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 programmers or users
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 extraactually
rediscovering means of expression that
had already been explored by Arab calligraphers
and seventeenth century western authorsshowing
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 cant 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 DependenceSoftware
Art in a Cultural Context It Cant
Get out of by Jacob Lillemose. And
the most amusing because of its clarity
and insight may befor this
reader at leastInke Arnss
Read_me, Run_me, Execute_me: Software
and its discontents, or: Its 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 arent
convinced that software can have an aesthetic,
you might change your mind after reading
this.