Reconstructing the Processor

Roland Seidel and Achim Stiermann’s project MAN OS 1 / extraordinateur is a performative video film work lasting around fifteen minutes, a work on whose realization the artists have spent a couple of years. The work was completed recently, although it bears the hallmarks of being a work in progress. This is saying nothing new; everything today is open to processuality, and processuality seems to be the never-ending story of contemporary art works. However, the logic here is a different one, and I just hope that the mainstream media capitalist commercial machine will not too quickly kidnap this masterpiece of experimental visual invention and display  it naively in future commercials.

What is it that is so interesting about the work? We use software tools, exchange mails (up to hundreds a day) and dwell in symbiosis with our computer, but without having any real clue how the operating system of the computer works as a real environment. MAN OS 1 presents this very logic of the computer operating system and its interfaces. Seidel and Stiermann actually replace them with human performers, insert or, better, situate them in the computer and, using the esthetics of cartoon animation, slapstick comedy, Chaplinesque gags and last but not least Laurel and Hardy’s perplexities, analyze the enigmas that are called computer, techno-science and networking.  The whole narrative of the work is staged in the interior of the computer, which, with its usual suspects – the icons and folders –, is transformed into a performative stage for serious analysis.

In MAN OS 1 the operating system of the computer is so to speak displayed in its materiality; humans actors replace the processors, although a bicycle with a human delivering an e-mail in the video is used more as metaphor / symbol for transport than as a replacement of the e-mail icon. The icon is used inside the Outlook program. The mouse clicks on it.

Seidel and Stiermann constructed a giant computer as the site of the performative actions, equipped with projectors and an apple as well. A real apple. It is used as a reference to the  PowerPC Macintosh/Apple Computer that powers their work. It is also a precise historical reference to the whole history of Mac personal computers, which were released in 1984, and designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed until this day by Apple Computers.

But what is interesting is what the artists point out themselves: »The computer programs used in our video film work became old and outdated as our film developed!« Seidel and  Stiermann started with Photoshop 5.0! The  processor »equivalent« of  Seidel, who also performs  in the video film as the »extraordinateur«, is  a  PC  processor. But, seeing as Apple changed the whole system architecture and switched to Intel processors, as such an »equivalent« Seidel is a technological anachronism that will be irrelevant in two years from now (as the artists state) . The computer processor’s  condition(s) of (im)possibility are always inscribed in every  techno-science work, but this time they are presented by Seidel and  Stiermann  as the main logic of the work.

Seidel and  Stiermann’s  video film title contains the strange, neither English nor German word »extraordinateur«. The work is about an »ordinateur«, the French word for a computer, but with an extra capacity, presented as a historical  anachronism as well, if we consider the fast development of computer processors.


I emphasized at the beginning of this article that a real apple appears. This one is put on the computer screen precisely where the Mac/Apple Computer Apple  brand logo regularly appears, though for a change it is thrown into the air like a ball.  And the system will not (yet!) crash down. As the operating system is presented in an anthropomorphic way, we see how digital processing and human behaviors collide and errors within the work take on more and more important roles.

With MAN OS  1 we leave the discursive subversion of the interior of the computer for images constructed literally, in real time: so to speak before our  eyes. A good  decade ago,  Jodi and other semi-hacker entities counteracted the surface of the screen with developing projects based on externalization of the computer language code. Instead of retreating toward programming textuality, Seidel and Stiermann have opened the language of the computer toward mainstream digital and computer images. Seidel and Stiermann believe in the image. It is a work that visually, and not textually, reconstructs the computer operating  system interfaces as a sketch. It explores the whole idea of techno-science and the importance of the computer not only as a tool, but as a context for performative politics. Computer is not a tool, but a form of politics about how we enter the field of culture, creativeness and our fantasies.

Laymert Garcia dos Santos argued that »the alliance between techno-science and global capital is leading, ever faster, to a restructuring of work, a reprogramming of nature, the recombination of life and the reconfiguration of language, based on the concepts of information and innovation. Moreover, this alliance allows techno-science and global capital to concentrate increasingly on the virtual dimension of reality and to map it and exploit it intensively and extensively in order to take control of that part of the virtual that needs to be brought up to date.« (In Zehar, no. 51,  published by Arteleku, San Sebastian, 2003). He later goes on in his  essay with the title »The new, horror and art« to write about the art system, which is also not immune to such  dynamics. The art system uses art not only to produce saleable objects, but increasingly to explore the interface between the virtual and the actual. Who gets their hands on the interface, and in which way, will determine the  question of the future of new media technology, art and its institutions in connection with capital. This is precisely what Seidel and Stiermann\\\'s project MAN OS 1 / extraordinateur is about: the logic of the interface and  possible different ways to represent and subvert it.

In doing things with images, Seidel and Stiermann\\\'s project MAN OS 1 reuses Hans Holbein’s painting »The Ambassadors« with its  famous case of anamorphosis. In this masterpiece of 1533, a human skull is presented as a hidden, anamorphic (deformed ) object on the floor depicted in the painting. When standing in front of this painting, one is always asked:  Do you see the strange object on the floor of the painting? And instructed: Close your left eye, put your face close to the computer screen near the right side of the picture. You will then see a skull! If you can\\\'t get it to work, you can cheat and at least look at a picture of it, usually reproduced near the painting. But this is not necessary any more:  in MAN OS 1 the anamorphic skull  is taken out from the picture and presented as a thing which is not understandable,  a »stupid something« without a function.

To understand this point of view, we can make a reference to Slavoj Zizek\\\'s» Parallax View«, a book published in 2006, in which Zizek describes the parallax view as the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the »parallax gap« separating two points between which no syntheses or mediation are possible, linked by an »impossible short circuit« of levels that can never meet.  Seidel and Stiermann’s  work aims at short circuits of levels and meanings  in techno-science. While tearing down the walls of privatization and attacking hybridization, Seidel and Stiermann’s work shows that, in the end, everything can be effectively disrupted by an unexpected –  human – error! Sound familiar?