Software Art and Writing Florian Cramer, drafted with Ulrike Gabriel 5/18/2001 What is software art? How can ``software'' be generally defined? We had to answeer these questions at least provisionally when we were asked to be with the artist-programmer John Simon jr. in the jury of the ''artistic software`` award for the transmediale.01 art festival in Berlin, Germany. Since more than a decade, festivals, awards, exhibitions and publications exist for various forms of computer art: computer music, computer graphics, electronic literature, Net Art and computer-controlled interactive installations, to name only a few, each of them with its own institutions and discourse. Classifications like the above show that attention is usually being paid to how, i.e. in which medium, digital artworks present themselves to the audience, externally. They also show that digital art is traditionally considered to be a part of ``[new] media art,'' a term which covers analog and digital media alike and is historically rooted in video art. But isn't it a false assumption that digital art - i.e. art that is consists of zeros and ones - was derived from video art, only because computer data is conventionally visualized on screens? By calling digital art ``[new] media art,'' public perception has focused the zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media, rather than structures of programming. This view is reinforced by the fact that the algorithms employed to generate and manipulate computer music, computer graphics, digital text are frequently if not in most cases invisible to the audience. While the history of computer art still is short, it is rich with works whose programming resides in black boxes or is considered to be just a preparatory behind-the-scenes process for a finished (and finite) work on CD, in a book or in the Internet. This is case with practically all books and newspapers in their dependence on word processing and typesetting software, and it is the case all audio CDs, even (and particularly) those which contain algorithmically generated music. The distribution of John Cage's sound play ``Roarotorio,'' for example, includes a book, a CD and excerpts of the score, but not even a fragment of the computer program which was employed to compute the score. While software, i.e. algorithmic programming code, is inevitably at work in all art that is digitally produced and reproduced, it has a long history of being overlooked as a conceptual and aesthetic factor. This history is paralleled in the evolution of computing from systems that could only be used by programmers to systems like the Macintosh and Windows which, by their graphical user interface, camouflaged the mere fact that they are running on program code, in their operation as well as in their aesthetics. Despite this history, we were surprised that the 2001 transmediale award for software art was not only the first of its kind at this particular art festival, but as it seems the first of its kind at all. When the London-based digital arts project I/O/D released an experimental World Wide Web browser, the Web Stalker http://www.backspace.org/iod/, in 1997, the work was perceived to be a piece of Net Art. Instead of rendering Web sites as smoothly formatted pages, the Web Stalker displayed their internal control codes and visualized their link structure. By making the Web unreadable in conventional terms, the program made it readable in its underlying code. It made its users aware that digital signs are structural hybrids of internal code and an external display that arbitrarily depends on algorithmic formatting. What's more, these displays are generated by other code: The Code of the Web Stalker may dismantle the code of the Web, but does so by formatting it into just another display, a display which just pretends to ``be'' the code itself. The Web Stalker can be read as a piece of Net Art which critically examines its medium. But it's also a reflection of how reality is shaped by software, by the way code processes code. Since software is machine control code, it follows that digital media are, literally, written. Electronic literature therefore is not simply text, or hybrids of text and other media, circulating in computer networks. If ``literature'' can be defined as something that is made up by letters, the program code, software protocols and file formats of computer networks constitute a literature whose underlying alphabet is zeros and ones. By running code on itself, this code gets constantly transformed into higher-level, human-readable alphabets of alphanumeric letters, graphic pixels and other signifiers. These signifiers flow forth and back from one aggregation and format to another. Computer programs are a literature in a highly elaborate syntax of multiple, mutually interdependent layers of code. This literature does not only rely on computer systems as transport media, but actively manipulates them when it is machine instructions. The difference is obvious when comparing a conventional E-Mail message with an E-Mail virus: Although both are short pieces of textwhose alphabets are the same, the virus contains machine control syntax, code that interferes with the (coded) system it gets sent to. It could be compared to the poisoned pages of Aristotles ``Poetics'' in Umberto Eco's novel ``The Name of the Rose,'' with the difference that in computer viruses, the mere language induces the lethal dose. If programming is writing with machines, software code at once is language and structural manipulation of a technical system. This aspect is neither covered by the concept of ``hypertext,'' nor by the concept of ``multimedia.'' As umbrella terms for ways of structuring and formatting data, they both don't imply by definition that the data is digital and that the formatting is algorithmic. Nevertheless, the ``Web Stalker'' shows that hypertext and multimedia on the one hand and software art on the other are by no means exclusive categories. They could be seen as different perspectives, the one focussing display, the other one the concept and systemics. But is code which technically manipulates systems exclusive to computer programming? The history of algorithmic, self-executing writing is much older than the history of the computer. Besides mathematics proper, it includes the permutational language of the Kabbalah, Lullian combinatorics in Renaissance poetry, in Novalis and Mallarmé, and combinatory language games of Dada and the French Oulipo writers.1. Software code doesn't even have to be algorithmic. If code is, mostly simply put, instructions that make up and control a system, it is - according to the legal theoretician Lawrence Lessig - law, and law vice versa is executable code2. Lessig's equation can be read to extend from secular and religious law into the realm of art when we consider, for example, the Composition 1961 No. I, January I by the contemporary composer and former Fluxus artist La Monte Young: This piece can be called a seminal piece of software art because its instruction is formal. At the same time, it is extremist in its aesthetic consequence, in the implication of infinite space and time to be traversed. Unlike in most notational music and written theatre plays, its score is not aesthetically detached from its performance. The line to be drawn could be even considered a second-layer instruction for the act of following it. But as it is practically impossible to perform the score physically, it becomes meta-physical, conceptual, epistemological. As such the piece could serve as a paradigm for Henry Flynt's 1961 definition of Concept Art as ``art of which the material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound.''3 Tracing concept art to artistic formalisms like twelve-tone music, Flynt argues that the structure or concept of those artworks is, taken for itself, aesthetically more interesting than the product of their physical execution. Flynt's Concept Art thus integrates mathematics as well, on the acognitive grounds of ``de-emphasiz[ing]'' its attribution to scientific discovery.4 With this claim, Flynt coincides, if oddly, with the most influential contemporary computer scientist, Donald E. Knuth. Knuth considers the applied mathematics of programming an art and whose famous compendium of algorithms is duely titled ``The Art of Computer Programming.''5 Should the transmediale software art jury therefore have consisted of mathematicians and computer scientists who would have judged the entries by the beauty of their code? What is known as Concept Art today is less rigorous in its immaterialism than the art Flynt had in mind. It is noteworthy, however, that the first major exhibition of this kind of conceptual art was named ``Software'' and confronted art objects actually with computer software installations.6. Curated in 1970 by the art critic and systems theorist Jack Burnham at the New York Jewish Museum, the show was, as Edward A. Shanken suggests, ``predicated on the idea of software as a metaphor for art [my emphasis],''7. It therefore stressed the cybernetical, social dimension of programmed systems rather than, as Flynt, pure structure. Thirty years later, after personal computing became ubiquituous, cultural stereotypes of what software is have solidified. Although the expectation that software is, unlike other writing, not an aesthetic, but a ``functional tool'' itself is an aesthetic expectation, software art nevertheless has become less likely to emerge as conceptualist clean-room constructs than reacting to these stereotypes. The ``Web Stalker'' again might be referred to as such a postmodern piece. In a similar fashion, the two works picked for the transmediale award, Adrian Ward's ``Signwave Auto-Illustrator'' and Netochka Nezvanova's ``Nebula M.81,'' are PC user software which acts up against its conventional codification, either by mapping internal functions against their corresponding signifiers on the user interface (Auto-Illustrator) or by mapping the signifiers of program output against human readability (Nebula M.81). Contrary to the formal language of fixed scores like La Monte Young's, but similar to literature in nonformal languages,8 computer software can even be programmed to recursively rewrite itself. If software coding is writing, it's processual not only as a computation process in the machine, but also when it's being composed in a programming languages. The works of Ward and Nezvanova and, for example, the computer code poems of mez and Alan Sondheim show that coding is a highly personal activity. Code can be diaries, poetic, obscure, ironic or disruptive, defunct or impossible, it can simulate and disguise, it has rhetoric and style, it can be an attitude. Such attributes might seem to contradict the fact that artistic control over combinatory iterations of machine code is limited, whether or not the code was self-written. Unlike the Cagean artists of the 1960s, the software artists mentioned above seem to appropriate this not merely as a means against intention, but as a simultaneous negation and extension of the writing subject. 9 References [Bar68] John Barth. Lost in the Funhouse. Anchor Books. Doubleday, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland, 1988 (1968). [Cra99] Florian Cramer. Permutationen, 1996-99. http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/{\~{}} cantsin/index.cgi. [Fly61] Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors, An Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961). [hun90] George Maciunas und Fluxus-Editionen, Edition Hundermark, Cologone, 1990. [Knu98] Donald E. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1973-1998. [Les00] Lawrence Lessig. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, New York, 2000. [Sha] Edward A. Shanken. The house that jack built: Jack burnham's concept of `software` as a metaphor of art. Leonardo Electronic Almanach, 6(10). http: //www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/House.html. Footnotes: 1 Some of those writings are reconstructed as computer programs on my web site ``Permutations'' [Cra99] 2 See [Les00] 3 Henry Flynt, Concept Art [Fly61] ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with language,'' Flynt writes, ``concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.''1 4 ibid. 5 [Knu98] 6 Among them Ted Nelson's hypertext system in its first public display, according to Edward A. Shanken, The House that Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of ``Software'' as a Metaphor for Art, [Sha] 7 ibid. 8 Like, for example, John Barth's ``Frametale'' which consists of the phrase ``ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN'' written on a Moebius strip as an infinitely recursing narrative, [Bar68], p.1-2 9 Or, as Adrian Ward puts it: ``Children are crafted by nature, software by nurture. I am the craftsman. Thus, I shall live on through myself'' (quoted from an E-Mail message to the ``Rhizome'' mailing list, March 9, 2001)