robmyers

Realism in art is the absence of sentiment. Livecoding is writing software in public while presenting the source code and its output along with the programmer as a kind of performance. Hacking (computer programming) is usually a solitary activity and hackers (computer programmers) rarely get to hack on (program) software that they themselves will use for their own ends or benefit directly from. Livecoding turns hacking into a public, social, self-directed activity by turning it into an artistic event.

By doing this livecoding briefly restores the kind of shared social context and the relationship of hackers to the fruits of their labour that Richard Stallman described in his account of life in the MIT AI Lab of the 1970s[1]. As Simon Yuill points out[2] about this account, Stallman describes the proletarianisation of hacking as business interests took over from pure (state funded) research.

If livecoding romanticised hacking or was simply an exercise in professional nostalgia for a lost age of authentic relations between hacker and machine then it would be sentimental. Sentimentalising hacking would add nothing to culture or to the socioeconomic situation of hackers. It would mis-represent its subject to its audience. It would be distraction, a comforter, spectacle.

What protects against this and what makes livecoding realistic is that livecoding involves the solving of technical problems in order to produce aesthetic results that maintain a social encounter between performer and audience. This is not relaxing either for the hacker or the audience. It can involve unexpected results and failure for both performer and audience. The hacker can lose their place in the code, corrupt it, or crash it. The audience cannot fall back on the cliches of rock or classical music appreciation. Both have to work at it.

Livecoding is a form of critical self-representation. It does not simply present the everyday activity of hacking as complete and exemplary. The differences between livecoding and hacking in a cubicle or in an office off of Brick Lane identify and make up for a lack. The heroics of performance are deflated by what is being performed rather than inflating the subject of the performance.

The use of aesthetics (sound and vision) as the subject of tasks in livecoding rather than, say, mathematical or logistics problems is resistant to immediate commodification by corporate information culture. Aesthetics, as Alan Liu points out[3], is resistant to corporate information culture because it is based on the quantitative rather than the qualitative. This isn't to say that the qualitative cannot be commodified, but the culture industry prefers more easily reproduced and less demanding experiences.

Like net.art, Livecoding might be folk art of the hacking (or web and motion graphic designing) class. But its aesthetics are higher than middlebrow, and if it can resist the inevitable attempted putsch by the cultural studies department it will be able to create its own noise within broader cultural life.

Livecoding presents and represents a form of labour through aesthetics. This presentation is socially, aesthetically and technically risky. It requires work on the part of the performer and the audience. Their reward is to experience through an unusual aesthetic event what hackers are missing in society and what society is missing in hacking.

[1] - Richard M Stallman, "The GNU Project", 1998.
[2] - Simon Yuill, comment at the second "Breakfast Club" round-table at MAKE ART 2009.
[3] - Alan Liu, "Laws of Cool", 2004.

"Open Source" is in danger of coming to mean corporations sharing source code in order to reduce their development costs for proprietary software incorporating that code and thereby removing the freedom of its users. Those corporations may share code with a "community" and hire people to "manage" that community, but any code shared will be under a non-copyleft licence and/or a copyright assignment to the corporation (rather than to a trusted third party) to protect their ability to make that code proprietary rather than respect the freedom of users to use the software that it represents.

Hackers involved with such projects often support the replacement of freedom for all by the sharing of resources between producers, or at least don't see it as a problem. This seems to come from a belief that they are not "just" computer users, they are the producers of software and so the benefit of sharing code and deciding which mere users get to use it is their (or at least their bosses') right. This is misguided. Hackers use software in order to write software, and with such projects use of the software in any given context can always be denied to them. Hackers must make common cause with all users of software otherwise they will end up without freedom as well.

Open Source must not come to describe a guild or camarilla of hackers and their managers that oppose their perceived economic interests to the interests they share with all users of software. Feelgood rhetoric and permissive licences don't offset the demands for privilege and control that corporate "open source" projects make, they conceal and enable them. Ignore them and instead use copyleft to protect user freedom with all its benefits for everyone.

I've upgraded the blog to Movable Type 5.

Woo!

Artist's exploration of extremism stymied

"The [UK] government's anti-terror law watchdog has become involved in an artist's attempt to use jihadist handbooks and extremist tracts in his work."

Tintin copyrights go to war against Tintin fans

"The British lawyer who married the widow of Tintin creator Hergé has successfully sued Bob Garcia ("a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado") for £35,000 for printing five short essays in appreciation of Tintin, two of which were illustrated with brief clips from the comic. The essays were distributed for free on a non-profit basis, and the two pamphlets with Tintin illustrations were printed about 500 times each. "

Artists vs. Copyright Law

"After constant harangues about the sanctity of their “private property” and the scourge of “piracy,” it was refreshing to experience World Fair Use Day in Washington, D.C. on January 12. The event — hosted by Public Knowledge, the defender of the public’s stake in the Internet and copyrighted works — brought together some two dozen artists, lawyers, scholars, journalists and others who care about our untrammeled right to use and re-use our own culture."

UK Independent editor claims it may steal any image posted to Flickr

"Freely sharing one's work is a popular choice, but it's not the choice that Zabulis made here. Moreover, the Independent didn't attribute the work, responded disrespectfully to his inquiry, and offers no fair use defense or even a transgressive rationale for what it did: just "tough shit, old boy," safe in the knowledge that legal recourse is an option only to those who can afford it."

 

You won't get published, this blog has moderation enabled.

Processing is an art computing environment that has the (dis)advantage of being based on Java and capable of running in any web browser with a non-free Java plugin (which really needs fixing, guys). There are better languages and environments for art computing, but there are none with greater mindshare or more active communities.

There are a couple of websites that allow you to create, upload and share Processing "sketches" (programs), which is great. Processing was designed in part as a successor to the "Design By Numbers" educational graphics programming environment, and its use in design and generative art makes sharing code good for the progress and development of culture.

sketchPatch

sketchPatch is very easy to use and allows you to write, compile and run Processing sketches in the browser. Sketches are licenced under Creative Commons's Attribution-only licence. Which CC don't recomment for code. MIT or the revised BSD licence would be better for a permissive/gift/psuedo-public-domain licence, and the GPL would be better for ensuring that people can use the code they contribute and build on.

OpenProcessing

OpenProcessing allows you to upload and share your sketches. The licencing is better than sketchPad - code is GPL the graphical output of the code presented on the website is BY-SA. But they do need to make it clear that the code is GPLv3 or later, and that BY-SA covers the non-code assets rather than the code, and that output from sketches is only BY-SA if presented on the site or it incorporates pre-existign BY-SA assets.

Neither site is Franklin Street free, you can't get the source code for the websites/web services themselves.

Both sites are great resources for digital artists and designers. Tuning up the presentation of their licences, and ensuring they are free network services, would future proof them for their creators and their audiences.

http://robmyers.org/art/cybernetic_artworld/

In 1952, a century after Ada Lovelace suggested that computing machinery might be used to write musical scores, the first text generation program was written at the University Of Manchester. It was a love letter generator. Which I was completely unaware of in 2003 when I wrote "The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote".

"Cybernetic..." was a Flash program that generated textual descriptions of simple abstract figure/ground visual compositions. The title came from an ironic 1970s code art piece I'd seen in an Art & Language catalogue, and the idea came from the random poetry generators I'd seen in an Usborne children's book about programming in the early 1980s. It's a computer art historical intervention, an artwork that as far as I know nobody created but that someone really should have.

I wrote a Common Lisp version a couple of years later but it was still intended as an art historical project. There was a comment in a review of a computer art history book I read a while ago that talked about artists working after their (techno-)historical moment, and in the era of collective intelligence, statistical methods, data visualisation and big data, text generators are passe. But then so was woodcut in the era of cubism, and that difference was used constructively by the expressionists.

What suddenly made a possible virtue of Cybernetic's simplicity and brevity was the emergence of microblogging services such as Twitter, which reduced the affective and semantic bandwidth available to would-be Turing Testers to 140 characters. Cybernetic could take part in the ambient chatter of the Twitosphere. Or the Dentosphere - I used the Free identi.ca (now Status Net) replacement for the proprietary Twitter service.

Earlier in 2009 I'd abandoned a couple of projects to simulate a parodic toy artworld visually or textually, but the simplicity, programmability, and social context of microblogging services allowed me to plan out what looked like an achievable version. An artist bot would microblog descriptions of possible artworks, a curator would blog references to those that made it into a show, a critic would blog evaluations of those works, and a collector bot would buy any that the critic identified as masterpieces. This would provide the artist with feedback to modify its aesthetic.

The curator and the feedback loop haven't been implemented (yet), but the artist/critic/collector social network are a perfect toy embodiment of precisely how the artworld doesn't work. They all run on the same server but the critic and the collector really do parse the output that they seem to. And they are running constantly, although I have to restart them when they crash or the server is restarted without my knowledge.

The Cybernetic Artworld is satire, both of art criticism and academia that takes the artworld's self-image seriously and of the still current idea of relational art. It's socialised aesthetic form, aestheticised social form. It's a bit of fun. But it works, it's aesthetically and conceptually rewarding, and it has critical content.

In January the sources for Goto 10's "Floss+Art" book were released, which feature the expanded version of my essay "Open Source Art Again".

In March I went to the FSF's "Libre Planet" conference, which was great. Thanks to Mako for the sofa!

In December I went to Goto 10's "Make Art" conference to talk about Foocorp's libre.fm project, which went live in April.

Furtherfield continued to publish my reviews. I find writing reviews very hard, and it's always good when I get feedback, I think my most popular review on that basis was the one of Pall Thayer's excellent Microcodes.

CIAC published some different reviews, which gave me a good chance to review work I wouldn't have had a chance to otherwise.

And I finished a good number of projects, including The Cybernetic Artworld, The Colour Of News, The Colour Of, the code for the Demo Graphic Replicators, and Random Aesthetics.

A big thank you to everyone whose material and moral support made this all possible. I feel very lucky to have got to do so much good stuff this year. I hope to do even more next year.

Donate your old laptops to help Furtherfield with the Zero Dollar Laptop project!

In order to become a Zero Dollar Laptop your old laptop will need:-

• a working screen
• processor-a minumum 1GHz Pentium 3, Athlon, Celeron.
• 256 (but more ideally 512) ram
• wireless card would be helpful

See here for more information - http://www.furtherfield.org/zerodollarlaptop.php

I've hopefully restored the formatting on the older entries in this blog.

Comment formatting couldn't be recovered this time, hopefully I'll be able to get it back at some point in the future.