in this collection is an excellent contribution to aesthetic computing, an extremely valuable text for aestheticians and computer scientists alike.

References and Notes:

1. Fishwick claims that computer interface "should be as much about quality as it is about quantitative performance" (p. 21).  My turn away from "quality" seems at odds with this claim.  But I think we are proposing something very similar because he seems interested in quality only as it relates to the affective as well as cognitive dimensions of HCI rather than to the properties of artifacts ( e.g., a computer or a graphic user interface) that would occasion such interaction.

2. Frieder Nake and Susanne Grabowski (pp. 53-70) add semiotics to the aesthetics and computing mix, apparently on the belief that aesthetics is subjective (p. 55) and needs to be offset by the more objective semiotics.  As I understand aesthetics, however, semiotics does not add anything that couldn't be included within aesthetics.  Umberto Eco's combination of aesthetics and semiotics is an example of what I have in mind here.

3. Jane Prophet and Mark d'Inverno (pp. 185-96) prefer to use the term "transdisciplinarity" in place of "interdisciplinarity" or "multidisciplinarity," because they think the first term emphasizes that something new emerges from the interactions among these disciplines.

4. Elsewhere [e.g., in my Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) or Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)], I characterize aesthetics as critical reflection on art, culture, and nature.  In this light, aesthetic computing is critical reflection on – or philosophical analysis of – the aesthetic theories, principles, beliefs, ideas, and the like underlying computing once it is governed not only by technological concerns but by artistic practices.

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I am not sure I want to understand what's supposed to be the goal of a philosophical perspective here. The reviewer here is writing against the supposedly formalist stance of the book (beauty being in the properties of the object). But this "relational" stance that he is defending seems to me as thoughtless as what's-his-name's "relational aesthetics". What is conveying commonlity? Is it something INSIDE the object, thus making the perception of relations very essentialist, subject to the same criticism that was articulated against the "formalists". How can a philosophical point of view can silence the construction at play in the definition of taste, legitimation, local contexts and global rules that all make the commonailty of the aesthetic experience? "What makes [the relations] possible" seems to be something that the object is carrying around like in a kangoroo pocket.

The definition of aesthetics according to the reviewer is not so much the capacity of the object to relate and organize human relationships around itself (any cultural objects does that), but more its capacity to properly objectify these relationships, to reflect upon them while making them elements of the art work. Which is a very bold and swelled claim to make, a stance inherited from the structuralists/semioticists such as Michael Riffaterre who have no problem theorizing that an artwork is imposing itself at the top of a semiotic hierarchy. I have to go re-read Riffaterre but I remember clearly that the ultimate goal of the art work is to gain power (for itself, as an autonomous object). This freaks me out. But I still want to read the book sometimes, because I have against nothing formalism (I have something against powerism).

Big  

Elgg has a new name: Eduspaces. Elgg remains the blogging platform that you can install on your server I believe, but Eduspaces has become the name of the online social network, a community which I am (hmm, not) part of. A Myspace for e-learning. If you read the announcement about the change, you'll see what I mean. But it will confuse you also, because they are announcing the name Edufilter and it's Eduspaces that comes up. So because I believe Elgg is often a little confusing in its technology and discourses, I advise not trusting the redirection link they promise between elgg.net and eduspaces.net (edufilter??).

So, 2 updates might be necessary:

1/ Bookmarks to http://eduspaces.net/cpb/weblog

2/ RSS feeds to http://eduspaces.net/cpb/weblog/rss/ 

Thinking about how I don't take part in the community's interest in e-learning, I am nonetheless taking this opportunity to point out how much interest I have developed in blog writing lately in terms of entertainment as well as learning. I cannot claim to be a good example in research blog writing, my posts being neither regular nor always thoughtful. Nor did I really expand on "good" ideas such as actually writing about sotfware art pieces (I have more like a general discourse) or this silly wild theory that I don't know what to make out of except a funny statement. 

But still I really enjoy this form of writing and reading and I definitely want to defend it as a form of legitimate critical discourse. For a class entitled "Collaborative Hypermedia" that I was taking at Paris 8 in the first semester, I thought about a way to augment the critical reading of blog writing. For this purpose, I have written a proposal essay to develop a search engine dedicated to following backlinks, so as to reconstitute blogging conversations that have expanded beyond the explicit limits of blogrolls and self-proclaimed communities. I will post the essay soon on my blog, after gathering a few references on blog writing that will accompany my proposal. 

For now I just want to point out the works of French semiologists on the subject of blogs, that I have not really digged into I must admit. For instance, researcher, professor and blogger Sophie Pène (an interesting woman I have seen recently in the jury for a PHD defense, hmmm, I should have blogged about that...) has some questions on the subject (she and her scholar community use the Elgg platform, by the way). Also, Yves Jeanneret, who is an authority on the subject of networked textuality in France, talks about digitized texts as subject to "labile" as opposed to "immaterial" (as it was used to define them since the post-modernists), in an online essay entitled "Le procès de numérisation de la culture: Un défi pour la pensée du texte" (2004). Taking into account this property of being in constant change is food for thought about blogs. Jeanneret suggests three interdependent behaviours to keep up with this changing textuality:

- sustaining its traces (this is a classical way already investigated by people working in the "computing for humanities" field);

- recognizing (as in "interpreting", "knowing again") its socialized forms (this is what the semiologists are mostly doing);

- allowing the "movement of its resumption" (originally in French: "le mouvement de sa reprise", referring to the labile text). This last behaviour is what I am really interested in because this is where practice and theory meet. My backlink project is based on this, and this is what blog writing is about: an extended and augmented form of linking and bookmarking - these being the technological forms of citation and reference. 

Ok, more soon. 

Fabula releases a good amount of research work news, among which these could be of interest, for better or for worse, in the context of this blog.

- Laboratoires de littératures: Littératures et Internet, dir. par Serge Boucharon, BPI, 2007

- La création artistique face aux nouvelles technologies, collectif (Séminaire interarts de Paris - 2004-2005), Klincksieck 2007

- Art, action et participation: L'artiste et la créativité, Frank Popper, «Collection d'esthétique» no. 32, Klincksieck, 2007

- Revue des Sciences Humaines, no 283. "La Valeur"
a few essays that seem cool: Jean-Pierre Cometti "Philosophie et critique. Y a-t-il un problème de l'évaluation ?" ; Bernard Vouilloux "Le jeu des valeurs. Au-delà de l'esthétique"; Djelal Kadir "Le monde tel qu'on le fait : la valeur prédicative de « monde » et « globalisation » dans la pratique de la littérature comparée"; Ronald Shusterman "Ce qui se vend, ce qui arrive, et ce qui explose : théories de la valeur après la « fin » de l'art".

on Paul Slocum's catalog: found images of simulated television static. click to go to the actual gifs.

"What is particularly remarkable is the way these differing blogs interact, conversations moving from one site to another or taking place on several sites at once, conversations branching into differing sets of links, never encompassing them all, but rarely limited to one. So, some of the same people appear in various conversations, although not all of the same people will comment at each blog. What the theory blogs suggest, then, is a practice of blogging that is more than journalism, more than diary keeping, and more than remediation. Ours is a practice of critical conversation beyond and through existing institutional frameworks.[...]

Rather than a fast paced media sphere, this exchange is like a slow seminar, focusing on one narrow question that arises on its own, and is addressed over a longer period of time, giving those who engage it opportunity to read and reflect. [...]

Two contradictory problems with this model of blogging [emphasis on the speed and the hysteric tone of blog writing and on wannabe bloggers] come to the fore when one thinks of theory blogs. The first is the assumption that the best writing gets the most attention. The second is the assumption that the most extreme views sell. (Part of the popularity of this second view rests on rather gothic assumptions regarding the internet as a virtual bedlam of ranting maniacs.) Now, unless one presumes that the best writing is the most extreme writing, these ideas rub up against each other in uncomfortable ways. Why should anyone think that what rises to the top of the blog indexes, what circulates the most or gets the most trackbacks, is the best? That’s like saying that The Purpose Driven Life is a better book than Gender Trouble because it sold more copies. At any rate, the presence of theory blogs and the practice of theorizing on blogs opens us up to interesting and thoughtful writing that aims neither toward popularity nor extremism.  [...]

Disrupting academic privilege is also a practice often articulated with a notion of transgression, the transgression of dominant norms and expectations. One uses shock to try to open up thinking to something new. But there are problems here. When we try to undermine our position and expertise, we risk validating it in another way—we are presuming that our authority is there, reinforcing it, not really risking it at all. Indeed, there is something massively condescending with the whole academic celebration of transgression: in establishing the terms of transgression in advance, we validate precisely what we claim we want to contest. We establish that there is a sphere, perhaps a public sphere, in which one is authorized to speak, in which one has a kind of authority and in which expectations of reason and respect govern the terms of discussion. My view is that this notion of transgression relies on the fantasy of an authority that does not exist, indeed, that it embodies an awareness of the fragility of that authority and thus aims ultimately to reinforce it, to affirm it, by addressing it."

oh and via an unexpected way (discussion thread about hacker art vs. default art on tom moody's blog), i found a thread on adverlicio.us dedicated to the company behind the banner i cut up to make this ranting maniacs animated gif. see what i mean here.

apxxxxx's latest feedpost:

free software and gnosticism - code exposure and light (2007.03.19:2)

black-box economy

no open source/no algorithms and restricted view of live coding/computation but rather software as an active descriptive means untethered from ownership (an interning)

free software goes some way towards the description of another economy

Philip K Dick: pink light - see trilogy

Thomas Pynchon: light and doubling - a spectral realm (the future past the entropic)

find quotes

__________________________________________________________________

introduction:

To begin with light:

1] ap/xxxxx - a journey from free software to open hardware

from description to making

a fictional history of ap/xxxxx (in software. in description)

speculative hardware:

How speculative, open hardware can operate, be imagined along an expressive line of (to be exposed) functionality - a reasoning in the evident, the means of description (software) and the EXISTENT.

2] the CPU is mapped over the world (where that execution happens):

the forest clearing (Heidegger)

We call this openness that grants a possible letting-appear and show 'opening.' In the history of language the German word Lichtung is a translation derived from the French clairiere It is formed in accordance with the older words Waldung [foresting] and Feldung [fielding].

The forest clearing [or opening] is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive Lichtung goes back to the verb lichten. The adjective licht is the same word as 'open.' To open something means to make it light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The free space thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective �light� which means �bright,� neither linguistically nor factually. This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light. Still, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the open region, is not only free for brightness and darkness but also for resonance and echo, for sound and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.

[Martin Heidegger.The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. Routledge p.441]

The CPU is the black boxed (after Edison's black mariah studio) theatre where the action takes place (also to expand further the limbs of that primal studio as our pinouts and some kind of internal sunlight, through the roof is there in the darkness - we can see all operations there; cats dancing, emotions). The script is performed and to some extent improvised (compiler and interpreter).

3] the vanishing point of the pinned-down executable

an horizon-line dividing software from hardware. again, seperating a description from an active circuit

Our model for the CPU, and the question that the idea of the CPU renders is precisely where we draw the line, where we mark a division or passage between hardware and software, a false and delirious division which could be imagined as between the analogue and the digital - the digital and/as a reining in of the analogue - not so much in terms of discretisation but of a forbidden zone.

4] CPU as pure economy/short circuit and what takes place between - in that time?

quotations for that economy: what drives the design of a computer architecture - the very design which is reflected in language and construction - in that non-transparent medium which is code

an economy of that which "does" (what does it do?)

quotations from early byte: - images

operating system is mapped over the CPU - it is that (Babel tower) of compilers, interpreters, assemblers, microcompilers, languages, of acronyms - that which hides but which are the terms of that which we find ourselves within

The operating system as entry point into the economic in all senses - economies of usability and of narrowed so-called interface (user becoming a subject of the OS, under the OS and to be coded for), economies of time-sharing (the original purpose) made plain here:

The large computer, being a very expensive resource, quickly justified the capital required to investigate optimum use of that resource. Among the principle results of these projects was the development of batch mode multiprocessing. The computer itself would save up the various tasks it had to do then change from one to the other at computer speeds. This minimised the wasted time between jobs and spawned the concept of an operating system (itals).

[Byte Magazine 1979]

(shell-command "display /root/scryer/sa4mc1.gif") ;; for example only

5] a story as software (Alice in Wonderland - we will come to)

a demonstrative history of (necessarily free) software/code - what that could be:

driven by process

The story of an Operating System (OS):

an artistic OS inspired by the free software movement

a history IN code

--- using eev and Emacs Lisp to demonstrate

how we can work with sequences - steps

(eesteps '("C-x C-f /root/Plans/promiscuOS RET" "C-x C-f /root/Plans/life_coding RET"

))

F12 step in eev

presentation buffer - buffer disturbed

a presentation format in Emacs Lisp - the devoted buffer where actions are directed?

or in Lisp and with SLIME but do we then not lose buffer control?

past works:

1) ap

- eev tests for channels - we want a green terminal! - or channel results should be diverted to a specific buffer

shell commands can be diverted to a specific buffer

(eebg-channel-xterm "monk") (eechannel "monk") echo 9 ls pwd

panel.lisp

/root/Wiki/panel.lisp

how process is made evident?

2) ap0201, ap0202, ap0204

fragmented code base - commandline tools

used to construct a performance or a text

eg:

i_am, devdisplay, jekyll, osctrans/dump,

;; use C- M- u to put in corner. C- M- f to unfix mouse

(shell-command "killall -9 devdisplay")

;; (shell-command COMMAND &optional OUTPUT-BUFFER ERROR-BUFFER)

or:

;; (start-process-shell-command NAME BUFFER COMMAND &rest COMMAND-ARGS)

3) xxxxx - a future/life coding:

the three levels (see langlois) for an artistic operating system:

a) CPU (black box text):

The CPU is concerned with the black-boxing of technology and a notion of a hidden interior, technology as an interiority.

We are interested in the idea of open hardware, and equally in a mapping of such interiority into the world as a philosophical question concerned with rationalism. The project here is concerned with a certain impossibility of exposure. Within a climate of intense (intellectual) property rights management which relies on locking the so-called user out of access to hardware the political concerns here are also important. These will be well mapped out through the documented construction in soft hardware of a functioning Central Processing Unit. The history of computing hardware will be examined in elaborating our artistic platform. Equally there is a relationship to alternative artistic hardware such as Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass and other such bachelor machines.

b) promiscuOS. software

The promiscuous operating system presents the next level in our model of abstraction proceeding from open hardware to open software. Further interrogating the political concerns of a denial of access to materiality, a politics which can easily be extrapolated from the realm of computation, such a locking-out is equally mimed by software. Users and software are heavily segregated in a universal operating system design which is haunted by the specter of the viral and thus denies the potential of active, shared and networked playful environments. Particular economies are very much present within this model of closed systems and a concern for the politics of control is essential here. This sub-project is concerned with the elaboration, in software, of an active networked operating system which exposes and interrogates control. This OS is concerned with non-functional artistic generation at socially-implied levels of code and production, favouring promiscuous, leaky code and data over security and division by function or task. The highly technical nature of some of the research here means that collaboration on a practical level is essential. This subproject will be launched as a fully-fledged open source software project to highlight the issues at stake here.

leaks demonstration in buffer

;;(require 'leaks) (leaking)

and http://www.1010.co.uk/prmscnet.el for collaborative/viral coding - remote execution and code share

promiscuOS text also:

c) wonderland environment - high level language.

The final subproject, the wonderland environment, is the most playful and perhaps loosely specified part of the artistic computing platform. The wonderland environment runs on the OS component and is primarily textual, allowing for language-based manipulation and play with networked instances of highly mobile code and data. The now active, artistic computing system embeds further social systems. The development of a relational language of description and process is implied as well as the question of a meeting between software and fiction; software above all as a means of representation rather than a tool or medium. Again, we are concerned with defining a new artistic practice which is concerned with both science and literature. The working title of a wonderland environment hints at the rich concerns here.

Alice, life coding:

closing Alice text:

A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July -

Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear, Pleased a simple tale to hear -

Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear, Eager eye and willing ear, Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream - Lingering in the golden dream - Life, what is it but a dream?

scrying boards (an image?)

the future: scrying boards and relation to hidden electromagnetic waves - the bringing into light and Gnosticism again

no matter how related to my older blog this post is, i'm still a sucker for code and am especially fascinated by its visual implementations. Here is a reblog for barcodes used in object hyperlinking, via Network Research.

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When posting the item on Variable Environment: mobility, interaction city and crossovers I stumbled across a post listing Visual Markers for camera / Related technologies. I had already been compiling a similar list however mine was missing two of theirs and theirs is missing three of mine. This is the most conclusive list of visual tags / codes / markers employed in object hyperlinking I’ve seen yet however there are doubtless others out there. If you know of others please let me know.

Semacode is a:

machine-readable ISO/IEC 16022 Data Matrix symbols which encode internet Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). It is primarily aimed at being used with cellular phones which have built-in cameras. The Data Matrix specification is given by the ISO/IEC 16022 standard. (wikipedia.org)

QR Code is a:

is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are most common in Japan, and are currently the most popular type of two dimensional code in Japan…used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR Codes are now used for inventory management in a wide variety of industries. (wikipedia.org)

Qode (thanks to Swampthing for pointing me in the direction of this one, see comment below) is a combination of visual tag (very similar to Semacode and QR Code) and a unique barcode number if a camera is not available on the mobile device you are using. It seems the mobile software is a lot more complex on this one as keyword searchs can also be performed.

Users of qode can scan a smartcode with their mobile phone’s camera, or enter a brand name, keyword, or mobile barcode number, to link directly to a mobile Web site. (qode.com)

Spotcode is the early version of Shotcode (below) created by High Energy Magic of Cambridge University and subsequently sold to OP3.

Shotcode is a:

circular barcode created by High Energy Magic of Cambridge University. It uses a dartboard-like circle, with a bulls eye in the centre and datacircles surrounding it. The technology reads databits from these datacircles by measuring the angle and distance from the bulls eye for each…Because of the circular design, it is also possible for software to detect the angle from which the barcode is read. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store regular data - rather, they store a look up number consisting of 49 bits of data. This needs to link to a server that holds information regarding a mapped URL which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data. (wikipedia.org)

Color Code is the only colour code in existance.

ColorCodes can be as small as 1 square cm, and as big as your imagination. A ColorCode’s™ pattern potential is determined by the number of color cells it encompasses. In a standard, four-color 5 x 5 cell code, more than 17 billion patterns can be created.

ColorCode™, which is based on encoding and decoding algorithms, is actually three types of codes: ColorCode™, GrayCode™ and Numeric Code. (colorcode.com.sg)

Yellow Arrow is not technically a visual code but is listed here because of it’s use of an arrow form (a visual marker) to identify it as a Yellow Arrow (similar to the You Are Here arrows on maps) alongside a unique code printed on the arrow. The Yellow Arrow concept functions similarly to visual codes however the two elements visual and code are distinct and separate with no need for a camera-based device.

You post a Yellow Arrow because you have something to say about where it points. Your thought is then forever tagged to that place. When someone else finds your arrow and sends the code, they get back the message you left on their mobile phone. (yellowarrow.net)

Some extracts of a 1954-58 book, The World of Science. These are from the chapter "Information: to send and use it" published entirely on the blog Modern Mechanix.

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INFORMATION THEORY

Our speech is not a very efficient way of giving messages. In conversation we waste a great many words. This does not matter when we are talk-ing with someone who is in the same room and we both have a lot of time. In fact, we sometimes do this for amusement. But there are times and circumstances when it is important to be efficient in giving a message.

Look at the want ads in your newspaper. The advertiser is paying for his want ad by the line. He really compresses his information to get in as much as he can per dollar. Read an advertisement for a used car, for example, and then think of all the words an eager dealer would use to give you this same information:

Ford ‘56. CI. dlx 2-dr. auto, trans. w/w tires, rad. htr. Pwr Strg. Xlnt cond, lo mi., orig. own. Tel. Ex 2-1111

SPEEDING UP THE WORK

Condensing speech is just one step, though.

“We’d like to condense the whole process of running want ads,” says a newspaper man. “Look at all the steps: The advertiser telephones in the information. An ad taker puts it into condensed language and types it up. A linotype operator sets the typewritten copy up in metal type. A paper mat is made from the metal type. The mat is plated up into a page. And the newspaper is printed from the plates. Then the business office has to type up a bill for the advertiser and keep a record of the billing.

“We’d like a computer that could take the message over the telephone and type it off so a mat could be made directly from it. At the same time the computer could type off information for the billing department. That would really save us a good slice of work.”

CALLING THE COMPUTER

The telephone company does have a system for transmitting information directly from a computer’s magnetic tape over the telephone.

You will recall (from page 78) that a computer can take instructions only in the form of holes in cards or magnetized spots on tape. There are just two signals in its code—1 and 0. At each point on a punch card either there is a hole or there is none. A spot on tape is magnetized or it is not.

A piece of equipment called a digital sub set accepts this information and converts it into tones. Wherever there is a magnetized spot, an electrical pulse sets up a tone. This code of electrical pulses diagrammed would look something like this:

There could be quite a lot of “noise” or interference with this signal and it would still be clear that this meant 1 0 1 0 1. In the computer code described on page 77, this pattern would give you the number 21.

This method can transmit 600 “bits” per second, the equivalent of 800 words per minute. This is about ten times as fast as the teletype-writer or telegraph.

Another method already in operation for send-ing computer information by telephone uses equipment called the recorded carrier.

Before putting in your telephone call, you feed your information onto a magnetic tape recorder. Then you put through a regular long distance call; and when the other party is ready to receive, you turn on your tape recorder. Of course the message is transmitted backwards, but who cares? When it is wound up on the tape recorder at the receiving end, it will be all set to play off in the right order. Then the information can be converted from tones back to magnetized spots on computer tape.

The input by this method is slower—75 “bits” per second. But it can be transmitted at eight times this speed, which brings it up to the digital sub set in efficiency.

Engineers have worked out an alphabetic code, too, using just 1 and 0. Using this code, you could send words and sentences with the simple pattern of a pulse or no pulse. It counts from 1 to 26 on the kind of basis many computers use:

In this code, our signal 10 101 would stand for U, the twenty-first letter of the alphabet.

“But we want to talk into the telephone,” you may say. “We don’t want to send a beep-blank-beep code. If we did, we would send a telegram.”

Researchers are at work on a code for voices too. They take the pattern of a spoken message, as the pitch of the voice rises and falls, like this:

They divide up the range of the voice into just six or seven numbered bands. They sample the pattern, let’s say a thousand times a second, and note in which band the voice is pitched each time. Then they send out just the list of band numbers. At the receiving end, these numbers are converted back into the sound ranges they stand for. And out comes a sound pattern enough like the original speech to be understood.

Simplified ways to send messages by machine are becoming very important. For the big movement in modern business is toward systems in which machines do all the routine jobs now done by human workers. This means that a great deal of information must be communicated from one machine to another. This development is called automation. Some people speak of it as a Second Industrial Revolution.

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Read more on the original page for an epic development on how humanity will deal with the emergence of automation (industrial-scale feedback systems), ending with:

"If you as a scientist or engineer of tomorrow can lead men in that direction, your name will go down in history as a great benefactor of mankind."

from socialfiction.org

Sorting is the new Breakdance.

+++ in tune with this: I heard the book Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, was the coolest. Hope I have time to read it sometimes.

Tonight I played for a long while with Hexball, an iconographic score programmed by Josh Nimoy. The whole point is to get out and into loops that you construct by modifiying the graphic elements. Someone with a good memory can create a beautiful score I am sure. The score can be settled or you can deconstruct/reconstruct it along when the game is playing. The beginning trick is to set all the border elements to forbid the ball to exit; then you keep working it. Unfortunately I lost my score, so I only have the presentation image:

There are several other pieces that I haven't tried yet, but that seem equally fascinating - to the extent that even my cat listened to me with delight when I was playing the HexBall. The programmer Josh Nimoy has some interesting things to say about minimal programming, and what he calls "usable" (the realtionship between the piece and the player) and "recycled" interfaces (why, and how he chose the graphic elements that are used in his pieces).