What does a notepad have to do with software art? Nothing, when it is the normal Notepad program included in Windows; and everything, when it is called Notepad minus, was discovered by an artist on some shareware site or other and is now dealt with under the category »Text Manipulation« in the present festival reader »read_me. Software Art & Cultures«.1 Notepad minus seems to be a version of Notepad that has sunk into oblivion. It was never sold by Windows and has nothing to offer except a simple write function. But these are the best prerequisites for celebrating this forsaken Microsoft product as a »fine objet trouvé«. Now no longer fulfilling its function, this rediscovered piece of software points towards completely different contexts: the cultural and ideological implications to which it owes its own existence and that, at the same time, it has infiltrated as a pointless version. One could, like Matthew Fuller, call Notepad minus »critical« or »speculative« software – critical inasmuch as it reveals its norms; speculative, inasmuch as it goes beyond these norms towards something in the future with artistic means.2

Exciting speculations

The runme.org repository3 is the most comprehensive archive on the topic of speculative or »experimental«4 software: in short, software art. Founded in January 2003, it now contains over 300 projects. The read_me festivals were initiated in 2001 by the same people, above all Alexei Shulgin and Olga Goriunova. Part One of the present reader contains the papers of the conference that took place in Århus, Denmark, in the summer of 2001, and Part Two presents outstanding projects. These features take the place of the competition carried out previously with juries. They convincingly take account of the fact that content creation also means the creation of community. This old-fashioned-style reader has become an exciting compendium that treats several questions that have accumulated, but also highlights differences. The Danish contributions are particularly striking for the new perspectives they provide. The theoretical section is divided into the five categories »Social Perspective«, »The World According to Software«, »Software Art: Historical and Cultural Contexts«, »Code, Text« and »Software Art: Visual and Conceptual Art Traditions«, and the feature section contains 14 similar themes.

»Code is law«5

Despite the common general thrust, in which the strategic and politicised aspect of software as the constructor of patterns of perception, ideologies and realities is emphasised, a gap is noticeable between broadly formalistic and activistic approaches and projects. However, this closes once more, because certain theoretical premises and agreements recur in all camps. One of these is that software consists of algorithms (instructions and rules) that, at a first level, are text (program code) and, at a second level, binary code (machine code). It is the latter that gets a computer working. Associated with this is the notion that, in this era of the profusion of images and the aggressive, patented code politics of Microsoft & Co., making code visible is tantamount to making ideological structures visible and that making code visible is therefore a politically charged act. In these argumentations, text and number become a kind of truth of the machine that it is necessary to reveal.6 In the following, I should like to examine the read_me reader with regard to these agreements.7

Software as essence

Software art was first introduced and defined as a term and a competition category at the transmediale.01 in Berlin: » Software art is opposed to the notion of software as a tool […] Software art could be algorithms as an end in themselves, it could subvert perceived paradigms of computer software or create new ones, it could do something interesting or disrupting with your computer, it could be creative writing, it could be science.«8 Software art – and essentially nothing has changed in this regard to this day – is the artistic or theoretical reflection on software, either on the basis of (alternative) software itself or – Florian Cramer’s approach – in any medium.9 In his opinion, all the art that is based on instructions – in a word, algorithms – is software art. Instructions as used by Fluxus and concept art – such as La Monte Young’s command »Draw a straight line and follow it« from 1961 – are called software art avant la lettre. This sweeping view has not remained unchallenged. The art historian Matthias Weiß, for instance, justly criticises what he calls the »glorifying imagery« and points out that the idea of the instructions cannot be simply replaced by the word »software«.10 Cramer’s ideas are also dealt with in the read_me reader. In his article »Mise-en-abyme in Software Art: A Comment to Florian Cramer«, the media theorist Troels Degn Johansson even speaks of essentialism. Johansson claims that Cramer is essentialist inasmuch as he defends software art as software. Cramer’s insistence on supporting the pure existence of code as text with aesthetic and historical arguments can indeed be seen as a search for the essence of software. Software art would then – thus Johansson – be nothing more than pursuing this one track: »to follow the straight line that they have drawn.«

The truth of the code

Johansson’s harsh criticism highlights a problem that Cramer’s emphatic stance has to face: precisely because he has something essential (and essentialist) to say, he runs the risk of reducing complex concepts to media-immanent and formalistic genealogies. And for this reason, as is also hinted in Johansson’s article, the faction of pure formalists and that of the culturalists draw closer than was perhaps intended. For both parties pursue in different ways the desire for representation of the essence or for the invention of correct, that is, processual, network-based, dynamic and action-oriented software: the former motivated by a deconstructivist, experimental or social impetus,11 the latter by a formalistic one. For both parties, the truth of the code is the reason for all action.
Inke Arns’ text » Read_me, Run_me, Execute_me. Software and its Discontents, or: It’s the Performativity of Code, Stupid!« is one high point in this exciting and »speculative« debate. Setting out from the assumption that there are formalistic and critical tendencies, she marks out the field: the formalistic faction forms in the area of »generative art«, that is, with those who mainly played with rules and automatisms and have only the artistic result in mind. In contrast to this, she says, software art engages with the cultural meaning of software. Although she at first expounds her position in an illuminating reading of convincing examples such as, for example, Dragan Espenschied and Alvar Freude’s project »Insert Coin«,12 it increasingly becomes clear that her argumentation offers no criteria for differentiating between the two groups. The border between them starts to become blurred precisely at the point where media-reflective experiments such as code poetry, for example, are under debate. These works that experiment with the code of programming languages and poetry, by mez or Alan Sondheim, for example, were already cited by Florian Cramer as guarantors for the deconstructing »visibilisation« of the computer as a medium that is in the final analysis code-based and thus language-based. At the same time, he himself suggests that these could be formalisms. Arns adds a political argument to Cramer’s aesthetic one and maintains that the body-related language experiments of mez thematise the »postoptical unconscious« of the information society. What is meant is the program code […] hidden by the graphical interfaces«.13
Here, Arns does not only sum up the premises of the runme.org community:14 connections can also be discerned with discourses on digital capitalism as represented by Lev Manovich, Deleuze and Haraway, among others. To prevent every formalistic experiment being able to be glorified as representation critique of postoptical power, however, a work should have connections with precisely such concepts. The mere reproduction of abstractions cannot suffice. Arns combines theories that are critical of capitalism taken from ideological critique and power analysis with speaking about the true essence of the noughts and ones behind the surface of the deceptive paper baskets and files. A discussion of the premises she uses would however make it clear that speaking about depths and surfaces, lies and deception, code and text needs to be overhauled. But Arns’ speculation is a serious attempt to introduce the ideas of representation and its critique into the debates of Software Art & Cultures – an attempt that »read_me« has undertaken.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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