Of the Beauty of Operating Systems

During the past few years, »software art« has been one of the contradictory topics debated at the leading festivals (Transmediale, Ars Electronica and others) and on the mailing lists (spectre, nettime) of digital culture. The festival »read_me«, organized by the Macros Center (http://www.macros-center.ru) in Moscow (May 17 - 19, 2002), is one of the pioneering events to stress software art. The hacker-like, atmospherically small-scale, yet broadly international (its participants came from the USA, Finland, UK, Hungary, Russia, France, etc.) three-day festival presented art »whose material is an algorithmic instruction code and/or which addresses cultural concepts of software.«¹ Being a professional digital-art sensualist rather than a professional theoretician, I was pleased by the simple and at the same time conceptually legitimate texts and concept of »read_me« (Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin, Florian Cramer). The overall non-institutional mood of the festival's well-balanced program (including substantive presentations and rather romantic internet performances at night) stimulated further investigation of the subject.

From the more than one hundred software-art projects submitted to the festival, the jury selected three for awards: DeskSwap, Screen Saver and Textension. DeskSwap is a program that critically considers the problem of the standardization of personal computer users' workspaces. It allows you to compare your desktop with desktops of other people living in different countries and speaking unknown languages. Screen Saver was the most challenging program with regard to the concept of software and software art. At first glance, it doesn't seem to be software in its own right, consisting as it does of simple step-by-step instructions for configuring the screen saver of the Microsoft Windows operating system. As a result, the PC is turned into a display of a giant rectangle which slowly moves from the left to the right corner of the screen and back, slightly modulating its color in the process.«²

In terms of aesthetic enjoyment, Textension was one of the best works: text typed by the user turned into an »independent« moving »organism,« organizing itself not necessarily in neat rows, but jumping and floating all over the »page,« forming circles, and shifting in piles as if blown by the wind. It seemed almost as tactile as the interactive installation Text Rain (Romy Achituv, Camille Utterbeck)³, where installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling text. The text appears to land on participants' heads and arms like rain or snow. The text responds to the participants' motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again.⁴

Among the software that received an honorary mention (altogether five programs), Wingluck Builder was the most controversial and visually the most ingenious. I would describe it as possessing a certain »evil beauty.« It »belongs to a cracker culture of 'revenge software,' i.e. creating programs that affect the normal work of an operating system and give the impression that your computer is broken or infected by a terrible virus.«⁵ Wingluck Builder in a sense embodied the deconstruction (that I felt was present at the festival) of the myth about software art as being something that is extremely high-tech and far beyond simple modes of visual perception. I’m almost beginning to believe that, even without having programming skills and an inherited gift for mathematics, it is still possible to be passionate about software art.