[spectre] exh. control panels. programming as an artistic practice, dortmund

[Andreas Broeckmann]

dear jaromil,

your response to the exhibition announcement is very passionate but i am
not sure what you are getting at, or what your conception of art is - what
you seem to be defending is a notion of *craft*, of masterly handling of
code, while your statements about software art only affirm what it is not.

>that a software is working is not enough to make it art.
>
>and the importance of the "social value it gets into the communication
>environment" (quoting Matthew Fuller) it's, yes!, something important,
>but still it's not enough to call it art.

>i don't believe software art is about making jokes of a working system,
>i'm not resigned to be a juggling joker in the stylish court of smiling
>academics when i think about making software art, i'm not resigned to
>the playful experience.

>erreto! give software art its dignity!

absolutely. we have been investigating this question of what software art
can or might be since transmediale.01, and we probably all see lots of
initiatives and events springing up in the last couple of years that deal
with the culture and politics of code, something that has earlier occurred
in free software circles and some art&technology niches, but not in the
more exposed field where it is now.

i think that this attention to software will have to remain superficial in
a certain way if we want to communicate it to a wider audience; the beauty
of a particular piece of code, the artfulness or not of mclean's
forkbomb.pl - you can leave this to the hard-coders, or to the court of
academics, or you can try to push it out into the world and, with some
luck, get people to think about their computers and standard software as
something more than their 'fate'. one way to do this is to show artworks
that make the computer do strange of funny things. when you go into the
field of art, it is never a matter of 'working' or 'not working', but a
different, aesthetic productivity which can reach deep into the guts of the
machine, or deep into the guts of people's minds and bodies.

i think of the discussions around software art as a way to de-mystify
software as something that is as limited and as 'given' as a toaster or the
TV set that you buy in your local shop; i think that we would probably
agree that it is necessary to make people realise that their computer is a
multi-valent machine that can be used for many purposes, and that can,
above all, be broken open and appropriated. some people do this by opening
the running of code to the discourse around art.

best regards,

-a