http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html
Software Art
Florian Cramer and Ulrike GabrielAugust 15, 2001
What is software art? How can ``software'' be generally defined? We had to answer
these questions at least provisionally when we were asked to be with the artist-programmer
John Simon jr. in the jury of the ``artistic software'' award for the transmediale.01
art festival in Berlin, Germany.
Since more than a decade, festivals, awards, exhibitions and publications exist
for various forms of computer art: computer music, computer graphics, electronic
literature, Net Art and computer-controlled interactive installations, to name
only a few, each of them with its own institutions and discourse. Classifications
like the above show that attention is usually being paid to how, i.e. in which
medium, digital artworks present themselves to the audience, externally. They
also show that digital art is traditionally considered to be a part of ``[new]
media art,'' a term which covers analog and digital media alike and is historically
rooted in video art. But isn't it a false assumption that digital art - i.e. art
that consists of zeros and ones - was derived from video art, only because computer
data is conventionally visualized on screens?
By calling digital art ``[new] media art,'' public perception has focused the
zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media,
rather than structures of programming. This view is reinforced by the fact that
the algorithms employed to generate and manipulate computer music, computer graphics,
digital text are frequently if not in most cases invisible, unknown to the audience
and the artist alike. While the history of computer art still is short, it is
rich with works whose programming resides in black boxes or is considered to be
just a preparatory behind-the-scenes process for a finished (and finite) work
on CD, in a book, in the Internet or in a ``realtime interactive'' environment.
The distribution of John Cage's algorithmically generated sound play ``Roarotorio,''
for example, includes a book, a CD and excerpts of the score, but not even a fragment
of the computer program which was employed to compute the score.
While software, i.e. algorithmic programming code, is inevitably at work in all
art that is digitally produced and reproduced, it has a long history of being
overlooked as artistic material and as a factor in the concept and aesthetics
of a work. This history runs parallel to the evolution of computing from systems
that could only be used by programmers to systems like the Macintosh and Windows
which, by their graphical user interface, camouflaged the mere fact that they
are running on program code, in their operation as well as in their aesthetics.
Despite this history, we were surprised that the 2001 transmediale award for software
art was not only the first of its kind at this particular art festival, but as
it seems the first of its kind at all.
When the London-based digital arts project I/O/D released an experimental World
Wide Web browser, the Web Stalker http://www.backspace.org/iod/, in 1997, the
work was perceived to be a piece of Net Art. Instead of rendering Web sites as
smoothly formatted pages, the Web Stalker displayed their internal control codes
and visualized their link structure. By making the Web unreadable in conventional
terms, the program made it readable in its underlying code. It made its users
aware that digital signs are structural hybrids of internal code and an external
display that arbitrarily depends on algorithmic formatting. What's more, these
displays are generated by other code: The code of the Web Stalker may dismantle
the code of the Web, but does so by formatting it into just another display, a
display which just pretends to ``be'' the code itself. The Web Stalker can be
read as a piece of Net Art which critically examines its medium. But it's also
a reflection of how reality is shaped by software, by the way code processes code.
If complex systems and their generative processors themselves become language,
formulation becomes the creation of a frame within which the system will behave,
and of the control of this behaviour. The joint operation of these processes creates
its own aesthetics which manifests itself no longer by application-restricted
assignments, but in the free composition of this system as a whole. (Which simply
is what developing software is all about.)
Since software is machine control code, it follows that digital media are, literally,
written. Electronic literature therefore is not simply text, or hybrids of text
and other media, circulating in computer networks. If ``literature'' can be defined
as something that is made up by letters, the program code, software protocols
and file formats of computer networks constitute a literature whose underlying
alphabet is zeros and ones. By running code on itself, this code gets constantly
transformed into higher-level, human-readable alphabets of alphanumeric letters,
graphic pixels and other signifiers. These signifiers flow forth and back from
one aggregation and format to another. Computer programs are written in a highly
elaborate syntax of multiple, mutually interdependent layers of code. This writing
does not only rely on computer systems as transport media, but actively manipulates
them when it is machine instructions. The difference is obvious when comparing
a conventional E-Mail message with an E-Mail virus: Although both are short pieces
of text whose alphabets are the same, the virus contains machine control syntax,
code that interferes with the (coded) system it gets sent to.
Software art means a shift of the artist's view from displays to the creation
of systems and processes themselves; this is not covered by the concept of ``media.''
``Multimedia'', as an umbrella term for formatting and displaying data, doesn't
imply by definition that the data is digital and that the formatting is algorithmic.
Nevertheless, the ``Web Stalker'' shows that multimedia and terms like Net Art
on the one hand and software art on the other are by no means exclusive categories.
They could be seen as different perspectives, the one focussing distribution and
display, the other one the systemics.
But is generative code exclusive to computer programming? The question has been
answered by mathematics proper and the many historical employments of algorithmic
structures in the arts. A comparatively recent classical example is the Composition
1961 No. I, January I by the contemporary composer and former Fluxus artist La
Monte Young, which is at once considered to be one of the first pieces of minimal
music and one of the first Fluxus performance scores:
``Draw a straight line and follow it.''1
This piece can be called a seminal piece of software art because its instruction
is formal. At the same time, it is extremist in its aesthetic consequence, in
the implication of infinite space and time to be traversed. Unlike in most notational
music and written theatre plays, its score is not aesthetically detached from
its performance. The line to bedrawn could be even considered a second-layer
instruction for the act of following it. But as it is practically impossible
to perform the score physically, it becomes meta-physical, conceptual, epistemological.
As such the piece could serve as a paradigm for Henry Flynt's 1961 definition
of Concept Art as ``art of which the material is `concepts,' as the material
of for ex. music is sound.''2 Tracing concept art to artistic formalisms like
twelve-tone music, Flynt argues that the structure or concept of those artworks
is, taken for itself, aesthetically more interesting than the product of their
physical execution. In analogy, we would like to define software art as art
of which the material is software.
Flynt's Concept Art integrates mathematics as well, on the acognitive grounds
of ``de-emphasiz[ing]'' its attribution to scientific discovery.3 With this
claim, Flynt coincides, if oddly, with the most influential contemporary computer
scientist, Donald E. Knuth. Knuth considers the applied mathematics of programming
an art; his famous compendium of algorithms is duely titled ``The Art of Computer
Programming.''4
Should the transmediale software art jury therefore have consisted of mathematicians
and computer scientists who would have judged the entries by the beauty of their
code?
What is known as Concept Art today is less rigorous in its immaterialism than
the art Flynt had in mind. It is noteworthy, however, that the first major exhibition
of this kind of conceptual art was named ``Software'' and confronted art objects
actually with computer software installations.5. Curated in 1970 by the art
critic and systems theorist Jack Burnham at the New York Jewish Museum, the
show was, as Edward A. Shanken suggests, ``predicated on the idea of software
as a metaphor for art [my emphasis],''6. It therefore stressed the cybernetical,
social dimension of programmed systems rather than, as Flynt, pure structure.
Thirty years later, after personal computing became ubiquituous, cultural stereotypes
of what software is have solidified. Although the expectation that software
is, unlike other writing, not an aesthetic, but a ``functional tool'' itself
is an aesthetic expectation, software art nevertheless has become less likely
to emerge as conceptualist clean-room constructs than reacting to these stereotypes.
The ``Web Stalker'' again might be referred to as such a piece. In a similar
fashion, the two works picked for the transmediale award, Adrian Ward's ``Signwave
Auto-Illustrator'' and Netochka Nezvanova's ``Nebula M.81,'' are PC user software
which acts up against its conventional codification, either by mapping internal
functions against their corresponding signifiers on the user interface (Auto-Illustrator)
or by mapping the signifiers of program output against human readability (Nebula
M.81).
The range of works entered for the transmediale.01 software art award shows
that coding is a highly personal activity. Code can be diaries, poetic, obscure,
ironic or disruptive, defunct or impossible, it can simulate and disguise, it
has rhetoric and style, it can be an attitude. Such attributes might seem to
contradict the fact that artistic control over generative iterations of machine
code is limited, whether or not the code was self-written. But unlike the Cagean
artists of the 1960s, the software artists we reviewed seem to conceive of generative
systems not as negation of intentionality, but as balancing of randomness and
control. Program code thus becomes a material with which artist work self-consciously.
Far from being simply art for machines, software art is highly concerned with
artistic subjectivity and its reflection and extension into generative systems.7
References
[Fly61]
Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors,
An Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961).
[hun90]
George Maciunas und Fluxus-Editionen, 1990.
[Knu98]
Donald E. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading,
Massachusetts, 1973-1998.
[Sha]
Edward A. Shanken. The house that jack built: Jack burnham's concept of
`software` as a metaphor of art. Leonardo Electronic Almanach, 6(10). http://www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/House.html.Footnotes:
1facsimile reprint included in [hun90], no page numbering
2Henry Flynt, Concept Art [Fly61] ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with
language,'' Flynt writes, ``concept art is a kind of art of which the material
is language.''
3ibid.
4[Knu98]
5Among them Ted Nelson's hypertext system in its first public display, according
to Edward A. Shanken, The House that Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of ``Software''
as a Metaphor for Art, [Sha]
6ibid.
7Or, as Adrian Ward puts it: ``I would rather suggest we should be thinking
about embedding our own creative subjectivity into automated systems, rather
than naively trying to get a robot to have its `own' creative agenda. A lot
of us do this day in, day out. We call it programming.'' (quoted from an E-Mail
message to the ``Rhizome'' mailing list, May 7, 2001)