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EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE

Tilman Baumgaertel


Presentation at the „art+communication" conference in Riga on August 26th 2000

„Software is mind control.
Come and get some."
Slogan of the artist collective I/O/D for their program "Web Stalker"


In this presentation I want to introduce a couple of software programs, that are labelled as art. The idea that software as itself can be art, is relatively new, at least to me, and I guess it is safe to assume that this was made possible by the art practices on the internet that have developed in the last couple of years. Those among you who have followed the development in the last couple of years in the field of net art will notice some familiar names, but there are also some newcomers. I don't want to suggest a new movement, or the latest, but rather point out some developments, of which I can't even begin to imagine where they might lead to.

To my mind there are a couple of parallels between these art computer programmes and certain tendencies in modernist art, especially with art movements such as Fluxus, conceptual art and to some extent also Mail Art - art forms, that preferred the description and presentation of ideas over their material realisation. Artists like Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono, Lawrence Weiner or Jenny Holzer come to mind here. A lot of art that was done in this context and by these people were essential one thing: „sets of instructions", things like "walk down the street and look at the sun", draw a certain number of lines, that don't cross, imagine a certain colour or a certain shape. In that sense they resemble, well, the "sets of instructions", out of which software consists, which give the machine on which they run, instructions.

So all the pieces I will talk about are essentially just that: „sets of instructions". They have not been typed on some piece of paper or written on the wall as in early conceptual art, but take place on the computer of the user, the viewer, the audience, whatever you want to call it. They are not art that has been created with the computer, but art, that takes place within the computer. Its not software that has been designed to create autonomous art works, but it is the software itself that is the art work. With most of the programmes it is not the final result that is of importance, and in many instances there isn't even a final result, but rather the process that the software triggers on the computer.

They are, as any kind of software, timed based. Some of them go on and on and on, as long as the computer is on, and in some cases even when the computer has been turned off. They are projects in the true sense of the word: they are ongoing, not an activity with a beginning and an end. They follow a generative aesthetics, and keep on keeping on as long as there is a computer and electricity. Most of them can't be shown in a traditional art context. They can be downloaded from the Internet for free and run on the machine of the individual user. In that sense they can be considered to be modern kind of multiple - an art piece that can be obtained by many for little or no money at all. They all turn the desktop of the computer into a space and into a subject of their artistic experiment. In that sense they are also a piece of „Public Art", that doesn't exist in public space anymore, but on the immaterial non-space of the graphic user interface of the computer.

The first piece I would like to show is a Java Applet by American artist John F. Simon, that is called "Every Icon". What it does basically is count forward. It consists of the scheme of an icon, like the ones you have on your computer, but is much larger. If you want to design an icon you use a grid like this, fill it with dots, and when you are lucky you see something that resembles what ever you had in mind. Now this piece does it automatically, and Simon estimates that it will take a couple of million years to complete every possible combination within this 32 x 32 grid. Please note the fact that this is my own personal version! I purchased it from the artist for 20 dollars, and I even have the right to sell it. Now here's a business model for net art!

The next piece is "SoftSub", a software piece by "C5corp", a collective from California, from UC San Jose. It's a Screen Saver that doubles as a analytical tool for your hard disk. With this piece that artists want to show a non-causal and non-representational way to represent knowledge - the data on your hard disk. To them it is a new way to organise data and a way to analyse complex clusters of information. Of course, SoftSub is not "useful" in any conventional way. To actually find information on your computer it is completely useless. Trying to find data on your hard disk with this tool is like trying to use a topological map to travel on a highway. It works a little bit like ScanDisk, but it doesn't help you to organise your files. It doesn't show the data as orderly pieces of information on a graphic user interface, but as cryptical clusters of data, that don't reveal anything about themselves - and that's what they are after all.

It travels over the partitions of the hard disk like a „Submarine" (which gave the piece the name), and collects the data on your machine. Once it is done with this, it generates sort of a snapshot of your hard disk, opens an internet connection and uploads this graphic profile of your computer to the Webserver of C5. There the image that you created will be compared to other images that were uploaded on the server and according to its visual characteristics, filed in a so-called „ontology".

So there you already have some alternative interface design. The next piece I am going to show you, is actually a variation over the interface of your machine… sort of. „OSS" by Jodi: OSS is quite in your face, much easier to understand than "SoftSub", I suppose. It was created by the artist duo Jodi that got quite well known with their work on the web. Their web-pieces were about interface design, and so is OSS. As soon as you put the CD-Rom in the diskdrive of your computer, the machine seems to take on a life of its own. Who ever thought he was in charge of his computer, when clicking on the computer icons, will know better after this. "OSS" shows us that it is not the user who is mastering the computer but rather that it is vice versa, that the computer uses its user. When putting in this CD-Rom the computer seems to develop a life of its own, like the famous HAL in „2001 - A Space Odyssey".

Another "alternative interface" is the "3D Finder" by Pete Everett from Great Britain that turns the Graphical User Interface into a black pseudo-three dimensional space, where the files on your hard disk are shown in star-like constellations. John Cage was thinking about a computer that doesn't help him to save time, when doing things, but actually makes tasks much harder to accomplish. Pete Everett and Jodi kind of did him this favour: they turn the computer into a completely useless machine, that can't be controlled anymore. The same thing can be said about computer games, so maybe it is no big surprise that Jodi have been creating versions of games lately.

The computergame „Wolfenstein" is indexed in Germany, because you can see Nazis in full uniforms. SOD, Jodi's Version of the game, is not a problem in this regard, because you can't see anything at all; it is completely abstract. It looks like a gallery where you can see only Malewitschs „Black Square". Computer games have got a lot of attention recently in the art world. There were a couple of exhibitions such as „Game Over" in Zürich, „Synworld" at t0 Public Netbase in Vienna and „Re-Load" at „Shift e.V." in Berlin.

Another kind of calculated abuse of existing computer-technology is the art browser that has been created in the last couple of years. The best know project is „Web Stalker" by the art collective I/O/D, that won the „WebbyAward" in May 2000, a kind of Internet-Oscar, in the „net art" category. With this program you can "surf" the web, just as with programs such as „Netscape Navigator" or „Microsoft Explorer", but unlike these commercial programs the „Web Stalker" shows exactly what „normal" browsers are trying to hide. Instead of nicely designed surfaces you see what is underneath this "wallpaper": the HTML-code, in which those pages were created and the structure of websites, that is displayed in complex diagrams on the monitor. "WebStalker" allows for a view of the WorldWideWeb that surpasses surface phenomena and shows it as what it actually is: a collection of digal data on server computers, whose organisation has a beauty in itself.

But to I/O/D the „Web Stalker" is not just a tool which allows for a more „formalist" approach toward the computer, but also a socio-political statement: „If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will to power... We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict. Somewhere between the construction of the data-mines and the desire for the abolition of work, which is embedded in the machines, is where we are now - but these are not the only possibilities. Geometry is not just the discipline of quantification, but also the art of tricking new spaces into being."

The critique of the metaphors that surrounds the World Wide"Web", also informs other art-browser-projects. According to dominant terminology we are „surfing" „on" the „Web", that consist out of nothing but a collection of „pages", that are located on „sites". You have to „navigate" through these sites with software that has telling names such as „Explorer" and „Navigator". These metaphors that appear almost colonialist are of course nothing more than wallpapers, that hide what we are actually doing: we are loading data from a server computer onto our computer.

"Reconnoitre" by Tom Corby and Gavin Baily is an art browser like „Web Stalker" that also contradicts the common net metaphors: the program makes "surfing" as an activity visible. "Reconnoitre", which the two artists call ironically „dysfunctional software" shows keywords or HTML-tags from randomly picked websites, that flow- white on a black background - through a seemingly three-dimensional "space". Once it has been started there's little left to do for the „user" than to passively watch the text collage that develops on the monitor - for the artists as a "technologically experienced dérive (drift) in its own right -an ambient grazing of text, fragmentary, incomplete and happily purposeless."

With „netomat" by New Yorker artist programmer Maciej Wisniewski you don't even have to click: all the program needs is a keyword, that starts a search for lines of text and images from the net, that are collaged together on the screen into an arbitrary collage. The artist says about his piece: „Software is not neutral. Software creates a „weltanschaung". Software structures and influences the politics and the sociology of communications. It organises our cognitive processes. If you use a particular software like „Internet Explorer" to look at the World Wide Web, you support a particular view of the net." Wisniewski offers the program as an „Open Source Software", and wants other programmers to modify and develop „netomat".

„The idea becomes the machine that makes the art", American artist Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967 in a famous manifesto of conceptual art. In the art computer programs of today this idea has been put more radical than any conceptual artist of the 60ies and 70ies would have thought. Poor Sol LeWitt later used his "sets of instructions" - such as "Paint 300 lines on the wall that don't cross" - to do actual wall paintings. If he would have put the instruction "Paint 300 lines on the all that don't cross" as an algorithm on a computer, he could have saved himself a lot of work. The art software pieces of today are "machines that make the art". They carry out things, that artists a couple of years ago could only have written down with their typewriters - if they would have known what calculating power a Pentium-III-PC in the year 2000 would have.

Almost exactly 30 years ago there were two of the most important shows of western conceptual art took place in New York, and both had very telling names: „Information" (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970) and „Software" (Jewish Museum, New York, 1971). The art software I have shown is exactly about what these titles promised: these pieces ARE Software. And they process information.

Today the conceptual art of the 60ies, which was shown in these exhibitions, is seen by many as the cultural background music of a fundamental shift in western capitalism: from an economy in which surplus value was created by the sale of material goods, to an information based economy, in which surplus value is created out of the manipulation of data. The early conceptual art consisted primarily out of information, in order to resist the market. Artists were trying to create art that couldn't be turned into commodities. They were wrong; it turned out that even art that was nothing but information could be sold, because in the "New Information Economy" that was developing in the 60ies and 70ies information and data became commodities. And conceptual art turned out to be very marketable after all in a postmodern information society.

It remains to be seen what happens with the software art. I don't see any signs, that they could also be turned into commodities, and not at all into commercial applications. These pieces are free-ware, and they are likely to stay that way. We can look at them as a new form of conceptual art, but we don't have to, we don't even have to look at them as art at all. These pieces are "experimental software", that is interesting for everyone who looks for different ways of approaching his or her computer. And some of them, such as "Webstalker" and "netomat", have actually been distributed on shareware CD-Roms in really mainstream computer-magazines.

The programs that I introduced in this text are also an attempt to reclaim the computer as a cultural tool, in order to not leave the machine to the software of a small number of North American and West European companies, whose dominance is less based on the quality of the programs, but rather on their market power. They also question the dominance of „user-friendly" software of companies such as Microsoft or Apple, because they show the computer as the wicked machine it actually is, not the funny point-and-click-tool, as which programs with Graphical User Interface (GUI) present it. One doesn't have to dream of „slashing and burning the macintosh interface", as I/O/D put it in an interview. But their „Web Stalker" and the other art programs discussed in this text remind us that using Microsoft Windows is not the only way to interact with a computer. All these pieces make the computer a little stranger and a little more inaccessible than most of today's software-producers want us to believe. And that's very good.

(1) http://ww.numeral.com
(2) http://www.c5corp.com/softsub
(3) http://oss.jodi.org
(4) http://www.twoFiveSix.co.uk
(5) http://sod.jodi.org
(6) http://synworld.t0.or.at
(7) http://www.re-load.org
(8) http://www.backspace.org/iod
(9) Interview between I/O/D and Belinda Barnet: http://www.backspace.org/iod/interview.html
(10) Email-Interview with T.B.: http://www.netomat.net

More links:

Mary Flanagan: Phage (1999)
http://www.maryflanagan.com/virus.htm

Andi Freeman, Jason Skeet: earshot
http://www.deepdisc.com/earshot/

Pete Everett: Circadia (1999)
http://www.twofivesix.co.uk/circadia/

General Idea: Screensaver (1996)
http://www.moma.org/onlineprojects/generalidea/

Francis Alÿs: The Thief (1999)
http://www.diacenter.org/alys/

Jodi: CTRL-SPACE (1998-1999)
http://ctrl-space.c3.hu/

Max Moswitzer and Margarete Jahrmann: LinX3d (1999)
http://www.konsum.net/linx3d/

Game Over, Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, 1999
http://www.gameover.org

Synworld, t0 Public Netbase, Wien, 1999
http://synworld.t0.or.at/