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Read_me: Software Art & Cultures

by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin (eds.)
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus, 2004
397 pp., illus. Paper, $41.95
ISBN: 87-988440-4-0.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

The basic question is: Can software in itself, as a collection of code, instructions, structures and protocols, objects and classes and whatever else it might include, be considered as an artistic medium? Can a program, however simple or complex and in whatever language or programming environments it is written, be a work of art? Is there a software aesthetic? Or is it just an intermediate carrier of something else, like paint in a painting or timber in a building? Is a program merely a string of (dis)functional bits and bytes operating in a hardware context and performing tricks at the programmer’s or user’s will?

For the authors and the editors of this book, the answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. And I do agree. Like maths, physics, chemical formulae, and gene sequences, code can have a beauty of its own, through its surprising simplicity or its mind-blowing complexity. But even more: Some software is written explicitly with its own formal characteristics and structure in mind and is purposefully presented as a ‘literary’ creation. A flawed analogy can be found in literature when the authors of the early twentieth century started to use typography as an extra——actually rediscovering means of expression that had already been explored by Arab calligraphers and seventeenth century western authors——showing that a word is not just a word, syntax is not just grammar and meaning can come from many sources.

The Software Art and Cultures Conference held at Aarhus University in 2004 was a meeting point for ‘People Doing Strange Things with Software’, many of who had been involved in projects or groups like Read_Me, Runme and Dorkbot. This book presents 18 conference papers and 32 projects from the Runme.org Software Art Repository, so it is obvious that I can’t list them all in this space. For the projects, just surf to Runme.org and let yourself be overwhelmed, amused, and irritated by some masterly code and some hopeless functionality. As for the papers, they are grouped under five headings: ‘social perspectives’, ‘the world according to software’, ‘software art: historical and cultural contexts’, ‘code, text’ and ‘software art: visual and conceptual art traditions’. Some of the texts are practically unintelligible, mainly because of translation problems, I suppose, but most are shedding light on very different aspects of the questions I started this review with. The most encompassing text being ‘A Re-Declaration of Dependence——Software Art in a Cultural Context It Can’t Get out of’ by Jacob Lillemose. And the most amusing because of its clarity and insight may be——for this reader at least——Inke Arns’s ‘Read_me, Run_me, Execute_me: Software and its discontents, or: It’s the performativity of code, stupid’. Or perhaps you want to start with Simon Yuills ‘Code Art Brutalism: Low-Level Systems and Simple Programs’ where assembler code and low-level system programming (close to the hardware, you might say) are compared to the ‘Brutalist’ movement in architecture. If you aren’t convinced that software can have an aesthetic, you might change your mind after reading this.

 

 




Updated 1st December 2005


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