Hard, piano-like sound echoes through the conference room in Dortmund – but it\'s not merely cool music we\'re being treated to at the »Read-Me-100« festival. No, it\'s code, some kind of Java code, whose listing was translated into a kind of music and which is now generating these uncompromising, but not unharmonious notes. The young Moscow mathematics student Ilia Malinovsky has put together software that can play code like music. »LYCAY« it\'s called, which stands for »Let your code play.« Listening to code is designed to introduce a whole new plane, no longer dedicated to a specific purpose, but instead allowing for a new access to programming.

This work is a typical example of how software art has been defined to date: software not as useful tool, but as art, allowing it to make visible its structures, mechanisms and ideologies in a whole new way. But »LYCAY« is also a good example of how this reflexive approach can quickly devolve into pure play, which, despite its loud volume, does not necessarily contribute to penetrating the material.

Interestingly enough, this was the only interpretation of the »Read-Me« slogan »People doing strange things with software« that remained mired in banality. All of the other projects chosen for the conference – six artistic and four theoretical works out of a total of 100 competition entries – were notable for clear references to socially relevant themes. A creative deconstruction of capitalist ideologies could be found, for example, in the audiovisual work »The Invisible Hand of the Market« by Renate Wieser and Julian Rohrhuber. Variations on circles with numbers in them, similar to those commonly used in graphic visualizations of percentage distributions, move in synchrony to canned music composed to match: a perpetual flickering and modulation taken to absurd extremes. This discursively designed work was inspired by a reading of Adam Smith\'s »The Wealth of Nations,« the 18th century capitalist bible, which features the recurring idea that an invisible hand would regulate the entire economy in a fitting and harmonious way if one would only let things take their natural course. A hack of Microsoft Excel in a new combination with the freeware SuperCollider, the work reveals the emptiness and calculation behind capitalist harmonization.

Pointing out that the generative direction of software art, often denounced as formalist, is really not that at all, was the aim of the telephone presentation given by Mitchell Whitelaw of Australia. In Whitelaw\'s opinion, people have heretofore made the mistake of interpreting generative works in purely formalist terms, overlooking their ability to draft a critical view of the world. What exactly the latter consists of was something he was unable to explain either in his lecture or in the ensuing conversation, which, due to the telephone situation, did not exactly develop smoothly. But a mere plea alone is not capable of making a model for subversive actors in a global society out of generative points before a black or white background. This was instead supplied the most convincingly by Yves Degoyon’s collaborative software, »Map-o-Matix.« Based on freeware, this application can be used to create a variety of maps, leaving it up to users to decide what it is exactly they want to map. The most blatant case of a world model was supplied by an anonymous guest from the British IT industry, who has been unemployed for several years. He developed software that generated rejection letters and company logos, and used it to legitimate his pleas to the employment office, which was trying to force him to take on nonstop work in a dead-end field. Further fuel was added to the fire by Sven König\'s presentation, in which he made it clear that he had hardly contributed a thing, but had instead further developed existing collective efforts. Based on a bug, his »Appropirate!« software hacks compressed video files from P2P networks and reveals their mathematical and procedural structure. What results is a really »beautiful,« visually and acoustically captivating video, which someone seems familiar. Despite massive protests on the part of the public, this work prevailed due to its sophisticated revelation of our culture of stealing and recycling.

In short, the conference provided a good overview of current software practices and confirmed the assumption that it\'s important to do strange things with software, even if opinions are divided and there are still yawning gulfs between the various positions.

Read Me 100 – Temporary Software Art Factory. Festival for Software Art and Cultures, http://www.readme.runme.org, November 4 - 5, 2005, Dortmund. The event was organized by Inke Arns and Francis Hunger of Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, with the cooperation of Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin of Readme/Runme, Moscow. Also on the competition committee: Amy Alexander and Alex McLean from Runme.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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