prehysteries of new media

celebrating the 100th international women's day - 100 female artists and digital media

2011-03-09T00:40:00.003+01:00

(i originally posted this list on p/art//icles before)

This project was done on March 8th, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the International Women's Day. Throughout the day I had been posting female artists working in the field of New Media Art to twitter and facebook. The goal was to post 100 artists for the 100th anniversary.

a short notice:
A few of the artists included might or might not be women. After 100 years of the celebration of International Women's Day what it means to be female has to be expanded and embrace gender rather than sex.

This list of 100+ female media artists is necessarily incomplete, please add more artists in the comments field! (the focus here is on artists + digital media; curators, theoreticians,... will be the focus of a separate project)
There is absolutely no intended order in this list. The entries on top were the last ones, the entries on the bottom of the list the starting points.

enjoy!

START: 11.12 am
END: 11:08 pm
March 8th, 2011

nina wenhart • 11:08 PM • Twitter
ninjafx: #IWD11 female artists & digital media: via @notendo: #IWD11 - Tina Frank + Billy Roisz + Tali Hinkis + Kaffe Matthews + Chicks On Speed

nina wenhart • 10:59 PM • Twitter
ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: compilation of 100 artists for #IWD's 100th birthday - completed (though there are many more...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Brenda Laurel #virtualreality #interactiveart http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/

ninjafx: #IWD11 these were 99 now, if i counted right

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sabrina Raaf #interactiveart http://www.raaf.org/about.php

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Cynthia Breazeal #robotics #roboticsqueen http://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Pattie Maes #netart #interactiveart http://web.media.mit.edu/~pattie/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Francoise Gamma #digitalgraphics #animatedgifs #netart http://francoisegamma.computersclub.org/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Krystal South #videoart #webart http://www.krystalsouth.com/

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & digital media: RT @nullsleep: (part 2) @PrintedCircuit Raquel Meyers, Lesley Flanigan, Marina Zurkow

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & digital media: RT @nullsleep: (part 1) @artfagcity @kiostark @SimonaLodi

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sabrina Ratte #videoart vimeo.com/sabrinaratte

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Laura Parnes #videoart www.lauraparnes.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Camilla Padgitt-Coles #VJ #electronicmusic vimeo.com/ivymeadows

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Alexandria McCrosky #digitalgraphics http://alexandriamccrosky.computersclub.org/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Aurora Halal #videoartist #electronicmusic http://www.aurorahalal.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Alexandra Gorczynski #videoart http://hologramcity.blogspot.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Bea Fremderman & Jeanette Hayes #netart http://justshutty.tumblr.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Alice Cohen #videoart http://vimeo.com/user1658854/videos

ninjafx: #IWD11 - @look_im_lucid (lindsay howard) just sent a great list with female media artists, so the following posts are all lindsay's input

ninjafx: RT @nullsleep: @ninjafx here are some more • @petcortright @BiellaColeman @LaurelHalo @juliaxgulia Alexandra Gorczynski, Laura Brothers,...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: via @chrissugrue (part 2) Simone Jones, Clara Boj, Geraldine Juarez, Becky Stern, Jackee Steck

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: via @chrissugrue (part 1) Karolina Sobecka, Addie Wagenknech, Kaho Abe, Grisha Coleman

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Laurel Halo #digitalgraphics #netart http://www.laurelhalo.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Petra Cortright #netart #digitalgraphics http://petracortright.com/ @petcortright

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Rachelle Viader-Knowles #interactiveart http://uregina.ca/rvk/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sabine Seymour #wearabletechnology http://www.fashionabletechnology.org/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Margarita Benitez #wearabletechnology http://margaritabenitez.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sage Keeler #netart #digitalgraphics http://fourmegabytememorylane.blogspot.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Jennifer Chan #videoart #digitalgraphics http://www.jennifer-chan.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 these were about 60+ female media artists now, for the 100th birthday 100 artists would be great. any more suggestions from anyone?

ninjafx: RT @robmyers: @ninjafx: Tessa Elliot http://surgerydar.co.uk/ & Tracey Matthieson http://ur1.ca/3fcc5 got me into digital art && are...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Ellen Sandor #mixedmedia http://www.artn.com/Ellen_Sandor

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Claudia Hart #3dcomputergraphics #artgames http://www.claudiahart.com

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Nina Valkanova #programmer #interactiveart http://ninavalkanova.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Gabi Kepplinger of Stadtwerkstatt #netart #networkedart #artinpublicspace...http://www.stwst.at/index.php?m=6&sm=1&sid=51

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Eva Grubinger #netart #networkedart http://www.evagrubinger.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Thecla Schiphorst #interactiveart #performance http://www.sfu.ca/~tschipho/

ninjafx: RT @tw1tt3rart: #INTERNATIONALWOMENSDAY ♀╭━╮╱╭━╮╱╭━╮╱╭━╮♀ ♀┃╱┃╱┃╱┃╱┃╱┃╱┃╱┃♀ ♀╰┳╯╱╰┳╯╱╰┳╯╱╰┳╯♀ ♀━╋━╱━╋━╱━╋━╱━╋━♀ ♀╱┃╱╱╱┃╱╱╱┃╱╱╱┃╱♀...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Lindsay Howard #netart #curating #digitalgraphics http://ow.ly/4ajmI http://ow.ly/4ajn0...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sara Ludy #netart #digitalgraphics #videoart http://www.saraludy.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Eva Wohlgemuth, Kathy Rae Huffman #netart http://ow.ly/4aj4S + http://ow.ly/4aj6s

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green #netart #radioart #pioneers http://turbulence.org/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Tina Auer of Time's Up #interactiveart www.timesup.org

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Jessica Westbrook #interactiveart #videoart http://www.jessicawestbrook.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Faith Wilding #cyberfeminism #performanceart http://faithwilding.refugia.net/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Tiffany Holmes #interactiveart http://tiffanyholmes.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Marta de Menezes #bioart http://www.martademenezes.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Manu Luksch #cctv #hacktivism #videoart http://www.manuluksch.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Isabella Bordoni #electronicmusic http://www.ib-arts.org/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Heidi Grundmann #artradio #radioart http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/grundmannbio.html

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Elisa Rose of Station Rose #netart #electronicmusic http://www.stationrose.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Agnese Trocchi #netart #videoart http://www.newmacchina.info/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female m artists & digital media: Jill Scott #interactiveart #videoart #body http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/scott/biography/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Melinda Rackham #netart http://www.subtle.net/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Ruth Catlow #netart #artinpublicspace @furtherfield http://ow.ly/4agBQ

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Margarethe Jahrmann "nybble engine toolZ" #gameart http://www.climax.at/nybble-engine/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Monica Panzarino #interactiveart #videoart http://www.monicapanzarino.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Melissa Barron #hacking #obsoletemedia www.melissabarron.net @m3li554

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Dain Oh #animatedgif #netart @lunarbaedeker http://ittakestwotostereo.blogspot.com

ninjafx: ... heroines!

ninjafx: #IWD11 exceptionally wonderful media artists, pre-digital: Steina Vasulka, Charlotte Moorman, Valie Export, Dara Birnbaum - you're...

ninjafx: RT @yokoono: Total communication equals peace. And it will eliminate ignorance, apathy and hatred. #IWD11

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Tamiko Thiel #augmentedreality #virtualreality #AR #VR http://ow.ly/4a84U

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Naoko Tosa, f.e. "Talking to Neurobaby" #interactiveart #robotics http://ow.ly/4a7Xr

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Ulrike Gabriel, f.e. "terrain 01" #robotics #artificialintelligence #interactiveart...http://vimeo.com/7723230

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Natasha Vita-More #transhumanism http://www.natasha.cc/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Agnes Hegedüs, f.e. "handsight" #interactiveart http://csw.art.pl/new/99/7e_agndl.html

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Christina Kubisch #electronicmusic http://www.christinakubisch.de/index_en.htm

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Daniela Alina Plewe, f.e. "Ultima Ratio" #interactive art http://ow.ly/4a74X

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Sandra Rosas Ridolfi, Nina Wenhart of h3x3n #netart #interactiveart www.h3x3n.net http://sandraridolfi.com/ ninawenhart-cv.blogspot.com

ninawenhart-cv.blogspot.com
ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Ushi Reiter #electronicmusic #interactiveart http://www.servus.at/blower

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Hannah Perner-Wilson #interactiveart http://plusea.at

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Mika Satomi #interactiveart http://nerding.at

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Marie Sester #interactiveart http://www.sester.net/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Mendi Obadike #netart #conceptualmusic http://www.blacknetart.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Jennifer McCoy #interactiveart http://www.mccoyspace.com/

ninjafx: hoppsa, my #IDW11 posts should of course also be #IWD11

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Lynn Hershman Leeson f.e. "America's Finest", "Conceiving Ada" #interactiveart #netart #videoart...http://www.lynnhershman.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Vera Molnar "machine imaginaire", part 2: #generativeart #pioneer #granddame #alltimefavorite...http://www.veramolnar.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Vera Molnar "machine imaginaire", her imaginative comp to produce permutations #generativeart...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Victoria Vesna #interactiveart http://victoriavesna.com

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Annie Abrahams #netart #networkedart http://www.bram.org/info/aa.htm

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Laura Beloff #wearbletechnology #networkedart http://ow.ly/4a4Ow

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Christa Sommerer, f.e. "interactive plant growing" #interactiveart http://ow.ly/4a4jj

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Lisa Jevbratt #netart #dataviz #biofeedback http://jevbratt.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Sherrie Rabinowitz, Kit Galloway "Hole in Space", "Electronic Café" #telematicart #netart...http://www.ecafe.com/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Beatriz da Costa #tacticalmedia #hacktivism #bioart http://ow.ly/4a3wl

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Natalie Bookchin #netart http://bookchin.net/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Honor Harger of radioqualia #netradio #opensource http://www.radioqualia.net/ @honorharger

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Chris Sugrue, part of the eyewriter team #interactiveart #programmer http://csugrue.com/...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Camille Utterback "textrain" #interactiveart http://camilleutterback.com/

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & media art collectives: Monika Fleischmann #interactiveart #mediaartdatabase http://ow.ly/4a2ua www.netzspannung.org

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artist collectives & digital media: Old Boys Network #netart #cyberfeminism http://www.obn.org

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists collectives & digital media: VNS Matrix "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century" #netart #cyberfeminism...http://lx.sysx.org/vnsmatrix.html

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Rachel Baker #netart #hacktivism http://ow.ly/4a2d0

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Natalie Jeremijenko #netart #hacktivism http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Amy Alexander #netart #softwareart http://amy-alexander.com/ @uebergeek

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Young-Hae Chang of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES #netart http://www.yhchang.com

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & media art collectives: Olga Goriunova #softwareart #netart http://readme.runme.org/ http://runme.org

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Eva Mattes of 0100101110101101 #netart #gameart http://www.0100101110101101.org/blog/

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art collectives: Joan Heemskerk of #JODI #netart #gameart #glitchart http://jodi.org

ninjafx: lol RT @markrhancock: Happy Int Women's Day. You are all bloody amazing. I love women!

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art: Clara Rockmore #electronicmusic #theremin #pioneer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Rockmore

ninjafx: RT @juspar: Inspirational women #iwd: Elizabeth Grosz, nature, sex, aesthetics #academicIWD #IWD11

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & digital media: Mary Flanagan #gameart http://ow.ly/49X9a

ninjafx: #IDW11 - female artists & digital media: Mez Breeze #netart #mezangelle http://ow.ly/49WXU http://ow.ly/49WZB @netwurker !u r pure...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Anne-Marie Schleiner #gameart #hacking #opensource http://www.opensorcery.net

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media: Char Davies "Osmose" #virtualreality http://ow.ly/49WEp

ninjafx: RT @franckancel RT @bookmarks_books: Women supporters of the Paris Commune jailed in 1871 http://bit.ly/e1D8HN #IWD11

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art: Maryanne Amacher #electronicmusic http://ow.ly/49WmF

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art: Eliane Radigue, 1st woman to receive golden nica @ prix ars in dig.musics, 2006 #electronicmusic...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliane_Radigue

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art: Daphne Oram #electronicmusic http://ow.ly/49Wgb

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & media art: Ursula Bogner #electronicmusic http://ow.ly/49Wdt

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists + media art: Delia Derbyshire #electronicmusic #pioneer http://ow.ly/49Wc7

ninjafx: RT @katecrawford: Hedy Lamarr was my kinda gal: Hollywood star, jewel thief, scientist, and co-inventor of a precursor to wifi....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

ninjafx: thx igor! RT @intima: #IWD11 follow/check @ninjafx: tweets with links to radical female digital media artists→ http://twitter.com/#!/ninjafx

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media 05: Rosa Menkman #softwareart #glitchart #videoart #obsoletemedia @r0o0s http://ow.ly/49VRC

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media 04: Olia Lialina "my boyfriend came back from the war" #netart @GIFmodel http://ow.ly/49VLz...

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media 03: netochka nezvanova #NN #netart #softwareart #nato.0+55+3d #nebula.m81 http://ow.ly/49VDq

ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media 02: Cornelia Sollfrank "female extension" #netart #hacking http://www.artwarez.org/femext/

11:12am via HootSuite
ninjafx: #IWD11 - female artists & digital media 01: LIA #generativeart #netart @liasomething http://www.liaworks.com/

>> Glitch. Olga Goriunova and Alexej Shulgin

2011-01-18T14:02:00.001+01:00

from: Matthew Fuller, "Software Studies"
text mirrored from: http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/softwarestudies.pdf

This term is usually identified as jargon, used in electronic industries and
services, among programmers, circuit- bending practitioners, gamers, media
artists, and designers. In electrical systems, a glitch is a short- lived error in a
system or machine. A glitch appears as a defect (a voltage- change or signal of
the wrong duration—a change of input) in an electrical circuit. Thus, a glitch
is a short- term deviation from a correct value and as such the term can also describe
hardware malfunctions. The outcome of a glitch is not predictable.
When applied to software, the meaning of glitch is slightly altered. A
glitch is an unpredictable change in the system’s behavior, when something
obviously goes wrong.

Glitch is often used as a synonym for bug; but not for error. An error might
produce a glitch but might not lead to a perceivable malfunction of a system.
Errors in software are usually structured as: syntax errors (grammatical errors
in a program), logic errors (error in an algorithm), and exception errors (arising
from unexpected conditions and events).
Glitches have become an integral part of computer culture and some phenomena
are perceived as glitches although they are not glitches in technical
terms. Artifacts that look like glitches do not always result from an error. What
users might perceive as “glitchy” can arise from a normally working function of
a program. Sometimes these might originate from technical limitations, such as
low image- processing speed or low bandwidth when displaying video. For example,
the codecs of some video- conferencing software, such as CU- Seeme,1 visibly
“pixelize” the image, allowing the compression of parts of the images that
remain static over different frames when, for instance, the transfer speed drops.
To comply with the customary usage of “glitch” we propose to think of
glitches as resulting from error, though in reality it might be diffi cult or impossible
to distinguish whether the particular glitch is planned or results from
a problem. To understand the roles glitches play in culture, knowing their origin
is not of primary importance. Understanding glitches as erroneous brings
more to a comprehension of their role than trying to give a clear defi nition that
would include or subordinate encoded glitches and glitches as malfunctions.
Glitches are usually regarded as marginal. In reality, glitches can be
claimed to be a manifestation of genuine software aesthetics. Let us look at
machine aesthetics as formed by functionality and dysfunctionality, and then
proceed to the concept of glitches as computing’s aesthetic core, as marks
of (dys)functions, (re)actions and (e)motions that are worked out in humancomputer
assemblages.
Computers do not have a recognizable or signifi cant aesthetic that possesses
some kind of authenticity and completeness. It is commonplace that the aesthetics
of software are largely adopted from other spheres, media, and conventions.
Thus, the desktop is a metaphor for a writing table, icons descend from
labels or images of objects, while the command line interface is inherited from
telegraph, teletype, and typewriter.
The aesthetics of computers that developed over a few decades from the
early 1950s to the early 1980s, when they were fi rst introduced to the public
and on to the current time (consisting of dynamic menus, mouse, pointer,
direct manipulation of objects on the screen, buttons, system sounds, human computer interaction models) are, in our opinion, not rich and self- suffi cient
enough to be called the aesthetic of the computer.
On top of that the current aesthetic of software is not complete; it does
not work very well as it does not contribute enough to the computer’s userfriendliness.
Besides, it is a widely acknowledged problem that the customary
information design principles of arranging computer data, derived from earlier
conventions (such as the treelike folder structure), result in users having
problem, with data archiving and the memorization of document names and
locations.
Historically, the shape, style, and decoration of every new technology has
been introduced in a manner owing much to the aesthetics and thinking customary
of the time. Thus, when mechanism had not yet replaced naturalism as
means of framing reality, Lewis Mumford argues, mechanisms were introduced
with organic symbols. For instance, a typical eighteenth century automaton, “the
clockwork Venus,” consisted of a female mannequin resting on top of a clockwork
mechanism.2 As technology developed further, some genuine machine
aesthetics were born, primarily derived from machine functionality. And it was
their functionality that some avant- garde movements of the twentieth century
admired in the machine. For instance, among the Russian avant- garde movements
of the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g., Cubo- Futurism, Abstractionism,
Rayonism, Suprematism) artists such as Mayakovsky, Gontcharova,
Kandinsky, Larionov, and Malevich poeticized new machines for their speed,
energy, and dynamics. The methods they used to depict movement, light,
power, and speed could be regarded aesthetically as grandparents of some of
today’s glitches (certain correlation of color mass; unlimited diversity of colors,
lines and forms; repeating geometrical structures, fi gures, lines, dots, etc.).
Rationalism and the precision of technical creation inspired many. Thus,
Meyerhold writes: “Arts should be based on scientifi c grounds.”3 Russian constructivists
such as Tatlin established a compositional organization based on
the kinetics of simple objects and complex ideas of movement—rotating inner
mechanisms and open structure, using “real” materials—all intended to
function for utilitarian use. Punin writes of Tatlin’s Tower: “Beneath our eyes
there is being solved the most complex problem of culture: utilitarian form
becomes pure creative form.”4
Functional machines, primarily built by engineers, established strong aesthetic
principles that have defi ned technological design for years. Functional
elements are later used as nonfunctional design elements that are appreciated as “beautiful” by users not least due to the cultural memory of their origin. For
instance, the curved part of the wing over the tire of some car models reproduces
the guards used in horse- driven vehicles and early automobiles to protect
users and vehicle from dust and to affi x lights onto. It does not carry any
advance in function, but is used in automobile design as a recognizable and
nostalgic element.
Today, the functionality of the computer is concealed inside the gray / white /
beige box that covers the cards, slots, motherboard, and wires. In modding5
these parts are reimagined as elements of visual richness that convey a symbolism.
Hardware elements are aestheticized: Users might install neon lights,
weird jumbo fans and colorful wires into a transparent computer case or even
build an entirely new one from scratch. Electronic boards jutting out at 90
degree angles and architectures of twisted wire are widely used, as in cinema
and design, to represent technical substances.
By contrast, the way data is presented on a hard drive is not human- readable.
It is stored in different segments of the disk and reassembled each time the
documents are retrieved according to a plan kept as a separate fi le. Software
functionality here is invisible and an interface is needed to use the machine.
Modern software almost always conceals its functionality behind the window.
It provides us instead with images such as a page fl ying from one folder to another,
an hourglass, or that of a gray line gradually being fi lled with color.
There are moments in the history of computer technology that are rich in
computer functionality producing distinct aesthetics. At such times, computer
functionality reveals itself through technological limitations. Bottlenecks, such
as processor speed, screen resolution, color depth, or network bandwidth—
4- bit, 8- bit music, 16- color pixelized visuals, slow rendering, compressed image
and video with artifacts—create an authentic computer aesthetics, that is,
the aesthetics of low- tech today.
There are vast contemporary 8- bit music communities (such as Micromusic
.net), based entirely on producing music on emulators or surviving models of
the early home computers of the 1980s, such as Atari or Commodore. Alongside
producing sine waves, the sound chips of such computers attempted to
simulate preexisting musical reality: guitar, percussion, piano. Imperfect and
restricted, the chips could only produce idiosyncratic, funny and easy to recognize
sounds which were far from the originals. Scarcity of means encouraged
a special aesthetics of musical low- tech: of coolness, romanticism and imperfection.
People making 8- bit music nowadays relate back to their childhoods’ favorite toys, memories that are shared by many people. Returning to a genuine
computer aesthetics of obsolete technology is not a question of individual
choice, but has the quality of a communal, social decision.
Functionality, as a characteristic of established machine aesthetics is always
chased by dysfunctionality (if not preceded by it). Functional machines,
robots, mechanized people (from Judaism’s Golem,6 Frankenstein’s monster7)
to the rebellious computers of the twentieth century) are interpreted as alien
to human nature, sooner or later becoming “evil” as they stop functioning
correctly. Thus, the dysfunctional mind, conduct, and vision become human,
compelling, sincere, meaningful, revelatory. As aesthetic principles, chance,
unplanned action, and uncommon behaviors were already central to European
and Russian literature of the nineteenth century in the work of writers such as
Balzac, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky.
In the technological era, society became organized according to the logic of
machines, conveyor belt principles, “rationally” based discrimination theories,
and war technology, with an increase in fear, frustration, refusal, and protest.
As a response, errors, inconsistencies of vision, of method, and of behavior become
popular modernist artistic methods used in Dadaism, Surrealism, and
other art movements. One of Surrealism’s declared predecessors, the Comte
de Lautréamont, provided us with the lasting phrase that something could be
as “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on
a dissection table.”8 The introduction of chance, “hasard,” (fr.), subconsciousness,
and irrationality into art and life was seen as being both opposed to and
deeply embedded in rationality and functionality.
Dysfunctional machines are not only those that are broken (images and
fi gures of crashed cars and other mass produced imperfections fi gure in the
aesthetics of Fluxus and Pop Art); they are also those that do not comply with
the general logic of machines, by acting irrationally and sometimes even turning
into humans. Thus, at the end of the Soviet movie Adventures of Electronic
Boy (1977), a robotic boy starts crying and this emotion symbolizes that he has
become human.
A glitch is a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the
customary, omnipresent, and alien computer aesthetics. A glitch is a mess that
is a moment, a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure, whether it is
a mechanism of data compression or HTML code. Although a glitch does not
reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality
of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.

Glitches are produced by error and are usually not intended by humans.
As a not- entirely human- produced reality, its elements are not one- hundred
percent compatible with customary human logic, visual, sound, or behavioral
conventions of organizing and acting in space. Aesthetically some glitches
might inherit from avant- garde currents, but are not directly a product of the
latter (fi gure 8). Avant- garde artists inspired or disgusted by technology and
its societal infl uence have created a range of artistic responses, the aesthetics of
which today’s glitches strangely seem to comply with. A glitch reminds us of
our cultural experience at the same time as developing it by suggesting new
aesthetic forms.
A glitch is stunning. It appears as a temporary replacement of some boring
conventional surface; as a crazy and dangerous momentum (Will the computer
come back to “normal”? Will data be lost?) that breaks the expected fl ow. A
glitch is the loss of control. When the computer does the unexpected and goes
beyond the borders of the commonplace, changes the context, acts as if it is not
logical but profoundly irrational, behaves not in the way technology should, it releases the tension and hatred of the user toward an ever- functional but
uncomfortable machine.
Error sets free the irrational potential and works out the fundamental concepts and
forces that bind people and machines. An error [is] a sign of the absence of an ideal
functionality, whether it be understood in the technical, social or economic sense.9
As with every new aesthetic form, glitches are compelling for artists and
designers as well as regular users. Glitches are an important realm in electronic
and digital arts. Some artists focus on fi nding, saving, developing, and
conceptualizing glitches, and glitches form entire currents in sonic arts and creative
music making. For example, the Dutch- Belgian group Jodi are known
for their attention to all kinds of computer visual manifestations that go beyond
well- known interfaces. It’s enough only to look at their web- page http: //
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org to get a sense of their style (fi gure 9). On http: // text
.jodi.org a user browses through an endless sequence of pages that are obviously
of computer origin, and appear to be both meaningless and fascinatingly
beautiful.
Video gamers practice glitching (exploiting bugs in games).10 Game modifi
cations by Jodi, such as Untitled Game,11 as well as by other artists, such as
Joan Leandre’s (Retroyou) R / C and NostalG12 are achieved by altering parts
of the code of existing games (fi gure 10). The resulting games range from absurd
environments in which cars can be driven, but with a distinct tendency
to sometimes fl y into outer space, to messy visual environments one can hardly
navigate, but which reveal dazzling digital aesthetic qualities.
In his aPpRoPiRaTe! (fi gure 11) Sven Koenig exploits a bug found in a video
player that makes a video compression algorithm display itself.13 By deleting
or modifying key frames (an encoded movie does not contain all full frames but
a few key frames, the rest of the frames are saved as differences between key
frames) he manages to modify the entire fi lm without much effort. As a result we get excitingly distorted yet recognizable variants of videos popular in fi le
exchange networks, where such algorithms are widely used. And, of course,
with this much work already done for them in advance, we’ll see the power of
the new aesthetics of the glitch used in commercial products very soon.
Notes
1. Traces of CU- SeeMe can be found through http: // archive.org by searching for http: //
cu- seeme.com.
2. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 52–55.
3. Vsevolod Meyerhold, “Artist of the Future,” in Hermitage, no. 6, 10.
4. Nikolay Punin, The Memorial to the Third International, 5.
5. See “case modifi cation” in Wikipedia: http:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Case_modifi cation/ .
6. For an excellent account of Golem, see: http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Golem / .
7. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
8. Lautréamont, Les chants de Maldoror, Russian edition, 55.
9. Pit Schultz, “Jodi as a Software Culture.” in Tilman Baumgarten, ed. Install.exe,
Christoph Merian Verlag.
10. See “glitch” in Wikipedia: http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Glitch / .
11. JODI, http: // wwwwwwwww.jodi.org / .
12. Joan Leandre (Retroyou), R / C and NostalG, http: // www.retroyou.org / and http: //
runme.org / project / +SOFTSFRAGILE / .
13. Sven Koenig, aPpRoPiRaTe!, http: // popmodernism.org / appropirate / .

>> SPACEWAR, Stewart Brand, 1972

2010-08-20T07:38:00.002+02:00

published in Rolling Stone Magazine,
mirrored from http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

S P A C E W A R

Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums

by Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand, 33, is a graduate of Standford (biology).
From 1968 to 1971 he edited the Whole Earth Catalog.

The first "Intergalactic spacewar olympics" will be held here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 hours. First prize will be a year's subscription to "Rolling Stone". The gala event will be reported by Stone Sports reporter Stewart Brand & photograhed by Annie Liebowitz. Free Beer!

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It's way off the track of the "Computers - Threat or menace? school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.

The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That's the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer. AI's Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen which says only:

THIS CONSOLE AVAILABLE.
He logs in on the keyboard with his initials: Click clickclickclick click.
L1,REG
CSD FALL PICNIC. SATURDAY 11 AM IN FLOOD PARK . . .
He interrupts further announcements, including one about the "First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics" at 8 PM, with: CLick ("run") clickclickclick ("Space War Ralph") click ("do it")

R SWR.

WELCOME TO SPACEWAR.
HOW MANY SHIPS? MAXIMUM IS 5.

Click: 5 (Five players. This is for the first familiarization battles in the Spacewar Olympics, initiated by me and sponsored (beer & prizes) by Rolling Stone. Friends, I won't be able to explain every computer-technical term that comes by. Fortunately you don't need them to get the gist of what's happening.)


KEYBOARD BUTTONS? (ELSE REGULAR). TYPE Y OR N.

"Yes" Click Y


THE STANDARD GAME IS:

1 CONSOLE, 2 TORPEDO TUBES, (NORMAL) SCORING, NO PARTIAL DAMAGE,
NO HYPERSPACE, KILLER SUN, SHIPS START IN STANDARD POSITIONS.
TYPE Y TO GET A STANDARD GAME.


Ralph wants other features. "No."

Click: N

HOW MANY SPACE MINES DO YOU WANT?
CHOOSE FROM ZERO TO 4.


Click: 4

PARTIAL DAMAGE?

Click: N

DISPLAY SCORES?

Click: Y

TWO TORPEDO TUBES?

Click: N

RANDOM STARTING POSITIONS?

Click: Y

Immediately the screen goes dark and then displays: Five different space ships, each with a dot indicating torpedo tubes are loaded, five scores, each at zero, a convincing starfield, and four space mines orbiting around a central sun, toward which the spaceships are starting to fall at a correctly accelerating rate.

Players seize the five sets of control buttons, find their spaceship persona on the screen, and simultaneously turn and fire toward any nearby still-help-less spaceships, hit the thrust button to initiate orbit before being slurped by the killer sun, and evade or shoot down any incoming enemy torpedoes or orbiting mines. After two torpedoee are fired, each ship has a three second unarmed "reloading" time. Fired torpedoes last nine seconds and then disappear.

As kills are made the scores start to change +1 for a successful kill, -1 for being killed, +1 for being lone survivor of a battle. Personalities begin to establish themselves in the maneuvering spaceahips: The pilot of the ship called Pointy Fins is a dead asot but panics easily in cross fire. Roundback tries to avoid early dueling and routinely fires two torpedoes "around the universe" (off the screen, so they reappear lethally unexpected from the opposite side). Birdie drives for the sun and a fast orbit, has excellent agility in sensing and facing toward hazard. Funny Fins shouts a lot, singling out individual opponents. Flatback is silent and maintains an uncanny filed-sense of the whole battlesky, impervious to surprise attack.

A game is over when only one or no survivors are displayed. The screen then blanks out, counts down 5-4-3-2-1, and redisplays a new battle with ships at new random positions equidistant from the sun and showing scores accumulative from previous games. A spaceship that is killed early in a battle will reincarnate after 16 seconds and rejoin the fray, so that a single battle may last up to five minutes with a weak player perishing several times in it.

The twenty or so raucous competitors in the Spacewar Olympics quickly organize three events: Five-Player Free-For-ALL, Team Competition (two against two), and Singles Competition. The executive officer of the AI Project, Les Earnest, who kindly OKed these Olympics and their visibility, is found to have no immediate function and is sent out for beer.

The setting and decor at AI is Modern Mad Scientist - long hallways and cubicles and large windowless rooms, brutal fluoresccnt light, enormous machines humming and clattering, robots on wheels, scurrying arcane technicians. And, also, posters and announcements against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, computer print-out photos of girlfriends, a hallway-long banner SOLVING TODAY'S PROBLEMS TOMORROW and signs on every door in Tolkien's elvish Feanorian script - the director's office is Imladris, the coffee room The Prancing Pony, the computer room Mordor. There's a lot of hair on those technicians, and nobody seems to be telling them where to scurry,

The games progress. A tape recorder kibitzes on the first round of Team Competition, four ships twisting, converging, evading, exploding:

Where am P. Where am I?
Clickclickclickclick
Agh! Clickclickclick clickclick
Glitch. Clickclick
OK, I won't shoot. Clickclickclick

Good work Tovar.
Revenge. Clickclick clickclick
Cease fire. Click
clickclick.

Ohhhhhh NO! You killed me, Tovar.

I'm sorry. Clickclickclick
Being purtners means never having to say you're
sorry. Clickclickclick

Get him! Get the mother
Clickclick-clickclickclick

Sacrifice. Clickclick click

Lemme get in orbit. Clickclick
8'ay to dodge. Click clickclickclick

Awshit. Get tough now.

Clickclickclick
The other guy was out of torps.
I knew it and waited till I got a good
shot. Clickclick.

A beaut. O lord. Clickclclick
I shot him but then I slurped.
Click click clickclick
Oooo!
We win! Tovar and REM!

Correct. Tovar and REM won the Team Competition (REM is how Robert E. Maas is known to the computer and thence to his friends). Bruce Baumgart, who by day builds sensing intelligence into a robot vehicle, won the Free-For-All with a powerhouse performance. And slim Tovar took the Singles.

Meanwhile, your photographer Annie, was tugged all over the lab to see the hand-eye rig, the number half-tone printer, various spectacular geometric display hacks, computer music programs, the color video image maker. . . . Four intense hours, much frenzy and skilled concerted action, a 15-ring circus in ten different directions, the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I've been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests . . . and really it's just a normal night at the AI Project, at any suitably hairy computer research project. Something basic ...

These are heads, most of them. Half or more of computer science is heads. But that's not it. The rest of the counterculture is laid low and back these days, showing none of this kind of zeal. What, then?

The Hackers

I'm guessing that Alan Kay at Xerox Research Center (more on them shortly) has a line on it, defining the standard Computer Bum: "About as straight as you'd expect hotrodders to look. It's that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship... They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around."

The hackers are the technicians of this science - "It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment." They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion. Fanatics with a potent new toy. A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what's possible.

A young science travels where the young take it. The wiser computer research directors have learned that not trusting their young programmers with major responsibility can lead immediately to no research. AI is one of perhaps several dozen computer research centers that are flourishing with their young, some of them with no more formal education than they got at the local Free School. I'm talking to Les Earnest, the gent who went for beer. He's tall, swarthy, has a black and white striped beard, looks like a Sufi athlete. He's telling me about what else people build here besides refinements of Spacewar. There's a speech recognition project. There's the hand-eye project, in which the computer is learning to see and visually correct its robot functions. There's work on symbolic computation and grammatical inference. Work with autistic children, "trying to get them to relate to computers first, and then later to people. This seems to be successful in part because many of these children think of themselves as machines. You can encourage them to interact in a game with the machine."

Another window on the interests of AI and of the hackers is a posted printout of the file of AI's system programs, some 250 elaborate routines available. Scanning" Hand Eye Monitor ... Go Game ... DPY Hack Broom Balancing ... Comparison Portion of Soup ... Retrieves Selected AP News Stories ... Display Hack ... Mad Doctor ... New TV Editor ... Fortune Cookie Program ... Another Display Hack ... Kalah Game ... Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Job Gone ... Paranoid-Model ... Pruning Program ... The Wonderful News Program ... Old Spacewar ... New Spacewar ... Send Everyone a Message ... Old Version of Daemon ... Tell Everyone the System Is Going Down ... Music Compiler Sort Of ... New Music Comppiler ...

A distinction exists between low rent and highrent computer research, between preoccupations of support group-(hackers) and of research group. The distinction blurs often. Les Earnest: "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between recreation and work, happily. We try to judge people not on how much time they waste but on what they accomplish over fairly long periods of time, like a half year to a year." He adds that Spacewar players "are more from the support groups than the research groups. The research groups tend to get their kicks out of research."

Spacewar is low-rent.

Spacewar

Low-rent ... but pervasive. Alan Kay: "The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer."

The first opportunity was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Electrical Engineering Department back in 1961-1962. The earliest mini-computer, Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-1, was installed in the kludge room with a cathode ray tube display hooked on. ("Kludge" - any lash-up often involving chewing gum, paper dips, scotch tape; it works if no one trips over a wire; unadaptable"" a working mess.) There it was that Steve Russell and his fellow hackers Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards introduced Spacewar to the world.

I phoned Russell at the sprawling old fabric mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, where Digital Equipment Corporation manufactures the most popular research and education computers on the market. Russell currently is a researcher for them working on man-machine interface problems - adapting computer nature to fit human nature. Back in 1962 he was a hacker, 23 or so, a math major two years out of Dartmouth working in the brand new field of computer science for John McCarthy at MIT.

His account of the invention of Spacewar is not only intriguing history, it's the most,sophisticated analysis of good game design I've ever run across - elegant work. But that's in retrospect; back then it was just kids staying up all night.

"We had this brand new PDP-l," Steve Russell recalls. "It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display, [There had been CRT displays before, but primarily in the Air Defense System.] Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships."

Naturally?

"I had just finished reading Doc Smith's Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers." "Doc" Smith: "The Boise leaped upon the Nevian, every weapon aflame. But, as Costigan had expected, Nerado's vessel was completely ready far any emergency. And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought. Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens." - Triplanetary (1948)

Steve Russell: "By picking a world which people weren't familiar with, we could alter a number of parameters of the world in the interests of making a good game and of making it possible to get it onto a computer. We made a great deal of compromises from some of our original grand plans in order to make it work well.

"One of the important things in Spacewar is the pace. It's relatively fast-paced, and that makes it an interesting game. It seems to be a reasonable compromise between action - pushing buttons - and thought. Thought does help you, and there are some tactical considerations, but just plain fast reflexes also help.

"It was quite interesting to fiddle with the parameters, which of course I had to do to get it to be a really good game. By changing the parameters you could change it anywhere from essentially just random, where it was pure luck, to something where skill and ex- experience counted above everything else. The normal choice is somewhere between those two. With Spacewar an experienced player can beat an amateur for maybe 20 to 50 games and then the amateur begins to win a little."

The pride of any hacker with a new program is its "features." Fresh forms of Spacewar with exotic new features proliferated. As Russell explains it, everything at MIT had priority over Spacewar, but it was an educational computer after all, and developing new programs (of Spacewar) was educational, and then those programs needed testing... The initial game of simply two spaceships and their torpedoes didn't last long.

Gravity was introduced. Then Peter Samson wrote in the starfield with a program called "Expensive Planetarium" (MIT's first text display had been called "Expensive Typewriter"). Russell: "Having a background was important to give some idea of range and so on. Our Spacewar did not have gravity affecting the torpedoes - our explanation was that they were photon bombs and that they weren't affected by gravity. Subsequent versions on newer computers have got enough compute time so that they can afford to use gravity for the torpedoes, and that makes it a more interesting game."

And then there came a - startling development called Hyperspace - when your situation got desperate you could push both turn buttons at once and go into hyperspace: disappear from the screen for a few seconds and then reappear at a random new position... maybe.

"Hyperspace was in within a month or so," says Russell. "It's a little controversial. Some people deplore it, and it's fairly common to play games without it.... It was of course vital to put in problems with hyperspace. You know, when you come back into normal space from hyperspace, there is initially a small energy-well which looks amazingly like a star; if a torpedo is shot into that energy well, lo and behold the ship blows up. There is also a certain probability of blowing up as you finally break out of hyperspace. Our explanation was that these were the Mark One hyperfield generators and they hadn't done really a thorough job of testing them - they had rushed them into the fleet. And unfortunately the energies that were being dissipated in

PETER DEUTSCH now at, Xerox ' Research Center, reminisces - about the first Spacewar: "The programming of the thing was a remarkable tour de forge, because the machine did not have a multiply or divide, The way that the outline of the spaceship was rotated was by compiling a special-purpose program. Nice programming trick... Spacewar was ' not an outgrowth of any work on computer-graphics, but it may have inspired - some of it. That's speculation"

Albert Kuhfeld, writing in July, 1971, Analog Magazine, reminisces, "The first few years of Spacewar at MIT were the best. The game was in a rough state, students were working their hearts out improving it, nd the faculty was nodding benignly as they watched. the students learning computer theory faster and more painlessly than they'd ever seen before... And a background of real-time interactive programming was being built up", that anybody in the school could draw on; one of the largest problem's in the development of the game was having . how to talk to a computer program and have it answer back."

Within weeks of its invention Spacewar was spreading across the country to other computer research centers, who began adding their own wrinkles.

There was a variation called Minnesota Hyperspace in which you kept your position but became invisible; however if you applied thrust, your rocket flame could be seen.... Score-keeping. Space mines, Partial damage - if hit in a fin you could not turn in that direction.

Then "2½-D" Spacewar, played on two consoles. Instead of being God viewing the whole battle, you're a mere pilot with a view put the front of your spaceship and the difficult task of finding your enemy. (Perspective could be compressed so that even though far away the other ship would be large enough to see.)

Adding incentive, MIT introduced an electric shock to go with the explosion of your ship. A promising future is seen for sound effects. And now a few commercial versions of Spacewar - 25 cents a game - are appearing in university coffee shops.

Steve Russell still dreams: "Something which I wanted to do is get some interesting sort of fleet action. There are some versions of Spacewar which allow two, three ships, but as far as I know no one has been sufficiently clever to set things up so there are ships with noticeably different characteristics that could fight in interesting combinations."

John Lilly (of dolphin, acid, and bio-computer fame) tells a story that IBM once forbade the playing of Spacewar by IBM researchers. After a few suddenly uncreative months of joyless research the ban was rescinded. Apparently, frivolous Spacewar had been the medium of important experiments. (In every computer-business story I've ever heard, IBM invariably plays the heavy.)

Les Earnest at AI confirms the moral. For instance, at his lab the ingenious device for handling interactive graphics on the time-shared computer is galled, "Spacewar Mode" in honor of its origin.

Surprisingly, there have been relatively few Spacewar-like games invented. The most elaborate is a "Snoopy and the Red Baron" game which involves flying,pour console like a biplane. But computer graphics as an area of research has mushroomed. The field is too wide and deep and engrossing for me to report here. It's an art form waiting for artists, a consciousness form waiting for mystics.

All right, one sample: the vision helmet designed by Ivan Sutherland at Harvard. The helmet covers the front of your face with special goggles that are tiny Co,puter-driven TV screens. They present you with a visual space in which you can move. The computer monitors where your head moves and alters what you see accordingly. In the projected reality you can look around, you can look behind you, you can move toward things and through them. You can furthermore change parameters. Your head goes forward a foot and in the vision you soar a hundred yards. Or you can travel in exaggerated relativistic space, so that if you lunge at something it bends away. Become a geometric point; become enormous; live out Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.

A R P A

The letters stand for Advanced Research Projects Agency, one of the rare success stories of Government action. Poetically enough it owes its origin to real spacewar. After Russia's Sputnik humiliated the US in the middle of the Fifties, America came back hard with the Mercury Program, John Glenn and all that, crash-funded through a new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense - ARPA.

When the US space program was moved out of the military to become NASA, ARPA was left with a lot of funding momentum and not much program. Into this vacuum stepped J.C.R. Licklider among others, with the suggestion that since the Defense Department was the world's largest user of computers, it would do well to support information-medium like computers.

So in 1963 a fraction of ARPA's budget, some $5-8 million, went into a program called IPT, Information Processing Techniques, under the initial direction of Licklider and then of a 26-year-old named Ivan Sutherland. Suth- erland, the developer of "Sketchpad" at MIT, gave the agency its bias toward interactive graphics and its commitment to "blue sky mode" re- search. The next director, Bob Taylor, then 32, doubled I PT's . budget (while ARPA's overall budget was shrinking) and administered a five-year golden age in computer research.

The beauty was, that being at the very top of the Defense Establishment, the agency had little Congressional scrutiny had little bureaucratic responsibility, able to take creative chances and protect long-term deep-goal projects. Alan Kay: "90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low. The basic ARPA idea is that you find good people and you give them a lot of money and then you step back. If they don't do good things in three years they get dropped - where 'good' is very much related to new or interesting."

Legends abound from early ARPA days, full of freedom and weirdness. Here's one of many from Project MAC (Multiple Access Computer) days - Alan Kay: "They had a thing on the PDP-l called 'The Unknown Glitch' ["Glitch" - a kink, a less-than-fatal but irritating fuck-up]. They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct octal, or in DDT, In the early days it was a paper-tape machine. It was painful to assemble stuff, so they never listed out the programs. The programs and stuff just lived in there, just raw seething octal code. And one of the guys wrote a program called 'The Unknown Glitch,' which at random intervals would wake up, print out I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, and then it would relocate itself somewhere else in core memory, set a clock interrupt, and go back to sleep. There was no way to find it."

One of the accomplishments of ARPA-funded research during this time was time-sharing, Time-sharing is a routing technique that allows a large number of users to sit down "on-line" with a. computer as if each were all alone with it. Naturally, timesharing was of no interest to computer manufacturers like IBM since it meant drastically morc efficient use of their hardware, and they were still a long way Project MAC vet ( Peter Deutsch inside the Xerox building: More than u hacker, in the opinion of a colleague, "although he has some of that style. He's a virtuoso."

The next (and current) director at ARPA-IPT was Larry Roberts, a brilliant researcher who had developed the first 3-D vision programs. His major project has been getting the ARPA Network up. ("Up" around computers means working, the opposite of "down" or crashed.) The dream for the Net was that researchers at widely separated facilities could share special resources, dip into each other's files, and even work on-line together on design problems too complex to solve alone.

At present some 20 major computer centers are linked on the two-year-old ARPA Net. Traffic on the Net has been very slow, due to delays and difficulties of translation between different computers and divergent projects. Use has recently begun to increase as researchers travel from center to center and want to keep in touch with home base, and as more tantalizing, sharable resources come available. How Net usage will evolve is uncertain. There's a curious mix of theoretical fascination and operational resistance around the scheme. The resistance may have something to do with reluctances about equipping a future Big Brother and his Central Computer. The fascination resides in the thorough rightness of computers as communications instruments, which implies some revolutions.

One popular new feature on the Net is AI's Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that's coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form).

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).

I asked Alan Kay if Spacewar had been played over the Net. He said it's possible. I asked if there'd been international Spacewar yet, and was told a story. "There's. a problem there of sending code groups, When Greenblatt's chess program reigned supreme, they tried to play one of. the Russian chess œ programs. Instead of doing it by mail or using an international phone call ' they decided to do it by amateur radio. i There's this federal statute against ' transmitting code groups of any kind,; including chess moves. It took a long time to straighten that out. There was eventual communication with the Russians through a ham link in Switzerland."

True hackers. Who won?

"Greenblatt's program won. It's called 'Mack Hack 6.' It was a Class C player, and has since been superseded by a couple of other programs." Poor Russia. Do they regret Sputnik and the dialectical forces it unleashed?

The Research Park

THE WESTERN POLE of the U.S. electronics research and manufacturing axis is the San Francisco Peninsula; the eastern end is Boston's Route 128. The tilt of talent is westward. The Shy Research Center (not their real name) is an idyll, a new building high on an oak-savannahed golden foothill in Stanford's industrial park in Palo Alto, California, a blue-skied shimmery threatless landscape. "Every time I think of that place I start to scratch my balls. It makes me nervous," argues dome and solar designer Steve Baer from dusty Albuquerque, recalling that most of the evil he knows has emitted from similar ivory towers.

Alan Kay, 32, child prodigy (National Quiz Kid at ten), former musician and artist, worked with Ivan Sutherland and Dave Evans at Utah, presently a researcher at Xerox. Alan shifts comfortably in his office bean-bag chair and appraises his colleagues. "This is really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all have track records and are used to dealing lightning with both hands."

Peter Deutsch, bearded and intent, 26, veteran of the early days at Project MAC, has served on every major front in computer science, now has a cubicle near Kay's at Xerox Research Center. Alan remarks on his neighbor, "Peter is in my opinion the world's greatest programmer. He's much more than a hacker, although he has some of that style. He's a virtuoso; his programs have very few mistakes. He has probably more written code running than anybody in the ARPA community."

But Peter doesn't work for ARPA any more. One who does, Smokey, at Stanford Research Institute Augmentation Research Center, tells Peter, "You get just a few more agates in that group and you'll have all the marbles."

The chief marble collector is - well, well - Bob Taylor. When he left the newly restricted ARPA he spent a year at Utah decompressing from the Pentagon and then went to Xerox and there continued his practice of finding and rewarding good men for doing pretty much whatever they considered important work. Freedom to explore in the company of talent is an irresistible lure. In two years Xerox had twenty of the best men around working. Toward what? Well, whatever.

I ask Bob Taylor about his position at Xerox. "It's not very sharply defined. You could call me a research planner." He's Texas born, trained in experimental psychology, soft-spoken. Where Alan Kay would summarize one of Taylor's papers with the statement "Economy of scale is one of the biggest frauds ever invented," Taylor will respond to a question about the economics of massive operations like huge computer complexes with a long look, a puff of pipe smoke, and a remark that "the benefits are less than claimed."

And that is the general bent of research at Xerox, soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.

In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console - affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to "fly" formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it's changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend's file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.

That's for grownups. Alan Kay is more interested in us kids He repudiates the manipulative arrogance of "Computer-Aided Instruction" and serves the dictum of Seymour Papert, Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?

Alan is designing a hand-held stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called "Dynabook." It's mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third and various cassette- loading slots, optional hook-up plugs, etc. His colleague Bill English describes the fantasy. thus:

"It stores a couple of million characters of text and does all the text handling for you - editing, viewing, scanning, things of that nature. It'll have a graphics capability which'll let you make sketches, make drawings. Alan wants to incorporate music in it so you can use it for composing. It has the Smalltalk language capability which lets people program their own things very easily. We want to interface them with a tinker-toy kind of thing. And of course it plays Spacewar."

The drawing capability is a program that Kay designed called "Paintbrush." Working with a stylus on the display screen, you reach up and select a shape of brush, then move the brush over and pick up a shade of half-tone-screen you like, then paint with it. If you make a mistake, paint it out with "white." The screen simultaneously displays the image you're working on and a one-third reduction of it, where the dot pattern becomes a shaded half-tone.

A Dynabook could link up with other Dynabooks, with library facilities, with the telephone, and it could go and hide where a child hides. Alan is determined to keep the cost below $500 so that school systems could provide Dynabooks free out of their textbook budgets. If Xerox Corporation decides to go with the concept, the Dynabooks could be available in two or three years, but that's up to Product Development, not Alan or the Research Center. Peter Deutsch comments: "Processors and memories are getting smaller and cheaper. Five years ago the idea of the Dynabook would have been a absolutely ridiculous. Now it merely seems difficult....

Immediately below left, chief marble collector Bob Taylor; and right, quiz kid emeritus Alan Kay. Below him, the Dynabook; the pocket calculator; the Bean-Bag Room. Center left, the author draws with the computer.

The emergence of computers into society at large has come from a completely different quarter than you'd expect, namely the small calculating machine manufacturers. The current ultimate step in that direction is the Hewlett-Packard Pocket Calculator. They sell for $400, and they're essentially a small computer with no program and very little storage. Wang Laboratories makes cal- . culators which are really computers in all but name - they're progra~ª~ble; they have lots of storage.... But still these things only reach thousands of people, not millions. They'll reach millions when computer power becomes like telephone power.... I think it's important to bring computing to the people." er a

Counter-computer

How mass use of computers might go is not even slightly known as yet, except for obviousus applications in the schools. One informative place to inquire is among the hackers, particularly at night when they're pursuing their own interests.

One night at a computer center (nameless) I wandered off from the Spacewar game to a clattering printout machine where a (nameless) young man with a trim beard was scanning columns of entries like, "Pam $1.59, Bud $14.75, Annie $2.66." He was an employee taking advantage of unbusy after hours time on the computer (computers are never turned off) to run his commune accounts.

"Money seems to be a very sensitive issue," he explained, "more sensitive than sex, even. People in the house who went on vacation for a week didn't want to be charged for the food during that time and so forth. It was taking me hours and hours every month to figure out people's house bills. Now it takes about a half hour a month. Every week I stick up a list on the refrigerator, and anyone who buys food or anything for the house writes it down on the list. I type all that into the computer, along with the mortgage payment and the phone bills and the gas bill. The House Bill Program goes around and divides up the common charges and adds in all the special charges and figures out exactly who owes who how much. Each person at the end of the month gets a bill plus a complete breakdown of what their money goes to"

What else goes on around here in moonlight mode? "A friend of mine has his recording tape library index on the computer. Everyone does their term papers and their theses on it. It'll justify margins, incorporate corrections, handle illustrations, paging, footnotes, headings, indexing.... Two years ago when we had the great faculty strike against the War, we rigged up a program that would type out a form letter to all your congressmen and type in your name and address.

"Bruce is working on an astrology program. You put in your birthplace and date, down to the minute, and it gives you all your aspects, your chart. You can get your progress chart too... One of the hackers is building a computer at home out of Army surplus parts, and he's using the facilities here to help his design, because we have this huge battery of computer design programs."

Indeed. Far beyond borrowing some one else's computer is having your own computer. Hear now the saga of Pam Hart and Resource One. In 1969 Pam was a computer programmer at Berkeley who found the work "just too disillusioning. Then during the Cambodia, Invasion demonstrations in Berkeley a group of us got together and designed a retrieval program for coordinating all of the actions on campus. It was a fairly dead system, but what it-did was it brought together people who had never worked together before and started them talking and thinking about how it was actually possible to do something positive with technology, when you define the goals."

Computing power to the people. So began one of the great hustles of modern times. Peter Deutsch is still awed: . "Pam could.hustle blood from a turnip." She speaks quietly in a hasty, gentle, self-effacing murmur. You have to lean close to hear the lady helping you help her to plant dynamite in the very heart of the Combine.

"Four of us came' from Berkeley to Project One and set up in a little office on the second floor. (Project One is a factory warehouse in the south-of-Market area of San Francisco. It started in 1970 with a radio announcement"' "If you're interested in building a community and cheap space and sharing resources, come to Project One." Within two weeks the building was filled with 200 artists, craftsmen, technicians and ex-professionals, and their families.] We worked, on designing a retrieval system so all the switchboards in the City could interact, using a common data base, with all the care taken for privacy and knowing who put stuff in so you could refer back. Hopefully you could generate lists that were updated and be as on-line as possible.

"We found that it just did not work using borrowed time, stolen time, bought time - we couldn't afford it. So about a year later we set about getting surplus. After a couple of months of calling everybody in San Francisco that w.as related to computers, Trans-America said that they had three XDS 940s in a warehouse [each costing $300,000 new]

"We negotiated the contract, got a '940 [free] which we refurbished; It arrived last April; we installed it in June. It was probably the fastest machine installation ever. We had it up in three days. We were really fortunate the whole time. We had a lot of people from Xerox Park, a lot of the old people from Berkeley Computer Corporation, that have assisted us in areas where we weren't totally sure of the appropriate thing to do ourselves. Peter Deutsch brought up the operating system.

"Now we're a little more stable economically. We got a foundation grant . of $10,000 last November from Stern. Then we borrowed $8000 from the Whole Earth Catalog, of which we paid back six. [News to me, This was part of the $20,000 I had turned over to the mob at the Catalog Demise Party. One Fred Moore finally signed for $15,000 of it and ran a series of subsequent consensus money decidings, which evidently were susceptible to Pam's soft voice and clear head.] After two years we're right there at the beginning point of actually being able to do the things that we said we wanted to do.

"One of the first things we have to do is have a retrieval system that's general enough that it can handle things like Switchboard referral information, also people who are doing investigative work on corporations, people doing research on foundations, a whole lot of different groups either willing or not willing to share data bases.

"We're interested in some health care statistical systems. There are a lot of Free. Clinics in the city, and they 'have to do all of their work by hand. We want to incorporate a system'doing statistical work for the clinics, charging the Health Centers that have money and not charging the Free Clinics that don't have money.

"A third area is using government generated tapes like assessor'.s tapes and census tapes, and start trying to do some analysis of the city. And the education program. The ideas include what Dymax is doing - set up a little recreation center where people could .come and play games and hopefully some of them would be learning games. And then I'm interested in doing community education with video tape. People want to know about computers, not how to use them, necessarily, but how they're used against them."

Counter-computer. At present there are ten people in the core group at Resource One ranging in age from 19 to 30 (Pam is 25), with decisions made by consensus.

Another scheme in the works involves the people around Steve Beck at the National Center for Experiments in Television a few blocks away. Steve has built the world's first real-time video synthesizer - the video equivalent of the Moogs, Buchlas, and Arps of music synthesis. It's a natural to link up with a computer. The current plan is for Steve and his equipment to move into the basement below Resource One, which should liven up the scene - Pam's gang is short on true hacker time-wasting frivolity; they're warm, but rather stodgier than some of the Government-funded folks. Maybe the video link-up will give us some higher levels of Spacewar on the way to exploring new territory entirely. If I were a computer manufacturer I'd pay the closest attention and maybe donate some goodies. A couple of Spacewar Olympians enjoy the free beer & an unauthorize TV screen production Below, Pam Hart with her People's XDS 940: "People want to know about computers - not to use them, necessarily, but how they're used against them."

Control and Spontaneity

I'M NO manufacturer, but I'm a hungry enough potential user to pretend briefly that I know what I'm talking about and run a trial polemic...

Until computers come to the people we will have no real idea of their most . natural functions. Up to the present their cost and size has kept them in the province of rich and powerful institutions, who, understandably, have developed them primarily as bookkeeping, sorting' and control devices. The: computers have been a priceless aid in keeping the lid on top-down organization. They are splendidly impressive as oracles of (programmable) Truth, the lofty voice of unchangeable authority.

In fact, computers don't know shit. Their special talent in the direction of intelligence is the ability to make elabrate models and fiddle with them, to I answer in detail questions that begin "What if ..?" In.this they parallel (and can help) the acquiring of intelligence by children. But the basic fact of computer use is "Garbage In, Garbage Out" - if you feed the computer nonsense, it will dutifully convert your mis- take into insanity-cubed and feed it back to you. Children are different - "Garbage In, Food Out" is common with them. Again, the benefits of var- iant parallel systems. Computer function is mostly one-track-mind, in which inconsistency is intolerable. The hu- man mind functions on multiple tracks (not all of them accessible); it can tolerate and even thrive on inconsistency.

I suggest that the parallel holds for the overall picture of computer use. Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc, a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life. (Likewise, 20 crummy speakers at once will give better sound fidelity than one excellent speaker - try it.)

Spacewar serves Earthpeace. So does any funky playing with computers or any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers. It won't be so hard. The price of hardware is coming down fast, and with the new CMOS chips (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor integrated circuits) the energy-drain of major computing drops to Flashlight-battery level.

Part of the grotesqueness of American life in these latter days is a subservience to Plan that amounts to panic. What we don't intend shouldn't happen. What happens anyway is either blamed on our enemies or baldly ignored. In our arrogance we close our ears to voices not our rational own, we routinely reject the princely gifts of spontaneous generation.

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one's grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive ("You killed me, Tovar!"). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
It encouraged new programming by the user.
It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
It was a game.
It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things ... like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction ... of sentient interaction.

Appendix 1 Access to Computers

Andy Moorer puts it, "Basically all you have to do is read a book on computer programming, and you're an instant computer scientist." Alan Kay insists that most of computer science can be mastered in one year of close attention. That's how young a science it is.

The main thing is getting with computers. If you live near a university or have family in a business that uses cpmputers, you may be able to wangle moonlight time and informal instruction.

If you're in school (college, high school, grade or Free) it shouldn't be too hard to con them into buying , aome decent equipment - tell them they . can use it for school accounts at night. According to Bob Albrecht of Dymax (People's Computer Company), the best school computers are from DEC and H-P: "Both of these companies have made a real commitment. They have qualified educational ataffa, they're developing new ahdf, they've got credibility." Write to: œ David Ahl, Digital Equipment Corporation, 146 Main St., Maynard, Mass. 01754 œ M McCricken, Hewlett-Packard, 11000 Wolf Rd., Cupcrtino, Ca. 9501,4 DEC has what they call Edu Systems, three families of conputers ranging from a single-terminal PDP-8 ($7K [$7000]; ma'.ha5dle up to 16 terminals) to the big PDP-10 ($500K). And . . H-P has thor 2000-series, ranging from " the 2000E ($50K) to the 2000C ($300K).

Some school systems are starting miniature ARPA Nets Bob Albrecht reports, "Minnesota may become the first state to have a statewide network where every kid will have access to a computer. There are more than 200 schools and 50,000 kids already tied into the network. And Long Island has a consortium with 40 schools on a PDP-10."

Finally, there are starting to be places where one can step in off the street and compute, and some of these have newsletters, games, etc., that they can send you. Write to:

Bob Albrecht, People's Computer Company, Box 310, Menlo Park, California 94025. (Publishes an outstanding newsletter on recreational and educational uses of computers. $4 for 5 issues/year.)
Bob Kahn, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720. (16 terminals available at 50 cents/hour. Publishes a newsletter, Kaleidoscope; has some interesting games.)
Rusty Whitney, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 4015 SW Canyon Road, Portland, Oregon 97221. (Public access computers. Has bener software for the PDP-8 than DEC has. And has new PDP-11.)
Bill Mayhew, The Children's Museum, Jamaica Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02150. (Public access computer games.)

If you're looking for good computer science in a college, the best is Carnegie-Mellon at Pittsburgh, then Stanford and MIT, with Utah, Cal Tech, and Illinois following. The college that exposes more of its students to computer use than anyone is Dartmouth.

Appendix Two:
Your Own Spacewar

Though no one has done it yet, Alan Kay is convinced. a modest Spacewar could be built cheap: "You can do motion with a couple of integrators. Headdcit . haa thia l6-integrator analogue computer you can build as a kit for 700 bucks or something like that. You have to have two layers of intp- gratore to get an inverse-square law, so you ahould be able to get gravity and orbits with that one. To make spaceship outlines and explosion patterns you need a few bits of digtal memory. Two chips worth of register file should do it. I think electronics stores may carry the chips.

"The controls for Spacewar are trivial. The simplest way is to go to a radio control store - like for model airplanes - and get the front end of the radio controller, which has two sets of joysticks and the pots and everything else. You can use those as the inputs to the analogue computer. They only cost something like thirty bucks." Once you have the computer, your own or someone else's, you can write your own Spacewar program or start with this one of Kay's:



to ship :size
penup, left 180, torward 2 *:size, right 90
forward,1 *:size, right 90
pendown, forward 4 *:size, right 30, forward 2 *:size
right 120, foward 2 *:size
right 30, forward 4 *:size
right 30, forwarg 2 *:size
right 120,forward 2 *:size
left 150, forward:size * 2 * sqrt 3
left 330, forward:size * 2
right 60, forward:size * 2
lefl 380, fowad:size 2 sqrt 3
 penup, left 90, forward:size, right 90,
forward 2 *:size
end to

to flame :size
 penup, left 180, forward 2 + sqrt 3, pendown
 triangle size, forward .5*:size
 triangle 1.5 *:size, forward .5*:size
 triangle 2 *:size, forward .5 *:size
 triangle 1 *:size, forward 1 *.size
 etc....
end to

to flash
  etc.....
to retre
  etc....
to torp
  etc....

to spaceahip :pilot :thrust :steer :trigger
use :numtorps :location:(x:y):speed :direction
repeat
 moveship
 if :trigger and:numtorps <3
 then create torpedo :speed :direction :location.
 ?crash :self
 display ship
 pause until clock =  :time + :movelag
end to

to moveship
 make :speed be :speed + (:spscale * :thrust)
 make :direction be :direction + (:diracale * :steer)
   rem 360
 make :location:x be :location:x + (:lscale *:speed *
 * cos :direction) rem 1024
 make :locatlon:y be :location:y + (:lscale *:speed *
 * sin :directtion) rem 1024
end to

to display ":obj
 penup, moveto:location, turn:direction
 create :obj:size
 if :thruat > 0 then create flame:size
 if :thrust < 0 thon create retro fiame:size,
 pause until clock = :time + :framelag
end to

to ?crash :object
  find all (create spaceship :s)
 if :object = :s
   and /:object:location:x  - :s:location:x/
  < close
   and /:object:location:y  - :s:location:y/
  < close
 then explode:s. explode:obj
end to

to explode:object
 penup, moveto:object:location
 flash
 finish :object
end to

to torpedo :speed :direction: :location
  use :thrust 0
  bump :numtorps
  moveship
if not (0<.location:x < 1024 and 0 < .location:y < 1024)
then debump :numtorps, finish :self
?crash :self
display :torp
end to

to start
repeat ask "how many will be playing?" times
 create spaceship ask "pilot's name?"
 stick.(make :sn be ask "stick number?").y
 stick .:sn.x
 stick :sn:but
end
repeat
 if (make :char be ask) = "s" then done
 find all(create spaceship :x)
 start :x
end to

*start
 how manu will be playing?
*2
 pilot's name?
*Jimmy
 stick number?
*2
 pilot's name
*Bill
 stick number?
*3

>> Cybernetic Serendipity, review in TIME, Friday Oct 4th, 1968

2009-10-28T05:39:00.001+01:00

from: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,838821,00.html

"Can computers create? Maybe not, but many of their programmers have a lot of fun trying to make them behave as if they could. Some technicians feed a set of numbers into the computer which activates a mechanical arm which in turn plots designs on paper. Photographs, too, can be analyzed and stored in a computer's memory, then reorganized and distorted on electronic command. The results are often tantalizing facsimiles of op and pop. In addition, computers can be programmed to direct kinetic sculptures through any number of varied cycles.

Indeed, so widely has the computer's brain been applied to esthetic pursuits that London's Institute of Contemporary Art has mounted an entire exhibit devoted to "Cybernetic Serendipity." In seven weeks, it has packed in 40,000 London art lovers, schoolboys, mathematicians and Chelsea old-age pensioners, and from admissions alone has all but recouped its $45,000 cost.

Frog to a Phoenix. Visitors are caught up in a carnivalesque March of Progress from the moment they enter. At the door, they find that their bodies have been sighted by an electric eye, which in turn triggers the computer-generated voice that welcomes them in a deep monotone. They may be approached by R.O.S.A. (Radio Operated Simulated Actress) Bosom, a roving electronic robot who actually appeared with live performers in a 1966 London production of The Three Musketeers (R.O.S.A. played the Queen of France).

On the walls hang graceful, abstract designs that look like snail shells, plus computer variations on op designs by Jeffrey Steele and Bridget Riley. Ohio State University's Charles Csuri, a painter turned programmer, employs EDP (Electronic Data Processing) to sketch funhouse-mirror distortions of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a man in Vitruvian proportions. Japanese Engineer Fujio Niwa has produced a computer portrait of John F. Kennedy that converts a photograph into a series of dashes, all of which converge with sinister impact on the left ear.

From the ceiling hangs a huge mobile by Britain's Gordon Pask that responds electronically to lights flashed on it by visitors. Wen Ying Tsai's sonically activated bed of strobe-lit steel rods sways to each clap of the viewer's hands. Taped sounds of computer-composed music fill the air, and computer-made poetry is on view. Some of it reads rather like Alice in Wonderland as rewritten by Charles Olson.

One Hand Clapping. Even at its best, the show proves not that computers can make art, but that humans are more essential than ever. For each of the drawings, a detailed program, painstakingly prepared by a human, was needed; the computer did no more than fill in the requested dots and lines. No genuinely observant viewer could ever confuse a vibrant Riley or a vertigo-inducing Steele painting with the computer's dry, mechanical variants on the original works. And, elaborate though Tsai's kinetic sculpture may be, it too needs a human, in fact two: one to build it and one to clap it into life in the exhibition hall. EDP does not respond to ESP, and no esthetic results can be expected from the sound of one hand clapping."

>> "ARTSPEAK -- A Computer Language For Young At Heart And The Art Lover", J.T.Schwartz

2009-10-09T02:51:00.008+02:00

article by Jehosua Friedmann, published in "The Best of Creative Computing, vol.2", 1980, pp. 62-65

ARTSPEAK, by Jacob Theodore Schwartz (, who passed away March 2nd, 2009), Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

the article below is archived by and on atariarchives.org

publications about ARTSPEAK:

- "The Art of Programming ARTSPEAK: a computer graphics language ", Henry Mullish, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 1974

- "ARTSPEAK: A graphics language for artists", Caroline Wardle, in ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, Volume 10 , Issue 1, 1976; pp.32-39

- short passage about ARTSPEAK, quotes from H.Mullish in Robert Kaupelis, "Experimental Drawing", 1980, p. 180, 181

>> "General Motors", Phil Morton, 1976

2009-10-08T23:48:00.002+02:00

Phil Morton, "General Motors", 1976
made with the sandin image processor
digitized by joncates, SAIC, who also started and hosts the complete phil morton archive

enjoy a lot!

also see jon's entry on morton on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Morton
as well as jon's online archive which also includes the distribution religion, a predecessor to open source licences:
http://copyitright.wordpress.com/

>> "Hole in Space", Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, 1980

2009-10-08T22:50:00.004+02:00

the project's website: http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/
from this website:

"HOLE-IN-SPACE was a Public Communication Sculpture. On a November evening in 1980 the unsuspecting public walking past the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and "The Broadway" department store located in the open air Shopping Center in Century City (LA), had a surprising counter with each other.

Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted -- no explanation at all was offered. No self-view video monitors to distract from the phenomena of this life-size encounter. Self-view video monitors would have degraded the situation into a self-conscience videoconference.

If you have ever had the opportunity to see what the award winning video documentation captured then you would have laughed and cried at the amazing human drama and events that were played out over the evolution of the three evenings. Hole-In-Space suddenly severed the distance between both cities and created an outrageous pedestrian intersection. There was the evening of discovery, followed by the evening of intentional word-of-mouth rendezvous, followed by a mass migration of families and trans-continental loved ones, some of which had not seen each other for over twenty years.

Created and produced by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. Funded in part by by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Broadway Department Store, with support from Avery Fisher Hall, and the support of many companies including Western Union, General Electric and Wold Communications."

>> "Baldessari sings LeWitt", John Baldessari, 1972

2009-10-06T05:40:00.004+02:00

from ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari_lewitt.html

>> "Sentences on Conceptual Art", Sol LeWitt, 1968

2009-10-06T05:38:00.001+02:00

from ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/papers/lewitt_sentences.html

1) Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2) Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
3) Illogical judgments lead to new experience.
4) Formal art is essentially rational.
5) Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6) If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7) The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.
8) When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9) The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10) Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11) Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12) For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13) A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artists’ mind to the viewers. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artists’ mind.
14) The words of one artist to another may induce a chain of ideas, if they share the same concept.
15) Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16) If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.
17) All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18) One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19) The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20) Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21) Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22) The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23) One artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstruing.
24) Perception is subjective.
25) The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26) An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27) The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28) Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29) The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30) There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31) If an artist uses the same form in a group of works and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.
32) Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33) It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34) When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35) These sentences comment on art, but are not ar

NOTES

* Reprinted from Art-Language, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1969).

>> "Systems Esthetics", Jack Burnham, 1968

2009-10-01T03:43:00.001+02:00

from: http://www.dxarts.washington.edu/courses/470/current/reading/sys_aes.pdf

Reprinted from Artforum (September, 1968). Copyright 1968 by Jack Burnham.

A polarity is presently developing between the finite, unique work of high art, that is, painting or sculpture, and conceptions that can loosely be termed unobjects, these being either environments or artifacts that resist prevailing critical analysis. This includes works by some primary sculptors (though 0 some may reject the charge of creating environments), some gallery kinetic and luminous art, some outdoor works, happenings, and mixed media presentations. Looming below the surface of this dichotomy is a sense of radical evolution that seems to run counter to the waning revolution of abstract and nonobjective art. The evolution embraces a series of absolutely logical and incremental changes, wholly devoid of the fevered iconoclasm that accompanied the heroic period from 1907 to 1925. As yet the evolving esthetic has no critical vocabulary so necessary for its defense, nor for that matter a name or explicit cause.

In a way this situation might be likened to the "morphological development" of a prime scientific concept-as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn sees science at any given period dominated by a single "major paradigm"; that is, a scientific conception of the natural order so pervasive and intellectually powerful that it dominates all ensuing scientific discovery. Inconsistent facts arising through experimentation are invariably labeled as bogus or trivial-until the emergence of a new and more encompassing general theory. Transition between major paradigms may best express the state of present art. Reasons for it lie in the nature of current technological shifts.

The economist, J. K. Galbraith, has rightly insisted that until recently the needs of the modern industrial state were never served by complete expression of the esthetic impulse. Power and expansion were its primary aims.

Special attention should be paid to Galbraith's observation. As an arbiter of impending socio-technical changes his position is pivotal. For the Left he represents America's most articulate apologist for Monopoly Capitalism; for the Right he is the socialist eminence grise of the Democratic Party. In The New Industrial State (1967) he challenges both Marxist orthodoxies and American mythologies premised upon laissez-faire capitalism. For them he substitutes an incipient technocracy shaped by the evolving technostructure. Such a drift away from ideology has been anticipated for at least fifty years. Already in California think-tanks and in the central planning committees of each soviet, futurologists are concentrating on the role of the technocracy, that is, its decision-making autonomy, how it handles the central storage of information, and the techniques used for smoothly implementing social change. In the automated state power resides less in the control of the traditional symbols of wealth than in information.

In the emergent "superscientific culture" long-range decision-making and its implementation become more difficult and more necessary. Judgment demands precise socio-technical models. Earlier the industrial state evolved by filling consumer needs on a piecemeal basis. The kind of product design that once produced "better living" precipitates vast crises in human ecology In the 1960s. A striking parallel exists between the "new" car of the automobile stylist and the syndrome of formalist invention in art, where "discoveries" are made through visual manipulation. Increasingly "products"-either in art or life-become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: these t revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding [ the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure. In the past our technologically-conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition M from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.

The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of organization. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, on-going relationships between organic and nonorganic systems, be these neighbor hoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems, information 0 centers, recreation centers, or any of the other matrices of human activity. All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions, and if their "environments" are on the unsophisticated side, this will change with time and experience.

The major tool for professionally defining these concerns is systems analysis. This is best known through its usage by the Pentagon and has more to do with the expense and complexity of modern warfare, than with any innate relation between the two. Systems analysts are not cold-blooded logicians; the best have an ever-expanding grasp of human needs and limitations. One of the pioneers of systems applications, E. S. Quade, has stated that "Systems analysis, particularly the type required for military decisions, is still largely a form of art. Art can be taught in part, but not by the means of fixed rules.... " ' Thus "The Further Dimensions" elaborated upon by Galbraith in his book are esthetic criteria. Where for some these become the means for tidying up a derelict technology, for Galbraith esthetic decision-making becomes an integral part of any future technocracy. As yet few governments fully appreciate that the alternative is biological self-destruction.

Situated between aggressive electronic media and two hundred years of industrial vandalism, the long held idea that a tiny output of art objects could somehow "beautify" or even significantly modify the environment was naive. A parallel illusion existed in that artistic influence prevails by a psychic osmosis given off by such objects. Accordingly lip service to public beauty remains the province of well-guarded museums. Through the early stages of industrialism it remained possible for decorative media, including painting and sculpture, to embody the esthetic impulse; but as technology progresses this impulse must identify itself with the means of research and production. Obviously nothing could be less true for the present situation. In a society thus estranged only the didactic function of art continues to have meaning. The artist operates as a quasipolitical provocateur, though in no concrete sense is he an ideologist or a moralist. L'art pour l'art and a century's resistance to the vulgarities of moral uplift have insured that.

The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment. This accounts for the radicality of Duchamp and his enduring influence. It throws light on Picasso's lesser position as a seminal force. As with all succeeding formalist art, cubism followed the tradition of circumscribing art value wholly within finite objects.

In an advanced technological culture the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-a-vis society. Artistic nihilism established itself through this condition. At the outset the artist refused to participate in idealism through craft. "Craft-fetishism," as termed by the critic Christopher Caudwell, remains the basis of modern formalism. Instead the significant artist strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society. Duchamp, Warhol, and Robert Morris are similarly directed in this respect. Gradually this strategy transforms artistic and technological decision-making into a single activity-at least it presents that alternative in inescapable terms. Scientists and technicians are not converted into "artists," rather the artist becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics. Progressively the need to make ultrasensitive judgments as to the uses of technology and scientific information becomes "art" in the most literal sense. As yet the implication that art contains survival value is nearly as suspect as attaching any moral significance to it. Though with the demise of literary content, the theory that art is a form of psychic preparedness has gained articulate supporters.

Art, as an adaptive mechanism, is reinforcement of the ability to be aware of the disparity between behavioral pattern and the demands consequent upon the interaction with the environment. Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when such validation Is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake....

The post-formalist sensibility naturally responds to stimuli both within and outside the proposed art format. To this extent some of it does begin to resemble "theater," as imputed by Michael Fried. More likely though, the label of theatricality is a red herring disguising the real nature of the shift in priorities. In respect to Mr. Fried's argument, the theater was never a purist medium, but a conglomerate of arts. In itself this never prevented the theater from achieving "high art." For clearer reading, rather than maintaining Mr. Fried's adjectives, theatrical or literalist art, or the phrase used until now in this essay, post-formalist esthetic, the term systems esthetic seems to encompass the present situation more fully.

The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective there are no contrived confines such as the theater proscenium or picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system. Inasmuch as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a "complex of components in interaction," comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control.

In his book, The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy described fabricating a set of enamel on metal paintings. These were executed by telephoning precise: instructions to a manufacturer. An elaboration of this was projected recently by the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Jan van der Marck, in a tentative exhibition, "Art by Telephone." In this instance the recorded conversation between artist and manufacturer was to become part of the displayed work of art. For systems, information, in whatever form conveyed, becomes a viable esthetic consideration.

Fifteen years ago Victor Vasarely suggested mass art as a legitimate function of industrial society. For angry critics there existed the fear of undermining art's fetish aura, of shattering the mystique of craft and private creation. If some forays have been made into serially produced art, these remain on the periphery of the industrial system. Yet the entire phenomenon of reproducing an art object ad infinitum is absurd; rather than making quality available to a large number of people, it signals the end of concrete objects embodying visual metaphor. Such demythification is the Kantian Imperative applied esthetically. On the other hand, a system esthetic is literal in that all phases of the life cycle of a system are relevant. There is no end product that is primarily visual, nor does such an esthetic rely on a "visual" syntax. It resists functioning as an applied esthetic, but is revealed in the principles underlying the progressive reorganization of the natural environment.

Various postures implicit in formalist art were consistently attacked in the later writings of Ad Reinhardt. His black paintings were hardly rhetorical devices (nor were his writings) masking Zen obscurities; rather they were the means of discarding formalist mannerism and all the latent illusionism connected with postrealistic art. His own contribution he described as:

The one work for the fine artist, tile one painting, is the painting of the onesized canvas... The single theme, one formal device, one color-monochrome one linear division in each direction, one symmetry, one texture, one free-hand brushing, one rhythm, one working everything into dissolution and one indivisibility, each painting into one overall uniformity and nonirregularity.

Even before the emergence of the anti-formalist "specific object" there appeared an oblique type of criticism, resisting emotive and literary associations. Pioneered between 1962 and 1965 in the writings of Donald Judd, it resembles what a computer programmer would call an entity's list structure, or all the enumerated properties needed to physically rebuild an object. Earlier the phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asserted the impossibility of conceptually reconstructing an object from such a procedure. Modified to include a number of perceptual insights not included in a "list structure," such a technique has been used to real advantage by the antinovelist, Alain Robbe-Crillet. A web of sensorial descriptions is spun around the central images of a plot. The point is not to internalize scrutiny in the Freudian sense, but to infer the essence of a situation through detailed examination of surface effects. Similar attitudes were adopted by Judd for the purpose of critical examination. More than simply an art object's list structure, Judd included phenomenal qualities which would have never shown up in a fabricator's plans, but which proved necessary for the "seeing" of the object. This cleared the air of much criticism centered around meaning and private intention.

It would be misleading to interpret Judd's concept of "specific objects" as the embodiment of a systems esthetic. Rather object art has become a stage towards further rationalization of the esthetic process in general-both by reducing the iconic content of art objects and by Judd's candidness about their conceptual origins. However, even in 1965 he gave indications of looking beyond these finite limits.

A few of the more general aspects may persist, such as the work's being like an object or even being specific, but other characteristics are bound to develop. Since its range is wide, three-dimensional work will probably divide into a number of forms. At any rate, it will be larger than painting and much larger than sculpture, which, compared to painting, is fairly particular.... Because the nature of three dimension isn't set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything.

In the 1966 "68th American Show" at the Chicago Art Institute, the sculptor, Robert Morris, was represented by two large, L-shaped forms which were shown the previous year in New York. Morris sent plans of the pieces to the carpenters at the Chicago museum where they were assembled for less than the cost of shipping the originals from New York. In the context of a systems esthetic, possession of a privately fabricated work is no longer important. Accurate information takes priority over history and geographical location.

Morris was the first essayist to precisely describe the relation between sculpture style and the progressively more sophisticated use of industry by artists. He has lately focused upon material-forming techniques and me arrangement of these results so that they no longer form specific objects but remain uncomposed. In such handling of materials the idea of process takes precedence over end results: "Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders of things is a positive assertion." Such loose assemblies of materials encompass concerns that resemble the cycles of industrial processing. Here the traditional priority of end results over technique breaks down; in a systems context both may share equal importance, remaining essential parts of the esthetic.

Already Morris has proposed systems that move beyond the confines of the minimal object. One work proposed to the City of New York last fall was later included in Willoughby Sharp's "Air Art" show in a YMHA gallery in Philadelphia. In its first state Morris's piece involved capturing steam from the pipes in the city streets, projecting this from nozzles on a platform. In Philadelphia such a system took its energy from the steam-bath room. Since 1966 Morris's interests have included designs for low relief earth sculptures consisting of abutments, hedges, and sodded mounds, visible from the air and not unlike Indian burial mounds. "Transporting" one of these would be a matter of cutting and filling earth and resodding. Morris is presently at work on one such project and unlike past sculptural concerns, it involves precise information from surveyors, landscape gardeners, civil engineering contractors, and geologists. In the older context, such as Isamu Noguchi's sunken garden at Yale University's Rare Book Library, sculpture defined the environment; with Morris's approach the environment defines what is sculptural.

More radical for the gallery are the constructions of Carl Andre. His assemblies of modular, unattached forms stand out from the works of artists who have comprised unit assembly with the totality of fixed objects. The mundane origins of Andre's units are not "hidden" within the art work as in he technique of collage. Andre's floor reliefs are architectural modifications -though they are not subliminal since they visually disengage from their surroundings. One of Andre's subtler shows took place in New York last year. 8 The viewer was encouraged to walk stocking-footed across three areas. each 12 by 12 feet and composed by 144 one-foot-square metal plates. One was not only invited to see each of these "rugs" as a grid arrangement in various | metals, but each metal grid's thermal conductivity was registered through the [ soles of the feet. Sight analysis diminishes in importance for some of the best new work; the other senses and especially kinesthesis makes "viewing" a more integrated experience. The scope of a systems esthetic presumes that problems cannot be solved by a single technical solution, but must be attacked on a multileveled, interdisciplinary basis. Consequently some of the more aware sculptors no longer think like sculptors, but they assume a span of problems more natural to architects, urban planners, civil engineers, electronic technicians, and cultural anthropologists. This is not as pretentious as some critics have insisted. It is a legitimate extension of McLuhan's remark about Pop Art when he said that it was an announcement that the entire environment was ready to become a work of art.

As a direct descendant of the "found object," Robert Smithson's identifying mammoth engineering projects as works of art ("Site-Selections") makes eminent sense. Refocusing the esthetic away from the preciousness of the work of art is in the present age no less than a survival mechanism. If Smithson's "Site-Selections" are didactic exercises, they show ; a desperate need for environmental sensibility on a larger than room scale. Sigfried Giedion pointed to specific engineering feats as objets d'art thirty years ago. Smithson has transcended this by putting engineering works into their natural settings and treating the whole as a time-bound web of man nature interactions.

Methodologically Les Levine is possibly the most consistent exponent of a systems esthetic. His environments of vacuum-formed, modular plastic units are never static; by means of experiencing ambulation through them, they consistently alter their own degree of space-surface penetrability. Levine's Clean Machine has no ideal vantage points, no "pieces" to recognize, as are implicit in formalist art. One is processed as in driving through the Holland Tunnel. Certainly this echoes Michael Fried's reference to Tony Smith's night time drive along the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike" Yet if this is theater, as Fried insists, it is not the stage concerned with focused upon events. That has more to do with the boundary definitions that have traditionally circumscribed classical and post-classical art. In a recent environment by Levine rows of live electric wires emitted small shocks to passersby. Here behavior is controlled in an esthetic situation with no primary reference to visual circumstances. As Levine insists, "What I am after here is physical reaction, not visual concern."

This brings to mind some of the original intentions of the "Group de Recherches d'Art Visuel" in the early 1960s. The Paris-based group had sought to engage viewers kinesthetically, triggering involuntary responses through ambient-propelled "surprises." Levine's emphasis on visual disengagement is much more assured and iconoclastic; unlike the labyrinths of the GRAV, his possesses no individual work of art deflecting attention from the environment as a concerted experience.

Questions have been raised concerning the implicit anti-art position connected with Levine's disposable and infinite series. These hardly qualify as anti-art as John Perreault has pointed out. Besides emphasizing that the context of art is fluid, they are a reductio ad absurdum of the entire market mechanism that controls art through the fiction of "high art." They do not deny art, they deny scarcity as a legitimate correlative of art.

The components of systems-whether these are artistic or functional- have no higher meaning or value. Systems components derive their value solely through their assigned context. Therefore it would be impossible to regard a fragment of an art system as a work of art in itself-as say, one might treasure a fragment of one of the Parthenon friezes. This became evident in j December 1967 when Dan Flavin designed six walls with the same alternate pattern of "rose" and "gold" eight-foot fluorescent lamps. This "Broad Bright Gaudy Vulgar System," as Flavin called it, was installed in the new ; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The catalog accompanying the exhibition scrupulously resolves some of the important esthetic implications for modular systems

The components of a particular exhibition upon its termination are replaced in another situation. Perhaps put into non-art as part of a different whole in a different future. Individual units possess no intrinsic significance beyond their concrete utility. It is difficult either to project into them extraneous qualities, a spurious insight, or for them to be appropriated for fulfillment or personal inner needs. The lights are untransformed. There are no symbolic transcendental redeeming or monetary added values present. .

Flavin's work has progressed in the past six years from light sources mounted on flat reliefs, to compositions in fluorescent fixtures mounted directly on walls and floors, and recently to totalities such as his Chicago "walk-in" environment. While the majority of other light artists have continued to fabricate "light sculpture"-as if sculpture were the primary concern-Flavin has pioneered articulated illumination systems for given spaces.

By the fact that most systems move or are in some way dynamic, kinetic art should be one of the more radical alternatives to the prevailing formalist esthetic. Yet this has hardly been the case. The best publicized kinetic sculpture is mainly a modification of static formalist sculpture composition. In most instances these have only the added bonus of motion, as in the case of Tinguely, Calder, Bury, and Rickey. Only Duchamp's kinetic output managed to reach beyond formalism. Rather than visual appearance there is an entirely different concern which makes kinetic art unique. This is the peripheral perception of sound and movement in space filled with activity. All too often gallery kinetic art has trivialized the more graspable aspect of motion: - this is motion internalized and experienced kinesthetically.

There are a few important exceptions to the above. These include Otto Piene's early "Light Ballets" (1958-1962), the early (1956) water hammocks and informal on-going environments of Japan's Gutai group, some works by Len Lye, Bob Breer's first show of "Floats" (1965), Robert Whitman's laser show of "Dark" (1967), and most recently, Boyd Mefferd's "Strobe-Light Floor" (1968).

Formalist art embodies the idea of deterministic relations between a composition's visible elements. But since the early 1960s Hans Haacke has depended upon the invisible components of systems. In a systems context, invisibility, or invisible parts, share equal importance with things seen. Thus air, water, steam, and ice have become major elements in his work. On both coasts this has precipitated interest in "invisible art" among a number of young artists. Some of the best of Haacke's efforts are shown outside the gallery. These include his Rain Tree, a tree dripping patterns of water; Sky Line, a nylon line kept aloft by hundreds of helium-filled white balloons; a weather balloon balanced over a jet of air; and a large-scale nylon tent with air pockets designed to remain in balance one foot off the ground.

Haacke's systems have a limited life as an art experience, though some are quite durable. He insists that the need for empathy does not make his work function as with older art. Systems exist as on-going independent entities away from the viewer. In the systems hierarchy of control, interaction and autonomy become desirable values. In this respect Haacke's Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed Coordinate System is probably one of the most elegant, responsive environments made to date by an artist (certainly more sophisticated ones have been conceived for scientific and technical purposes). Boundary situations are central to his thinking.

A "sculpture" that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a "system" of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer's empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.

Tangential to this systems approach is Allan Kaprow's very unique ,concept of the Happening. In the past ten years Kaprow has moved the Happening from a rather self-conscious and stagy event to a strict and elegant procedure. The Happening now has a sense of internal logic which was lacking before. It seems to arise naturally from those same considerations that have crystallized the systems approach to environmental situations. As described by their chief inventor, the Happenings establish an indivisibility between themselves and everyday affairs; they consciously avoid materials and procedures identified with art; they allow for geographical expansiveness and mobility; they include experience and duration as part of their esthetic format; and they emphasize practical activities as the most meangingful mode of procedure. . . As structured events the Happenings are usually reversible. Alterations in the environment may be "erased" after the Happening, or as a part of the Happening's conclusion. While they may involve large areas of place, the format of the Happening is kept relatively simple, with the emphasis on establishing a participatory esthetic.

The emergence of a "post-formalist esthetic" may seem to some to embody a kind of absolute philosophy, something which, through the nature of concerns cannot be transcended. Yet it is more likely that a "systems esthetic" will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present. New circumstances will with time generate other major paradigms for the arts.

For some readers these pages will echo feelings of the past. It may be remembered that in the fall of 1920 an ideological schism ruptured two factions of the Moscow Constructivists. The radical Marxists, led by Vladimir Tatlin, proclaimed their rejection of art's false idealisms. Establishing ourselves as "Productivists," one of their slogans became: "Down with guarding the traditions of art. Long live the constructivist technician." As a group dedicated to historical materialism and the scientific ethos, most of its members were quickly subsumed by the technological needs of Soviet Russia. As artists they ceased to exist. While the program might have d some basis as a utilitarian esthetic, it was crushed amid the Stalinist anti-intellectualism that followed.

The reasons are almost self-apparent. Industrially underdeveloped, food and heavy industry remained the prime needs of the Soviet Union for the next forty years. Conditions and structural interdependencies that naturally develop in an advanced industrial state were then only latent. In retrospect it is doubtful if any group of artists had either the knowledge or political strength to meaningfully affect Soviet industrial policies. What emerged was another vein of formalist innovation based on scientific idealism; this manifested itself in the West under the leadership of the Constructivist emigres, Gabo and Pevsner.

But for our time the emerging major paradigm in art is neither an ism nor a collection of styles. Rather than a novel way of rearranging surfaces and spaces, it is fundamentally concerned with the implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological society. As a culture producer, man has traditionally claimed the title, Homo Faber: man the maker (of tools and images). With continued advances in the industrial revolution, he assumes a new and more critical function. As Homo Arbiter Formae his prime role becomes that of man the maker of esthetic decisions. These decisions- whether they are made concertedly or not-control the quality of all future life on the earth. Moreover these are value judgments dictating the direction of technological endeavor. Quite plainly such a vision extends beyond politlcal realities of the present. This cannot remain the case for long.

>> Larry Cuba, computer animated scene from star wars

2009-09-30T08:17:00.001+02:00

>> "Mother of all Demos", Douglas Engelbart, 09.12.1968

2009-09-24T21:59:00.003+02:00

presentation of the projects of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), founded by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), held @ Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC), December 9th, 1968, which became known as "the mother of all demos":
-- demo of NLS (= oNLine System)
-- "X-Y position indicator for a display system" = computer mouse (developed together with Bill English, 1967)
-- video/teleconference
-- hypertext

>> "Hyperland", Douglas Adams, 1990

2009-09-24T09:08:00.004+02:00

50min documentary about hypertext, internet,...
written by Douglas Adams, produced by BBC2 in 1990

playlist in 5 parts on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E090E024E3E8E7A3

Douglas Adam's website for the project:
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hype.html
where it says:
"In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it's interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn't: these days, no one's heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web..."

>> brief history of the internet (excerpt)

2009-09-24T09:03:00.001+02:00

from: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins

"Origins of the Internet

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, ⁴ starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed.

In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. ⁵

In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA. ⁶

Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS, an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.

Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications.

In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic."

>> "Man-Computer Symbiosis", J.C.R. Licklider, 1960

2009-09-21T23:01:00.003+02:00

from: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

Man-Computer Symbiosis

J. C. R. Licklider
IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,
volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960
Summary

Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.

1 Introduction
1.1 Symbiosis

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce wit bout the insect; the insect cannot eat wit bout the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative "living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms" is called symbiosis [27].

"Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
1.2 Between "Mechanically Extended Man" and "Artificial Intelligence"

As a concept, man-computer symbiosis is different in an important way from what North [21] has called "mechanically extended man." In the man-machine systems of the past, the human operator supplied the initiative, the direction, the integration, and the criterion. The mechanical parts of the systems were mere extensions, first of the human arm, then of the human eye. These systems certainly did not consist of "dissimilar organisms living together..." There was only one kind of organism-man-and the rest was there only to help him.

In one sense of course, any man-made system is intended to help man, to help a man or men outside the system. If we focus upon the human operator within the system, however, we see that, in some areas of technology, a fantastic change has taken place during the last few years. "Mechanical extension" has given way to replacement of men, to automation, and the men who remain are there more to help than to be helped. In some instances, particularly in large computer-centered information and control systems, the human operators are responsible mainly for functions that it proved infeasible to automate. Such systems ("humanly extended machines," North might call them) are not symbiotic systems. They are "semi-automatic" systems, systems that started out to be fully automatic but fell short of the goal.

Man-computer symbiosis is probably not the ultimate paradigm for complex technological systems. It seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical "machines" will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province. Even now, Gelernter's IBM-704 program for proving theorems in plane geometry proceeds at about the same pace as Brooklyn high school students, and makes similar errors.[12] There are, in fact, several theorem-proving, problem-solving, chess-playing, and pattern-recognizing programs (too many for complete reference [1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25]) capable of rivaling human intellectual performance in restricted areas; and Newell, Simon, and Shaw's [20] "general problem solver" may remove some of the restrictions. In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone. There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. A multidisciplinary study group, examining future research and development problems of the Air Force, estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.
2 Aims of Man-Computer Symbiosis

Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. (If an unforeseen alternative arises, the whole process comes to a halt and awaits the necessary extension of the program.) The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.

However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not, 'What is the answer?' The question is, 'What is the question?'" One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.

The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.
3 Need for Computer Participation in Formulative and Real-Time Thinking

The preceding paragraphs tacitly made the assumption that, if they could be introduced effectively into the thought process, the functions that can be performed by data-processing machines would improve or facilitate thinking and problem solving in an important way. That assumption may require justification.
3.1 A Preliminary and Informal Time-and-Motion Analysis of Technical Thinking

Despite the fact that there is a voluminous literature on thinking and problem solving, including intensive case-history studies of the process of invention, I could find nothing comparable to a time-and-motion-study analysis of the mental work of a person engaged in a scientific or technical enterprise. In the spring and summer of 1957, therefore, I tried to keep track of what one moderately technical person actually did during the hours he regarded as devoted to work. Although I was aware of the inadequacy of the sampling, I served as my own subject.

It soon became apparent that the main thing I did was to keep records, and the project would have become an infinite regress if the keeping of records had been carried through in the detail envisaged in the initial plan. It was not. Nevertheless, I obtained a picture of my activities that gave me pause. Perhaps my spectrum is not typical--I hope it is not, but I fear it is.

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so. At one point, it was necessary to compare six experimental determinations of a function relating speech-intelligibility to speech-to-noise ratio. No two experimenters had used the same definition or measure of speech-to-noise ratio. Several hours of calculating were required to get the data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.

Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.

The main suggestion conveyed by the findings just described is that the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men. Severe problems are posed by the fact that these operations have to be performed upon diverse variables and in unforeseen and continually changing sequences. If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process.

It may be appropriate to acknowledge, at this point, that we are using the term "computer" to cover a wide class of calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machines. The capabilities of machines in this class are increasing almost daily. It is therefore hazardous to make general statements about capabilities of the class. Perhaps it is equally hazardous to make general statements about the capabilities of men. Nevertheless, certain genotypic differences in capability between men and computers do stand out, and they have a bearing on the nature of possible man-computer symbiosis and the potential value of achieving it.

As has been said in various ways, men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their " pre-programming." Men naturally speak redundant languages organized around unitary objects and coherent actions and employing 20 to 60 elementary symbols. Computers "naturally" speak nonredundant languages, usually with only two elementary symbols and no inherent appreciation either of unitary objects or of coherent actions.

To be rigorously correct, those characterizations would have to include many qualifiers. Nevertheless, the picture of dissimilarity (and therefore p0tential supplementation) that they present is essentially valid. Computing machines can do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers. That suggests that a symbiotic cooperation, if successful in integrating the positive characteristics of men and computers, would be of great value. The differences in speed and in language, of course, pose difficulties that must be overcome.
4 Separable Functions of Men and Computers in the Anticipated Symbiotic Association

It seems likely that the contributions of human operators and equipment will blend together so completely in many operations that it will be difficult to separate them neatly in analysis. That would be the case it; in gathering data on which to base a decision, for example, both the man and the computer came up with relevant precedents from experience and if the computer then suggested a course of action that agreed with the man's intuitive judgment. (In theorem-proving programs, computers find precedents in experience, and in the SAGE System, they suggest courses of action. The foregoing is not a far-fetched example. ) In other operations, however, the contributions of men and equipment will be to some extent separable.

Men will set the goals and supply the motivations, of course, at least in the early years. They will formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models. They will remember that such-and-such a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published. In general, they will make approximate and fallible, but leading, contributions, and they will define criteria and serve as evaluators, judging the contributions of the equipment and guiding the general line of thought.

In addition, men will handle the very-low-probability situations when such situations do actually arise. (In current man-machine systems, that is one of the human operator's most important functions. The sum of the probabilities of very-low-probability alternatives is often much too large to neglect. ) Men will fill in the gaps, either in the problem solution or in the computer program, when the computer has no mode or routine that is applicable in a particular circumstance.

The information-processing equipment, for its part, will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the models against data (which the human operator may designate roughly and identify as relevant when the computer presents them for his approval). The equipment will answer questions. It will simulate the mechanisms and models, carry out the procedures, and display the results to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs ("cutting the cake" in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants). The equipment will interpolate, extrapolate, and transform. It will convert static equations or logical statements into dynamic models so the human operator can examine their behavior. In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

In addition, the computer will serve as a statistical-inference, decision-theory, or game-theory machine to make elementary evaluations of suggested courses of action whenever there is enough basis to support a formal statistical analysis. Finally, it will do as much diagnosis, pattern-matching, and relevance-recognizing as it profitably can, but it will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.
5 Prerequisites for Realization of Man-Computer Symbiosis

The data-processing equipment tacitly postulated in the preceding section is not available. The computer programs have not been written. There are in fact several hurdles that stand between the nonsymbiotic present and the anticipated symbiotic future. Let us examine some of them to see more clearly what is needed and what the chances are of achieving it.
5.1 Speed Mismatch Between Men and Computers

Any present-day large-scale computer is too fast and too costly for real-time cooperative thinking with one man. Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs.

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.
5.2 Memory Hardware Requirements

When we start to think of storing any appreciable fraction of a technical literature in computer memory, we run into billions of bits and, unless things change markedly, billions of dollars.

The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may store the parts that can be summarized most succinctly-the quantitative parts and the reference citations-but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, delivering, and returning of books.)

The second point is that a very important section of memory will be permanent: part indelible memory and part published memory. The computer will be able to write once into indelible memory, and then read back indefinitely, but the computer will not be able to erase indelible memory. (It may also over-write, turning all the 0's into l's, as though marking over what was written earlier.) Published memory will be "read-only" memory. It will be introduced into the computer already structured. The computer will be able to refer to it repeatedly, but not to change it. These types of memory will become more and more important as computers grow larger. They can be made more compact than core, thin-film, or even tape memory, and they will be much less expensive. The main engineering problems will concern selection circuitry.

In so far as other aspects of memory requirement are concerned, we may count upon the continuing development of ordinary scientific and business computing machines There is some prospect that memory elements will become as fast as processing (logic) elements. That development would have a revolutionary effect upon the design of computers.
5.3 Memory Organization Requirements

Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern and that it be accessible through procedure much faster than serial search. At least half of the problem of memory organization appears to reside in the storage procedure. Most of the remainder seems to be wrapped up in the problem of pattern recognition within the storage mechanism or medium. Detailed discussion of these problems is beyond the present scope. However, a brief outline of one promising idea, "trie memory," may serve to indicate the general nature of anticipated developments.

Trie memory is so called by its originator, Fredkin [10], because it is designed to facilitate retrieval of information and because the branching storage structure, when developed, resembles a tree. Most common memory systems store functions of arguments at locations designated by the arguments. (In one sense, they do not store the arguments at all. In another and more realistic sense, they store all the possible arguments in the framework structure of the memory.) The trie memory system, on the other hand, stores both the functions and the arguments. The argument is introduced into the memory first, one character at a time, starting at a standard initial register. Each argument register has one cell for each character of the ensemble (e.g., two for information encoded in binary form) and each character cell has within it storage space for the address of the next register. The argument is stored by writing a series of addresses, each one of which tells where to find the next. At the end of the argument is a special "end-of-argument" marker. Then follow directions to the function, which is stored in one or another of several ways, either further trie structure or "list structure" often being most effective.

The trie memory scheme is inefficient for small memories, but it becomes increasingly efficient in using available storage space as memory size increases. The attractive features of the scheme are these: 1) The retrieval process is extremely simple. Given the argument, enter the standard initial register with the first character, and pick up the address of the second. Then go to the second register, and pick up the address of the third, etc. 2) If two arguments have initial characters in common, they use the same storage space for those characters. 3) The lengths of the arguments need not be the same, and need not be specified in advance. 4) No room in storage is reserved for or used by any argument until it is actually stored. The trie structure is created as the items are introduced into the memory. 5) A function can be used as an argument for another function, and that function as an argument for the next. Thus, for example, by entering with the argument, "matrix multiplication," one might retrieve the entire program for performing a matrix multiplication on the computer. 6) By examining the storage at a given level, one can determine what thus-far similar items have been stored. For example, if there is no citation for Egan, J. P., it is but a step or two backward to pick up the trail of Egan, James ... .

The properties just described do not include all the desired ones, but they bring computer storage into resonance with human operators and their predilection to designate things by naming or pointing.
5.4 The Language Problem

The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis. It is reassuring, however, to note what great strides have already been made, through interpretive programs and particularly through assembly or compiling programs such as FORTRAN, to adapt computers to human language forms. The "Information Processing Language" of Shaw, Newell, Simon, and Ellis [24] represents another line of rapprochement. And, in ALGOL and related systems, men are proving their flexibility by adopting standard formulas of representation and expression that are readily translatable into machine language.

For the purposes of real-time cooperation between men and computers, it will be necessary, however, to make use of an additional and rather different principle of communication and control. The idea may be highlighted by comparing instructions ordinarily addressed to intelligent human beings with instructions ordinarily used with computers. The latter specify precisely the individual steps to take and the sequence in which to take them. The former present or imply something about incentive or motivation, and they supply a criterion by which the human executor of the instructions will know when he has accomplished his task. In short: instructions directed to computers specify courses; instructions-directed to human beings specify goals.

Men appear to think more naturally and easily in terms of goals than in terms of courses. True, they usually know something about directions in which to travel or lines along which to work, but few start out with precisely formulated itineraries. Who, for example, would depart from Boston for Los Angeles with a detailed specification of the route? Instead, to paraphrase Wiener, men bound for Los Angeles try continually to decrease the amount by which they are not yet in the smog.

Computer instruction through specification of goals is being approached along two paths. The first involves problem-solving, hill-climbing, self-organizing programs. The second involves real-time concatenation of preprogrammed segments and closed subroutines which the human operator can designate and call into action simply by name.

Along the first of these paths, there has been promising exploratory work. It is clear that, working within the loose constraints of predetermined strategies, computers will in due course be able to devise and simplify their own procedures for achieving stated goals. Thus far, the achievements have not been substantively important; they have constituted only "demonstration in principle." Nevertheless, the implications are far-reaching.

Although the second path is simpler and apparently capable of earlier realization, it has been relatively neglected. Fredkin's trie memory provides a promising paradigm. We may in due course see a serious effort to develop computer programs that can be connected together like the words and phrases of speech to do whatever computation or control is required at the moment. The consideration that holds back such an effort, apparently, is that the effort would produce nothing that would be of great value in the context of existing computers. It would be unrewarding to develop the language before there are any computing machines capable of responding meaningfully to it.
5.5 Input and Output Equipment

The department of data processing that seems least advanced, in so far as the requirements of man-computer symbiosis are concerned, is the one that deals with input and output equipment or, as it is seen from the human operator's point of view, displays and controls. Immediately after saying that, it is essential to make qualifying comments, because the engineering of equipment for high-speed introduction and extraction of information has been excellent, and because some very sophisticated display and control techniques have been developed in such research laboratories as the Lincoln Laboratory. By and large, in generally available computers, however, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter.

Displays seem to be in a somewhat better state than controls. Many computers plot graphs on oscilloscope screens, and a few take advantage of the remarkable capabilities, graphical and symbolic, of the charactron display tube. Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.

1) Desk-Surface Display and Control: Certainly, for effective man-computer interaction, it will be necessary for the man and the computer to draw graphs and pictures and to write notes and equations to each other on the same display surface. The man should be able to present a function to the computer, in a rough but rapid fashion, by drawing a graph. The computer should read the man's writing, perhaps on the condition that it be in clear block capitals, and it should immediately post, at the location of each hand-drawn symbol, the corresponding character as interpreted and put into precise type-face. With such an input-output device, the operator would quickly learn to write or print in a manner legible to the machine. He could compose instructions and subroutines, set them into proper format, and check them over before introducing them finally into the computer's main memory. He could even define new symbols, as Gilmore and Savell [14] have done at the Lincoln Laboratory, and present them directly to the computer. He could sketch out the format of a table roughly and let the computer shape it up with precision. He could correct the computer's data, instruct the machine via flow diagrams, and in general interact with it very much as he would with another engineer, except that the "other engineer" would be a precise draftsman, a lightning calculator, a mnemonic wizard, and many other valuable partners all in one.

2) Computer-Posted Wall Display: In some technological systems, several men share responsibility for controlling vehicles whose behaviors interact. Some information must be presented simultaneously to all the men, preferably on a common grid, to coordinate their actions. Other information is of relevance only to one or two operators. There would be only a confusion of uninterpretable clutter if all the information were presented on one display to all of them. The information must be posted by a computer, since manual plotting is too slow to keep it up to date.

The problem just outlined is even now a critical one, and it seems certain to become more and more critical as time goes by. Several designers are convinced that displays with the desired characteristics can be constructed with the aid of flashing lights and time-sharing viewing screens based on the light-valve principle.

The large display should be supplemented, according to most of those who have thought about the problem, by individual display-control units. The latter would permit the operators to modify the wall display without leaving their locations. For some purposes, it would be desirable for the operators to be able to communicate with the computer through the supplementary displays and perhaps even through the wall display. At least one scheme for providing such communication seems feasible.

The large wall display and its associated system are relevant, of course, to symbiotic cooperation between a computer and a team of men. Laboratory experiments have indicated repeatedly that informal, parallel arrangements of operators, coordinating their activities through reference to a large situation display, have important advantages over the arrangement, more widely used, that locates the operators at individual consoles and attempts to correlate their actions through the agency of a computer. This is one of several operator-team problems in need of careful study.

3) Automatic Speech Production and Recognition: How desirable and how feasible is speech communication between human operators and computing machines? That compound question is asked whenever sophisticated data-processing systems are discussed. Engineers who work and live with computers take a conservative attitude toward the desirability. Engineers who have had experience in the field of automatic speech recognition take a conservative attitude toward the feasibility. Yet there is continuing interest in the idea of talking with computing machines. In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type. If computing machines are ever to be used directly by top-level decision makers, it may be worthwhile to provide communication via the most natural means, even at considerable cost.

Preliminary analysis of his problems and time scales suggests that a corporation president would be interested in a symbiotic association with a computer only as an avocation. Business situations usually move slowly enough that there is time for briefings and conferences. It seems reasonable, therefore, for computer specialists to be the ones who interact directly with computers in business offices.

The military commander, on the other hand, faces a greater probability of having to make critical decisions in short intervals of time. It is easy to overdramatize the notion of the ten-minute war, but it would be dangerous to count on having more than ten minutes in which to make a critical decision. As military system ground environments and control centers grow in capability and complexity, therefore, a real requirement for automatic speech production and recognition in computers seems likely to develop. Certainly, if the equipment were already developed, reliable, and available, it would be used.

In so far as feasibility is concerned, speech production poses less severe problems of a technical nature than does automatic recognition of speech sounds. A commercial electronic digital voltmeter now reads aloud its indications, digit by digit. For eight or ten years, at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), the Signals Research and Development Establishment (Christchurch), the Haskins Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dunn [6], Fant [7], Lawrence [15], Cooper [3], Stevens [26], and their co-workers, have demonstrated successive generations of intelligible automatic talkers. Recent work at the Haskins Laboratory has led to the development of a digital code, suitable for use by computing machines, that makes an automatic voice utter intelligible connected discourse [16].

The feasibility of automatic speech recognition depends heavily upon the size of the vocabulary of words to be recognized and upon the diversity of talkers and accents with which it must work. Ninety-eight per cent correct recognition of naturally spoken decimal digits was demonstrated several years ago at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and at the Lincoln Laboratory [4], [9]. To go a step up the scale of vocabulary size, we may say that an automatic recognizer of clearly spoken alpha-numerical characters can almost surely be developed now on the basis of existing knowledge. Since untrained operators can read at least as rapidly as trained ones can type, such a device would be a convenient tool in almost any computer installation.

For real-time interaction on a truly symbiotic level, however, a vocabulary of about 2000 words, e.g., 1000 words of something like basic English and 1000 technical terms, would probably be required. That constitutes a challenging problem. In the consensus of acousticians and linguists, construction of a recognizer of 2000 words cannot be accomplished now. However, there are several organizations that would happily undertake to develop an automatic recognize for such a vocabulary on a five-year basis. They would stipulate that the speech be clear speech, dictation style, without unusual accent.

Although detailed discussion of techniques of automatic speech recognition is beyond the present scope, it is fitting to note that computing machines are playing a dominant role in the development of automatic speech recognizers. They have contributed the impetus that accounts for the present optimism, or rather for the optimism presently found in some quarters. Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable vocabularies would not be achieved for ten or fifteen years; that it would have to await much further, gradual accumulation of knowledge of acoustic, phonetic, linguistic, and psychological processes in speech communication. Now, however, many see a prospect of accelerating the acquisition of that knowledge with the aid of computer processing of speech signals, and not a few workers have the feeling that sophisticated computer programs will be able to perform well as speech-pattern recognizes even without the aid of much substantive knowledge of speech signals and processes. Putting those two considerations together brings the estimate of the time required to achieve practically significant speech recognition down to perhaps five years, the five years just mentioned.

References

[1] A. Bernstein and M. deV. Roberts, "Computer versus chess-player," Scientific American, vol. 198, pp. 96-98; June, 1958.

[2] W. W. Bledsoe and I. Browning, "Pattern Recognition and Reading by Machine," presented at the Eastern Joint Computer Conf, Boston, Mass., December, 1959.

[3] F. S. Cooper, et al., "Some experiments on the perception of synthetic speech sounds," J. Acoust Soc. Amer., vol.24, pp.597-606; November, 1952.

[4] K. H. Davis, R. Biddulph, and S. Balashek, "Automatic recognition of spoken digits," in W. Jackson, Communication Theory, Butterworths Scientific Publications, London, Eng., pp. 433-441; 1953.

[5] G. P. Dinneen, "Programming pattern recognition," Proc. WJCC, pp. 94-100; March, 1955.

[6] H. K. Dunn, "The calculation of vowel resonances, and an electrical vocal tract," J. Acoust Soc. Amer., vol. 22, pp.740-753; November, 1950.

[7] G. Fant, "On the Acoustics of Speech," paper presented at the Third Internatl. Congress on Acoustics, Stuttgart, Ger.; September, 1959.

[8] B. G. Farley and W. A. Clark, "Simulation of self-organizing systems by digital computers." IRE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. IT-4, pp.76-84; September, 1954

[9] J. W. Forgie and C. D. Forgie, "Results obtained from a vowel recognition computer program," J. Acoust Soc. Amer., vol. 31, pp. 1480-1489; November, 1959

[10] E. Fredkin, "Trie memory," Communications of the ACM, Sept. 1960, pp. 490-499

[11] R. M. Friedberg, "A learning machine: Part I," IBM J. Res. & Dev., vol.2, pp.2-13; January, 1958.

[12] H. Gelernter, "Realization of a Geometry Theorem Proving Machine." Unesco, NS, ICIP, 1.6.6, Internatl. Conf. on Information Processing, Paris, France; June, 1959.

[13] P. C. Gilmore, "A Program for the Production of Proofs for Theorems Derivable Within the First Order Predicate Calculus from Axioms," Unesco, NS, ICIP, 1.6.14, Internatl. Conf. on Information Processing, Paris, France; June, 1959.

[14] J. T. Gilmore and R. E. Savell, "The Lincoln Writer," Lincoln Laboratory, M. I. T., Lexington, Mass., Rept. 51-8; October, 1959.

[15] W. Lawrence, et al., "Methods and Purposes of Speech Synthesis," Signals Res. and Dev. Estab., Ministry of Supply, Christchurch, Hants, England, Rept. 56/1457; March, 1956.

[16] A. M. Liberman, F. Ingemann, L. Lisker, P. Delattre, and F. S. Cooper, "Minimal rules for synthesizing speech," J. Acoust Soc. Amer., vol. 31, pp. 1490-1499; November, 1959.

[17] A. Newell, "The chess machine: an example of dealing with a complex task by adaptation," Proc. WJCC, pp. 101-108; March, 1955.

[18] A. Newell and J. C. Shaw, "Programming the logic theory machine." Proc. WJCC, pp. 230-240; March, 1957.

[19] A. Newell, J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, "Chess-playing programs and the problem of complexity," IBM J. Res & Dev., vol.2, pp. 320-33.5; October, 1958.

[20] A. Newell, H. A. Simon, and J. C. Shaw, "Report on a general problem-solving program," Unesco, NS, ICIP, 1.6.8, Internatl. Conf. on Information Processing, Paris, France; June, 1959.

[21] J. D. North, "The rational behavior of mechanically extended man", Boulton Paul Aircraft Ltd., Wolverhampton, Eng.; September, 1954.

[22] 0. G. Selfridge, "Pandemonium, a paradigm for learning," Proc. Symp. Mechanisation of Thought Processes, Natl. Physical Lab., Teddington, Eng.; November, 1958.

[23] C. E. Shannon, "Programming a computer for playing chess," Phil. Mag., vol.41, pp.256-75; March, 1950.

[24] J. C. Shaw, A. Newell, H. A. Simon, and T. O. Ellis, "A command structure for complex information processing," Proc. WJCC, pp. 119-128; May, 1958.

[25] H. Sherman, "A Quasi-Topological Method for Recognition of Line Patterns," Unesco, NS, ICIP, H.L.5, Internatl. Conf. on Information Processing, Paris, France; June, 1959

[26] K. N. Stevens, S. Kasowski, and C. G. Fant, "Electric analog of the vocal tract," J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., vol. 25, pp. 734-742; July, 1953.

[27] Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd e., G. and C. Merriam Co., Springfield, Mass., p. 2555; 1958.

>> "On Computable Numbers...", Alan Turing, 1936

2009-09-17T23:32:00.001+02:00

from: http://plms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/s2-42/1/230

originally published in:
A. M. Turing
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Proc. London Math. Soc. 1937 s2-42: 230-265; doi:10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230

Turing_OnComputableNumbers_1936

>> video playlists on computer histories

2009-09-16T05:11:00.001+02:00

and

>> UNIVAC, 1951

2009-09-16T04:54:00.003+02:00

plus two 1950s advertisements:

and a prediction for the 1956 presidential election:

>> ENIAC, 1946 (raw footage)

2009-09-16T04:45:00.001+02:00

>> "Whole Earth Catalogue", Stewart Brand et al, 1968 ff

2009-09-16T00:01:00.003+02:00

the complete archive of the Whole Earth Catalogue is accessible online:
http://www.wholeearth.com/history-whole-earth-catalog.php

use the flipbook-option, it is free

>> "Computer Programming as an Art", Donald E. Knuth, 1974

2009-09-15T06:55:00.001+02:00

from: http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

originally published in: CACM, December 1974

"When Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the members of ACM'S Editorial Board made the following remark as they described the purposes of ACM'S periodicals [2]:

"If computer programming is to become an important part of computer research and development, a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected."

Such a goal has been a continually recurring theme during the ensuing years; for example, we read in 1970 of the "first steps toward transforming the art of programming into a science" [26]. Meanwhile we have actually succeeded in making our discipline a science, and in a remarkably simple way: merely by deciding to call it "computer science."

Implicit in these remarks is the notion that there is something undesirable about an area of human activity that is classified as an "art"; it has to be a Science before it has any real stature. On the other hand, I have been working for more than 12 years on a series of books called "The Art of Computer Programming." People frequently ask me why I picked such a title; and in fact some people apparently don't believe that I really did so, since I've seen at least one bibliographic reference to some books called "The Act of Computer Programming."

In this talk I shall try to explain why I think "Art" is the appropriate word. I will discuss what it means for something to be an art, in contrast to being a science; I will try to examine whether arts are good things or bad things; and I will try to show that a proper viewpoint of the subject will help us all to improve the quality of what we are now doing.

One of the first times I was ever asked about the title of my books was in 1966, during the last previous ACM national meeting held in Southern California. This was before any of the books were published, and I recall having lunch with a friend at the convention hotel. He knew how conceited I was, already at that time, so he asked if I was going to call my books "An Introduction to Don Knuth." I replied that, on the contrary, I was naming the books after him. His name: Art Evans. (The Art of Computer Programming, in person.)

From this story we can conclude that the word "art" has more than one meaning. In fact, one of the nicest things about the word is that it is used in many different senses, each of which is quite appropriate in connection with computer programming. While preparing this talk, I went to the library to find out what people have written about the word "art" through the years; and after spending several fascinating days in the stacks, I came to the conclusion that "art" must be one of the most interesting words in the English language.

The Arts of Old

If we go back to Latin roots, we find ars, artis meaning "skill." It is perhaps significant that the corresponding Greek word was τεχνη, the root of both "technology" and "technique."

Nowadays when someone speaks of "art" you probably think first of "fine arts" such as painting and sculpture, but before the twentieth century the word was generally used in quite a different sense. Since this older meaning of "art" still survives in many idioms, especially when we are contrasting art with science, I would like to spend the next few minutes talking about art in its classical sense.

In medieval times, the first universities were established to teach the seven so-called "liberal arts," namely grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Note that this is quite different from the curriculum of today's liberal arts colleges, and that at least three of the original seven liberal arts are important components of computer science. At that time, an "art" meant something devised by man's intellect, as opposed to activities derived from nature or instinct; "liberal" arts were liberated or free, in contrast to manual arts such as plowing (cf. [6]). During the middle ages the word "art" by itself usually meant logic [4], which usually meant the study of syllogisms.

Science vs. Art

The word "science" seems to have been used for many years in about the same sense as "art"; for example, people spoke also of the seven liberal sciences, which were the same as the seven liberal arts [1]. Duns Scotus in the thirteenth century called logic "the Science of Sciences, and the Art of Arts" (cf. [12, p. 34f]). As civilization and learning developed, the words took on more and more independent meanings, "science" being used to stand for knowledge, and "art" for the application of knowledge. Thus, the science of astronomy was the basis for the art of navigation. The situation was almost exactly like the way in which we now distinguish between "science" and "engineering."

Many authors wrote about the relationship between art and science in the nineteenth century, and I believe the best discussion was given by John Stuart Mill. He said the following things, among others, in 1843 [28]:

Several sciences are often necessary to form the groundwork of a single art. Such is the complication of human affairs, that to enable one thing to be done, it is often requisite to know the nature and properties of many things... Art in general consists of the truths of Science, arranged in the most convenient order for practice, instead of the order which is the most convenient for thought. Science groups and arranges its truths so as to enable us to take in at one view as much as possible of the general order of the universe. Art... brings together from parts of the field of science most remote from one another, the truths relating to the production of the different and heterogeneous conditions necessary to each effect which the exigencies of practical life require.

As I was looking up these things about the meanings of "art," I found that authors have been calling for a transition from art to science for at least two centuries. For example, the preface to a textbook on mineralogy, written in 1784, said the following [17]: "Previous to the year 1780, mineralogy, though tolerably understood by many as an Art, could scarce be deemed a Science."

According to most dictionaries "science" means knowledge that has been logically arranged and systematized in the form of general "laws." The advantage of science is that it saves us from the need to think things through in each individual case; we can turn our thoughts to higher-level concepts. As John Ruskin wrote in 1853 [32]: "The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."

It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.

Artificial intelligence has been making significant progress, yet there is a huge gap between what computers can do in the foreseeable future and what ordinary people can do. The mysterious insights that people have when speaking, listening, creating, and even when they are programming, are still beyond the reach of science; nearly everything we do is still an art.

From this standpoint it is certainly desirable to make computer programming a science, and we have indeed come a long way in the 15 years since the publication ot the remarks I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Fifteen years ago computer programming was so badly understood that hardly anyone even thought about proving programs correct; we just fiddled with a program until we "knew" it worked. At that time we didn't even know how to express the concept that a program was correct, in any rigorous way. It is only in recent years that we have been learning about the processes of abstraction by which programs are written and understood; and this new knowledge about programming is currently producing great payoffs in practice, even though few programs are actually proved correct with complete rigor, since we are beginning to understand the principles of program structure. The point is that when we write programs today, we know that we could in principle construct formal proofs of their correctness if we really wanted to, now that we understand how such proofs are formulated. This scientific basis is resulting in programs that are significantly more reliable than those we wrote in former days when intuition was the only basis of correctness.

The field of "automatic programming" is one of the major areas of artificial intelligence research today. Its proponents would love to be able to give a lecture entitled "Computer Programming as an Artifact" (meaning that programming has become merely a relic of bygone days), because their aim is to create machines that write programs better than we can, given only the problem specification. Personally I don't think such a goal will ever be completely attained, but I do think that their research is extremely important, because everything we learn about programming helps us to improve our own artistry. In this sense we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Science and Art

Our discussion indicates that computer programming is by now both a science and an art, and that the two aspects nicely complement each other. Apparently most authors who examine such a question come to this same conclusion, that their subject is both a science and an art, whatever their subject is (cf. [25]). I found a book about elementary photography, written in 1893, which stated that "the development of the photographic image is both an art and a science" [13]. In fact, when I first picked up a dictionary in order to study the words "art" and "science," I happened to glance at the editor's preface, which began by saying, "The making of a dictionary is both a science and an art." The editor of Funk & Wagnall's dictionary [27] observed that the painstaking accumulation and classification of data about words has a scientific character, while a well-chosen phrasing of definitions demands the ability to write with economy and precision: "The science without the art is likely to be ineffective; the art without the science is certain to be inaccurate."

When preparing this talk I looked through the card catalog at Stanford library to see how other people have been using the words "art" and "science" in the titles of their books. This turned out to be quite interesting.

For example, I found two books entitled The Art of Playing the Piano [5, 15], and others called The Science of Pianoforte Technique [10], The Science of Pianoforte Practice [30]. There is also a book called The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach [22].

Then I found a nice little book entitled The Gentle Art of Mathematics [31], which made me somewhat sad that I can't honestly describe computer programming as a "gentle art." I had known for several years about a book called The Art of Computation, published in San Francisco, 1879, by a man named C. Frusher Howard [14]. This was a book on practical business arithmetic that had sold over 400,000 copies in various editions by 1890. I was amused to read the preface, since it shows that Howard's philosophy and the intent of his title were quite different from mine; he wrote: "A knowledge of the Science of Number is of minor importance; skill in the Art of Reckoning is absolutely indispensible."

Several books mention both science and art in their titles, notably The Science of Being and Art of Living by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi [24]. There is also a book called The Art of Scientific Discovery [11], which analyzes how some of the great discoveries of science were made.

So much for the word "art" in its classical meaning. Actually when I chose the title of my books, I wasn't thinking primarily of art in this sense, I was thinking more of its current connotations. Probably the most interesting book which turned up in my search was a fairly recent work by Robert E. Mueller called The Science of Art [29]. Of all the books I've mentioned, Mueller's comes closest to expressing what I want to make the central theme of my talk today, in terms of real artistry as we now understand the term. He observes: "It was once thought that the imaginative outlook of the artist was death for the scientist. And the logic of science seemed to spell doom to all possible artistic flights of fancy." He goes on to explore the advantages which actually do result from a synthesis of science and art.

A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming.

Emma Lehmer wrote in 1956 that she had found coding to be "an exacting science as well as an intriguing art" [23]. H.S.M. Coxeter remarked in 1957 that he sometimes felt "more like an artist than a scientist" [7]. This was at the time C.P. Snow was beginning to voice his alarm at the growing polarization between "two cultures" of educated people [34, 35]. He pointed out that we need to combine scientific and artistic values if we are to make real progress.

Works of Art

When I'm sitting in an audience listening to a long lecture, my attention usually starts to wane at about this point in the hour. So I wonder, are you getting a little tired of my harangue about "science" and "art"? I really hope that you'll be able to listen carefully to the rest of this, anyway, because now comes the part about which I feel most deeply.

When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs. It is for this reason I was especially pleased to learn recently [32] that my books actually appear in the Fine Arts Library at Cornell University. (However, the three volumes apparently sit there neatly on the shelf, without being used, so I'm afraid the librarians may have made a mistake by interpreting my title literally.)

My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.

Furthermore when we read other people's programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art. I can still remember the great thrill it was for me to read the listing of Stan Poley's SOAP II assembly program in 1958; you probably think I'm crazy, and styles have certainly changed greatly since then, but at the time it meant a great deal to me to see how elegant a system program could be, especially by comparison with the heavy-handed coding found in other listings I had been studying at the same time. The possibility of writing beautiful programs, even in assembly language, is what got me hooked on programming in the first place.

Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!

Taste and Style

The idea of style in programming is now coming to the forefront at last, and I hope that most of you have seen the excellent little book on Elements of Programming Style by Kernighan and Plauger [16]. In this connection it is most important for us all to remember that there is no one "best" style; everybody has his own preferences, and it is a mistake to try to force people into an unnatural mold. We often hear the saying, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like." The important thing is that you really like the style you are using; it should be the best way you prefer to express yourself.

Edsger Dijkstra stressed this point in the preface to his Short Introduction to the Art of Programming [8]:

It is my purpose to transmit the importance of good taste and style in programming, [but] the specific elements of style presented serve only to illustrate what benefits can be derived from "style" in general. In this respect I feel akin to the teacher of composition at a conservatory: He does not teach his pupils how to compose a particular symphony, he must help his pupils to find their own style and must explain to them what is implied by this. (It has been this analogy that made me talk about "The Art of Programming.")

Now we must ask ourselves, What is good style, and what is bad style? We should not be too rigid about this in judging other people's work. The early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it this way [3, Bk. 3, Ch. 1]:

Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has a mischievous tendency.

When we apply our own prejudices to "reform" someone else's taste, we may be unconsciously denying him some entirely legitimate pleasure. That's why I don't condemn a lot of things programmers do, even though I would never enjoy doing them myself. The important thing is that they are creating something they feel is beautiful.

In the passage I just quoted, Bentham does give us some advice about certain principles of aesthetics which are better than others, namely the "utility" of the result. We have some freedom in setting up our personal standards of beauty, but it is especially nice when the things we regard as beautiful are also regarded by other people as useful. I must confess that I really enjoy writing computer programs; and I especially enjoy writing programs which do the greatest good, in some sense.

There are many senses in which a program can be "good," of course. In the first place, it's especially good to have a program that works correctly. Secondly it is often good to have a program that won't be hard to change, when the time for adaptation arises. Both of these goals are achieved when the program is easily readable and understandable to a person who knows the appropriate language.

Another important way for a production program to be good is for it to interact gracefully with its users, especially when recovering from human errors in the input data. It's a real art to compose meaningful error messages or to design flexible input formats which are not error-prone.

Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. The reason for this is that we are now experiencing a reaction from the time when efficiency was the only reputable criterion of goodness, and programmers in the past have tended to be so preoccupied with efficiency that they have produced needlessly complicated code; the result of this unnecessary complexity has been that net efficiency has gone down, due to difficulties of debugging and maintenance.

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

We shouldn't be penny wise and pound foolish, nor should we always think of efficiency in terms of so many percent gained or lost in total running time or space. When we buy a car, many of us are almost oblivious to a difference of $50 or $100 in its price, while we might make a special trip to a particular store in order to buy a 50 cent item for only 25 cents. My point is that there is a time and place for efficiency; I have discussed its proper role in my paper on structured programming, which appears in the current issue of Computing Surveys [21].

Less Facilities: More Enjoyment

One rather curious thing I've noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools. For example, the program of which I personally am most pleased and proud is a compiler I once wrote for a primitive minicomputer which had only 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word. It makes a person feel like a real virtuoso to achieve something under such severe restrictions.

A similar phenomenon occurs in many other contexts. For example, people often seem to fall in love with their Volkswagens but rarely with their Lincoln Continentals (which presumably run much better). When I learned programming, it was a popular pastime to do as much as possible with programs that fit on only a single punched card. I suppose it's this same phenomenon that makes APL enthusiasts relish their "one-liners." When we teach programming nowadays, it is a curious fact that we rarely capture the heart of a student for computer science until he has taken a course which allows "hands on" experience with a minicomputer. The use of our large-scale machines with their fancy operating systems and languages doesn't really seem to engender any love for programming, at least not at first.

It's not obvious how to apply this principle to increase programmers' enjoyment of their work. Surely programmers would groan if their manager suddenly announced that the new machine will have only half as much memory as the old. And I don't think anybody, even the most dedicated "programming artists," can be expected to welcome such a prospect, since nobody likes to lose facilities unnecessarily. Another example may help to clarify the situation: Film-makers strongly resisted the introduction of talking pictures in the 1920's because they were justly proud of the way they could convey words without sound. Similarly, a true programming artist might well resent the introduction of more powerful equipment; today's mass storage devices tend to spoil much of the beauty of our old tape sorting methods. But today's film makers don't want to go back to silent films, not because they're lazy but because they know it is quite possible to make beautiful movies using the improved technology. The form of their art has changed, but there is still plenty of room for artistry.

How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through the years usually seem to have learned their art in comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most important things we have been learning about programming seem to have originated with people who did not have access to very large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to make us lethargic. The art of tackling miniproblems with all our energy will sharpen our talents for the real problems, and the experience will help us to get more pleasure from our accomplishments on less restricted equipment.

In a similar vein, we shouldn't shy away from "art for art's sake"; we shouldn't feel guilty about programs that are just for fun. I once got a great kick out of writing a one-statement ALGOL program that invoked an innerproduct procedure in such an unusual way that it calculated the mth prime number, instead of an innerproduct [19]. Some years ago the students at Stanford were excited about finding the shortest FORTRAN program which prints itself out, in the sense that the program's output is identical to its own source text. The same problem was considered for many other languages. I don't think it was a waste of time for them to work on this; nor would Jeremy Bentham, whom I quoted earlier, deny the "utility" of such pastimes [3, Bk. 3, Ch. 1]. "On the contrary," he wrote, "there is nothing, the utility of which is more incontestable. To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?"

Providing Beautiful Tools

Another characteristic of modern art is its emphasis on creativity. It seems that many artists these days couldn't care less about creating beautiful things; only the novelty of an idea is important. I'm not recommending that computer programming should be like modern art in this sense, but it does lead me to an observation that I think is important. Sometimes we are assigned to a programming task which is almost hopelessly dull, giving us no outlet whatsoever for any creativity; and at such times a person might well come to me and say, "So programming is beautiful? It's all very well for you to declaim that I should take pleasure in creating elegant and charming programs, but how am I supposed to make this mess into a work of art?"

Well, it's true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. Consider the "trapped housewife," who has to clean off the same table every day: there's not room for creativity or artistry in every situation. But even in such cases, there is a way to make a big improvement: it is still a pleasure to do routine jobs if we have beautiful things to work with. For example, a person will really enjoy wiping off the dining room table, day after day, if it is a beautifully designed table made from some fine quality hardwood.

Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.

It's very hard for me to convince college freshmen that programming is beautiful, when the first thing I have to tell them is how to punch "slash slash JoB equals so-and-so." Even job control languages can be designed so that they are a pleasure to use, instead of being strictly functional.

Computer hardware designers can make their machines much more pleasant to use, for example by providing floating-point arithmetic which satisfies simple mathematical laws. The facilities presently available on most machines make the job of rigorous error analysis hopelessly difficult, but properly designed operations would encourage numerical analysts to provide better subroutines which have certified accuracy (cf. [20, p. 204]).

Let's consider also what software designers can do. One of the best ways to keep up the spirits of a system user is to provide routines that he can interact with. We shouldn't make systems too automatic, so that the action always goes on behind the scenes; we ought to give the programmer-user a chance to direct his creativity into useful channels. One thing all programmers have in common is that they enjoy working with machines; so let's keep them in the loop. Some tasks are best done by machine, while others are best done by human insight; and a properly designed system will find the right balance. (I have been trying to avoid misdirected automation for many years, cf. [18].)

Program measurement tools make a good case in point. For years, programmers have been unaware of how the real costs of computing are distributed in their programs. Experience indicates that nearly everybody has the wrong idea about the real bottlenecks in his programs; it is no wonder that attempts at efficiency go awry so often, when a programmer is never given a breakdown of costs according to the lines of code he has written. His job is something like that of a newly married couple who try to plan a balanced budget without knowing how much the individual items like food, shelter, and clothing will cost. All that we have been giving programmers is an optimizing compiler, which mysteriously does something to the programs it translates but which never explains what it does. Fortunately we are now finally seeing the appearance of systems which give the user credit for some intelligence; they automatically provide instrumentation of programs and appropriate feedback about the real costs. These experimental systems have been a huge success, because they produce measurable improvements, and especially because they are fun to use, so I am confident that it is only a matter of time before the use of such systems is standard operating procedure. My paper in Computing Surveys [21] discusses this further, and presents some ideas for other ways in which an appropriate interactive routine can enhance the satisfaction of user programmers.

Language designers also have an obligation to provide languages that encourage good style, since we all know that style is strongly influenced by the language in which it is expressed. The present surge of interest in structured programming has revealed that none of our existing languages is really ideal for dealing with program and data structure, nor is it clear what an ideal language should be. Therefore I look forward to many careful experiments in language design during the next few years.

Summary

To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak about the state of the Art.

References

1. Bailey, Nathan. The Universal Etymological English Dictionary. T. Cox, London, 1727. See "Art," "Liberal," and "Science."

2. Bauer, Walter F., Juncosa, Mario L., and Perlis, Alan J. ACM publication policies and plans. J. ACM 6 (Apr. 1959), 121-122.

3. Bentham, Jeremy. The Rationale of Reward. Trans. from Theorie des peines et des recompenses, 1811, by Richard Smith, J. & H. L. Hunt, London, 1825.

4. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia 1. The Century Co., New York, 1889.

5. Clementi, Muzio. The Art of Playing the Piano. Trans. from L'art de jouer le pianoforte by Max Vogrich. Schirmer, New York, 1898.

6. Colvin, Sidney. "Art." Encyclopaedia Britannica, eds 9, 11, 12, 13, 1875-1926.

7. Coxeter, H. S. M. Convocation address, Proc. 4th Canadian Math. Congress, 1957, pp. 8-10.

8. Dijkstra, Edsger W. EWD316: A Short Introduction to the Art of Programming. T. H. Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Aug. 1971.

9. Ershov, A. P. Aesthetics and the human factor in programming. Comm. ACM 15 (July 1972), 501-505.

10. Fielden, Thomas. The Science of Pianoforte Technique. Macmillan, London, 927.

11. Gore, George. The Art of Scientific Discovery. Longmans, Green, London, 1878.

12. Hamilton, William. Lectures on Logic 1. Win. Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1874.

13. Hodges, John A. Elementary Photography: The "Amateur Photographer" Library 7. London, 1893. Sixth ed, revised and enlarged, 1907, p. 58.

14. Howard, C. Frusher. Howard's Art of Computation and golden rule for equation of payments for schools, business colleges and self-culture .... C.F. Howard, San Francisco, 1879.

15. Hummel, J.N. The Art of Playing the Piano Forte. Boosey, London, 1827.

16. Kernighan B.W., and Plauger, P.J. The Elements of Programming Style. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974.

17. Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy. Elmsly, London, 1784.

18. Knuth, Donald E. Minimizing drum latency time. J. ACM 8 (Apr. 1961), 119-150.

19. Knuth, Donald E., and Merner, J.N. ALGOL 60 confidential. Comm. ACM 4 (June 1961), 268-272.

20. Knuth, Donald E. Seminumerical Algorithms: The Art of Computer Programming 2. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1969.

21. Knuth, Donald E. Structured programming with go to statements. Computing Surveys 6 (Dec. 1974), pages in makeup.

22. Kochevitsky, George. The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach. Summy-Birchard, Evanston, II1., 1967.

23. Lehmer, Emma. Number theory on the SWAC. Proc. Syrup. Applied Math. 6, Amer. Math. Soc. (1956), 103-108.

24. Mahesh Yogi, Maharishi. The Science of Being and Art of Living. Allen & Unwin, London, 1963.

25. Malevinsky, Moses L. The Science of Playwriting. Brentano's, New York, 1925.

26. Manna, Zohar, and Pnueli, Amir. Formalization of properties of functional programs. J. ACM 17 (July 1970), 555-569.

27. Marckwardt, Albert H, Preface to Funk and Wagnall's Standard College Dictionary. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1963, vii.

28. Mill, John Stuart. A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London, 1843. The quotations are from the introduction, S 2, and from Book 6, Chap. 11 (12 in later editions), S 5.

29. Mueller, Robert E. The Science of Art. John Day, New York, 1967.

30. Parsons, Albert Ross. The Science of Pianoforte Practice. Schirmer, New York, 1886.

31. Pedoe, Daniel. The Gentle Art of Mathematics. English U. Press, London, 1953.

32. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice 3. London, 1853.

33. Salton, G.A. Personal communication, June 21, 1974.

34. Snow, C.P. The two cultures. The New Statesman and Nation 52 (Oct. 6, 1956), 413-414.

35. Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: and a Second Look. Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Copyright 1974, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. General permission to republish, but not for profit, all or part of this material is granted provided that ACM's copyright notice is given and that reference is made to the publication, to its date of issue, and to the fact that reprinting privileges were granted by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery."

>> "hackers and painters", paul graham, 2004

2009-09-14T20:20:00.001+02:00

chapter 10, programming languages explained, pp 146

"the net", lutz dammbeck, 2004

2009-09-14T14:00:00.004+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FE019426C78CD603

http://www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/start_html.htm

>> "from here to ear", céleste boursier mougenot, 2007

2009-09-11T20:42:00.002+02:00

>> "birds on wires", jarbas agnelli, 2009

2009-09-11T20:41:00.001+02:00

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

>> "unauthorized access", annaliza savage, 1994

2009-09-11T20:40:00.002+02:00

>> Ars Electronica 2009 - streams

2009-09-09T16:28:00.001+02:00

ars electronica 2009 is over,
the audio and video file of the conferences online:
http://www.aec.at/humannature/stream

>> jaromil, "cyberpunk is not dead", 2008

2009-08-11T14:57:00.001+02:00

http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/cyberpunk_not_dead.pdf

read it!

University of Manchester, website about their early computer history

2009-06-22T21:18:00.004+02:00

From "The Baby" to the "Manchester Mark 1" and the William's Tube. The University of Manchester, were these things were developed more than half a century ago, put together a website with a really nice collection of resources about the history of its early computers.

http://www.computer50.org/

>> Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", 1936

2009-06-20T10:48:00.001+02:00

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

I

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence:

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

II

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.”

Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

III

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

IV

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

VI

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII

The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses.” Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars: “What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.” Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?” It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the film a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior world with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the elevation of the film to the realm of art. “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities ... these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

VIII

The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX

For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible ... ” In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw “the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place.” With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.

X

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens’ Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

XI

The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

XII

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

XIII

The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions – though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

XV

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Epilogue

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

>> Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

2009-06-20T10:34:00.003+02:00

http://blog.santafe.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/turing1950.pdf

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing, 1950

>> Pamela M. Lee, "Chronophobia", 2006

2008-12-17T17:26:00.002+01:00

from MIT Press:

"In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called "not being entitled to time." This anxiety and uneasiness about time, which Pamela Lee calls "chronophobia," cut across movements, media, and genres, and was figured in works ranging from kinetic sculptures to Andy Warhol films. Despite its pervasiveness, the subject of time and 1960s art has gone largely unexamined in historical accounts of the period. Chronophobia is the first critical attempt to define this obsession and analyze it in relation to art and technology.
Lee discusses the chronophobia of art relative to the emergence of the Information Age in postwar culture. The accompanying rapid technological transformations, including the advent of computers and automation processes, produced for many an acute sense of historical unknowing; the seemingly accelerated pace of life began to outstrip any attempts to make sense of the present. Lee sees the attitude of 1960s art to time as a historical prelude to our current fixation on time and speed within digital culture. Reflecting upon the 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality, she argues, helps us historicize our current relation to technology and time.
After an introductory framing of terms, Lee discusses such topics as "presentness" with repect to the interest in systems theory in 1960s art; kinetic sculpture and new forms of global media; the temporality of the body and the spatialization of the visual image in the paintings of Bridget Riley and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann; Robert Smithson's interest in seriality and futurity, considered in light of his reading of George Kubler's important work <i>The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things

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artistic software for dummies

To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: artistic software for dummies
From: Olga Goriunova <og {AT} avia.formoza.ru>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 14:44:51 +0400
Reply-to: Olga Goriunova <og {AT} avia.formoza.ru>

dear all,

i hope you might be interested in the following text that was published in
read_me 1.2 CD&book in an occasion of the first international software art
festival read_me 1.2, moscow 2002

olga

Artistic Software for Dummies and, by the way, Thoughts About the New World Order.

Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin

What is artistic software?

Artistic software is, first and foremost, software created for purposes
different than traditional pragmatic ones. Such programs are not seen as
tools for the production and manipulation of digital objects - from online
bank accounts to works of art - they are works of art in their own right.
The emergence of this phenomenon is first of all due to the overall spread
of software - commercial, proprietary programs as well as open source -
and its introduction into all spheres of human activity. Software has
always been seen as a neutral tool, tending to become a transparent medium
for information processing, and a most comfortable one at that. Software
and the products created with its help have always been considered not
only to belong to totally different areas but even to be non-comparable.
In most cases, an individual piece of software is thought to be completely
interchangeable with a competing product without any effect on the result.
Such an approach assumes several stereotypical and false premises. First,
software is not a "transparent" tool for the creation and processing of
the digital product. It defines a quite limited space, within a specific
framework in which people are required to work. Thus it persistently
forces people to keep to certain, pre-defined rules. In addition to the
limitations of using computer programs there is also a certain
predetermined position - a creative, social, even political one - into
which the software user is put, not so much by the software's creators,
but by more general power structures: the culture of software creation and
media culture as a whole. And this, in turn, depends on the dominant
social rules, which will be touched upon in this article. More and more
people are finding these limitations not only uncomfortable but also
boring and authoritarian. Second, the overall "digitalisation" of reality
makes software, the basis of the functioning of digital space,
increasingly important as such.

Rationality and Western civilization

The general and recently accelerating change in the world moves toward its
deeper rationalisation. The forms, the methods of functioning of the
society are all becoming extremely technologised. All means of functioning
of the digital world - networks, software and even design are being
created in accordance with notions of the rational basis of the universe
and are the highest representation of the Western idea - the domination of
the Reason. The history of Western civilization is, among other things,
the history of human alienation, the history of rationalisation, the
history of the loss of the mystical. The changes in the notion of
Knowledge as the basis of progress can represent this history in the
simplest terms. Up until the Middle Ages, knowledge was interwoven with
magic, mysticism and religion. It was not considered, as it commonly is
today, as something purely abstract which could nevertheless have
practical applications. Knowledge could not be transmitted solely on the
theoretical level, outside of ritual practice. It was transmitted only
through personal and full communication of the chosen with the chosen.
Even "crafts skills" knowledge could not have been acquired within just a
couple of years. Knowledge was not detached from other forms of life. The
situation starts to change during the Renaissance: gradually the
theorisation of knowledge begins; knowledge separates itself from
mysticism and religion and acquires high autonomous status. By the end of
the XVII century the final break of knowledge from other forms of life is
taking place. The history of rationalisation is the history of the
diminishment of the leading role of religion, the history of exclusion of
morality from all spheres except maybe that of the "life world"
(Lebenswelt). Catholicism has introduced rationalised relations between
man and God (indulgence); Protestantism has rejected ancient rituals and
their traditional visual attributes and became the peak of the religious
rationality, logically progressing to "humanistic" atheism. Gradually
science took the place of religion. And science oriented itself towards
the cognition of nature by defining nature in terms of matter's lack of
inherent value and metaphysical attributes. Examining nature as an
infinitely reusable object, science began to apply the same notions to the
human being. Thus all scientifically unverifiable truths and meanings
could neither be supported nor refuted by all-prevailing Reason.

What now?

- Science, having finally broken away from all its once inherent
metaphysical goals, is becoming, by analogy with extreme sport, an extreme
science, endangering the very existence of human beings on earth (nuclear
and bio-technologies, overall penetration of technology and its use as a
means of control over the human being).

- The highly rational way of life in such societies as the US, can go out
of whack from time to time: one of the most convincing examples lies in
the events of the 11th of September 2001. The growing conflict between
East and West - which can be seen as a conflict between an extremely
rationalised western society and the metaphysically oriented eastern one -
presents one of the most obvious dangers for the current world order.

Culture as content

The type of the society in which the citizens of "developed" countries
are living has been called informational for a long time already. The
system of such societies, accordingly, is utterly different from the
preceding industrial one, which was centered around industrial production.
Post-industrial society is ruled not by commodity-money relations but by
informational currents. Or, rather currents of capital and power that are
spreading (and to a large extent in the form of open or veiled propaganda)
through networks, in accordance with new laws.

All means and media by which such societies function - networks,
computers, software and even design - are extremely technologised and are
created in accordance with the notion of the rational basis of the
universe.

Culture and its manifestations are also turning into information (and
even "content"), flowing into information space. Just like any other
information, cultural information can be digitalised. With its shift into
computer space, culture begins to function by the same rational rules
according to which the rest of the system works - by the rules created, in
particular, by designers and programmers.

The methods of information presentation, storage and functioning, often
define its content as well. In so far as there is no place for metaphysics
within information space, the space towards which all spheres of public
and personal life are moving, the mode of this space's being is
particularly rational - culture as the custodian of the non-rational
inevitably becomes sterilized in such space. Morality and "life world" -
for a long time and very consistently too - have been being rationalised
under the civilization processes. Within the digital environment this
process yet intensifies. Existing in the digital realm, human beings are
following its logic - the extra-ethical logic of the machine.

Art as the custodian of the non-rational

Art is one of the most mobile and diverse systems; it has been changing continuously to the extent that it contradicts itself. It would be interesting, then, to look at the change in the artist's social role:

- Ancient times. There is no artist yet as such - she is an ordinary
member of the society, additionally performing some religious functions.
Her work is based exclusively on tradition, her name is not announced, the
results of her work are part of the mystical ritual.

- The epoch of Renaissance and Humanism: the artist is breaking from the
religious tradition and begins to glorify the beauty of the human and of
the surrounding world. The figure of the self-manifesting Genius appears
on stage.

- The Technological epoch: The beauty of the world becomes easily
reflectable through technical reproduction media. At the same time the
ideals of humanism decline - as a consequence of technological progress as
well. On one hand, art begins to reflect the crisis of human
self-consciousness (modernism), and on the other, it gets diverted into a
certain form of commercial activity. Works of art turn into commodities,
an extensive art-market is created (there appears, in particular, a notion
of "the original"). During the preceding, humanistic epoch, the artist was
placed very high in society (artist: demiurge, poet: the ruler of people's
minds). Therefore, on the new technological level she begins to actively
participate (and be used) in the political struggle.

The Communication epoch

With the development and fundamental change of communicative space the
role of the artist is changing again. Artist is not someone who creates
images anymore; she rejects the idea of representation.
Information overload becomes a common illness. An infinite number of
images have already been created; they are kept in unerasable digital form
in readily accessible databases. On the whole, the existing culture can
already be represented as information currents that surround people and
constantly try to penetrate their minds.
The artist's mission now shifts from creating images to manipulating and
redirecting information currents. The artist becomes, on one hand, the
information filter, and on the other, its re-transmitter.
This new role of the artist, then, in many ways becomes linked with the
functions of communication and computer technologies: her activity is
performed by means of networks and computers. The difference is that
computers work on the basis of "bare" algorithms, while humans apply
intuition, emotions and other non-rational elements - exactly those
qualities that are beginning to disappear due to the influence of
technology that makes everyone work rationally. Thus design of networks,
databases, computers and software becomes defining factor in modern
culture. Software and computers tend to be seen exclusively as pragmatic
tools for information processing; programmers are usually exceptionally
pragmatic people whose rational side often prevails over all others.
Therefore, the artist has to confront pragmatism with the methods she is
well acquainted with, based on intuition and non-rationality. Thus,
artistic software appears.

How does software art save non-rationality?

One might ask, "How can software art be non-rational, if rational
algorithms are what lies at its basis?"
Yes, at the basis of each piece of software there are definite
algorithms, but if conventional programs are instruments serving purely
pragmatic purposes, the result of the work of artistic programs often
finds itself outside of the pragmatic and the rational.
Because the process of the digitalisation of culture and other components
of social life is inevitable, it is necessary to consider adequate ideas
and mechanisms for the transfer of those spheres into digital space, to
find adequate conditions for their functioning within networks. How can we
put forth such mechanisms, those which would preserve the remaining grains
of the non-rational and metaphysical, those which could guarantee the
safety of the society and protect it against further rationalisation?
Artistic software, non-rational software, perhaps gives some answers to
this question.

Appendix. Most common characteristics of artistic software:
- irony 18%
- addressing political and social issues 10%
- interface prevailing over functionality 20%
- deconstruction 16%
- non-rationality 25%
- other 11%
(data for the beginning of 2002)

>> Matthew Fuller, "Software Studies: A Lexicon", 2008

2008-11-22T19:00:00.003+01:00

link for pdf-download:
http://www.addebook.com/it/uncategorized/software-studies-a-lexicon-leonardo-books_7348.html

or from amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Software-Studies-Lexicon-Leonardo-Books/dp/0262062747/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227376583&sr=8-1

>> Lev Manovich, "Software Takes Control", 2008

2008-11-21T19:57:00.006+01:00

Lev Manovich's most recent book can be downloaded from this site:
http://softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.pdf

the software studies initiative at UCSD:
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/