User:Petra Milički/rw&rm/draft

(this is a very drafty draft - there is a middle part missing, the conclusion and references )

Title(s) - how the code effects nature of the text on 3 different levels - sign, hypertext, context - levels of the code - from binary system to software art - text and code - how code forms the text

Abstract

This essay investigates relations between the programming code and textuality by concentrating on the how digital and networked media changed common notions of text. In order to see how their interactions have affected creative and artistic practices the relationship between the text and the code will be observed through three levels of programming.

By starting with the low level of coding, a communication between hardware and software via binary sistem, the essay will try to explain code language through comparison with natural language. Here we come to the first outcome of the code-text interrelations, which changes nature of the text that code in its essence is, executable text.

- Characteristics of the digital text (to be added)-

Further on, essay takes the code beyond the context of technical systems, to the context of the social, political and cultural systems that are becoming increasingly dependent on these technical foundations. This essay conciders software or generative art/design to be the heighest level of program code, as it uses performative text.

1 To explain how the code influences speech and writing, and changes their common notions on the lower levels of the code, I will introduce Katherine Hayles and the methodology she uses in her book “My Mother was a Computer”. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. In this sense, Hayles claims that code always changes the writing/speech that comes out of digital media.

She explores speech, writing and code, each in their own worldview, but also the complex relationships between those worldviews, which she calles “intermediations” (Nicholas Gessler). They take place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media.

Since each successor has the ability to reinterpret the systems that came before, she uses the progression from speech, through writing to code to explain the significance of the code and the need for reevaluation of the commonly accepted ideas about signification* in the context of coding technologies.

Hayles focuses on 2 theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure and his view of speech, and Jacques Derrida and his grammatological view of writing, and uses their methodologies and systematic approach to define the nature of the code as the programming language.

Hayles argues that the code exceeds both writing and speech and is different from both because it speaks to both humans and machines.

According to Saussure*, the signifier and the signified are components of the sign, which is formed by the associative link between them. Signifier is the form of the word or phrase, and the signified is it’s mental concept. However, even with these two components, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs, which means that a sign can form its value only through the value of relationships with other signs. The contrasts that forms between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive their meaning.

If put in the context of the code, signification system would concider voltages and their changes as signifiers (1/0 corresponds to 5 volts/0 volts). Signifieds are the interpretations that other layers of code give these voltages. The signifieds become signifiers for higher levels of processing languages that eventually work their way toward human-renderable translations.(#)

The comparison Saussure’s signification theory to the language of code, Hayles concludes with: “Because all these operations depend on the ability of the machine to recognize the difference between one and zero, Saussure’s premise that differences between signs make signification possible fits well with the computer architecture.”

But when it comes to Derrida’s pointoview of the signification system, the continuity between computer architecture and the system becomes discontinuated.

Accoring to Derrida, the differance between signs should be transformed into differánce, which suggests that meanings generated by differential relations are endlessly deffered, which means that: “... signs can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional signs, from which they differ. Thus, meaning (signified) is forever “deferred” or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers, there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total.

In the code world this would translate into a some sort of ambiguity, which the programming language can not tolerate. But as the system builds up levels of programming languages, it developes functionalities that permit and tolerate greater ambiguities “In the worldview of code, it makes no sense to talk about signifiers without signified. Every voltage must have a precise meaning in order to affect the behaviour of the machine.” (Hayles)

This all leads to definition of the nature of programming language: “Allthough code originates with human writers and readers, once entered into the machine it has its primary reader the machine itself.” This means that the machine is the final executor and it decides on weather the code is intelligible, regardless of what humans think about it.

Although we can view computer code as independent logical struture, without the neccessary platform it doesn’t have the real meaning, weather that platform is a human brain or a digital computer. The ability to make the behaviour of machines change, made the code arguably as important as natural language, because it causes things to happen and by that it is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language. Code is the only executable language, which makes it’s texts - executable text (Galloway).

“Although speech and writing issuing from programmed media may still be recognizable as spoken utterances and print documents, they do not emergre unchanged by the encounter with code.”

Code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine bahaviour and through networked ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code.

2

3 Code, however, does not only influence the text by making it executable, nor does it only change the notions of text it self by phenomenon of digital text (phenotext) shown as the graphical user interfaces. Code goes beyond the technical environment and forms a new social, political and cultural contexts. “‘Coded performativity’ also has direct, political consequences on the virtual spaces (the Internet, for example) which we are increasingly occupying: program code, according to the U.S. law professor Lawrence Lessig, “increasingly tends to become law.””#

Arns writes that the decision for a particular code is, according to Lessig, “also a decision about the innovation that the code is capable of promoting or inhibiting.” This gives the code the power to mobilise or immobilise its users, eventhough it remains invisible. Graham Harwood refers to this as an “invisible shadow world of process.”

In communications networks, similarly, the structures of economic, political, societal power distribution must be made opaque and thus visible. Ultimately, it is a question of returning the computer science-based definition of transparency (that is, the transparency of the interface: information hiding) to its original meaning–clearness and controllability through visibility.

The outcome of the highest level of this code interfearing text () comes in form of generative art/design and the real affordance of the code is very well represented in the form of software art/design. Inke Arns writes about the differences and similarities between those two in her essay/article Read_me, run_me, execute_me Code as Executable Text: Software Art and its Focus on Program Code as Performative Text.

Arns writes: “According to Philip Galanter (2003), generative art refers to “any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural intervention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.”

Although, Arns talks about generative art and software art, this essay will take the freedom to treat design with the same pretences.

Generative art/design uses self-organising processes, which run autonomously following the instructions given and programed by the artist/designer. Depending on the technological context in which the process unfolds, the result is unpredictable and thus less the product of individual intention or authorship than the product of the given working conditions.

The main characteristic of the generative processes is the ability to use them to negate intentionality, the human influence. “Generative art is only concerned with generative processes (and in turn, software or code) insofar as they allow–when viewed as a pragmatic tool that is not analysed in itself–the creation of an ‘unforeseeable’ result.”

The ** in Generative Gestaltung describe the Generative design/art as a proces which starts with the ‘idea’, which is then by abstraction transformed into ‘rule algorithm’, which is then by formalization and starting parameters formed into ‘source code’. Into both, the rule algorithm and source code, an artist/designer can intervene by either modifying rules of the former or by modifying source code or parameters of the latter. Further on, the source code gives the ‘output’ of the proccess which is then evalued and judged by the author/artist/designer.

Director of the Generative Design Lab at the Politecnico di Milano technical university in Milan describes generative art as a tool that allows the artist or designer to synthesise “an ever-changing and unpredictable series of events, pictures, industrial objects, architectures, musical works, environments, and communications.” The artist could then produce “unexpected variations towards the development of a project” in order to “manage the increasing complexity of the contemporary object, space, and message.”

Codemuse web site also defines generative art as a process with parameters that the artist should experiment with “until the final results are aesthetically pleasing and/or in some way surprising.”Having in mind the difference between software and generative art/design, Arns considers generative art and generative design as processes mainly concerned with the results that they produce. Software is here used as a pragmatic-generative tool or to achieve a certain (artistic) result without questioning the software itself. “The generative processes that the software controls are used primarily to avoid intentionality and produce unexpected, arbitrary and inexhaustible diversity.”

On the other hand software art, refers to artistic activity that enables reflection of software (and software’s cultural significance) within the medium – or material – of software. Unlike generative art/design, it does not regard software as a pragmatic aid that disappears behind the product it creates, but focuses on the code it contains–even if the code is not always explicitly revealed or emphasised.

Although text issuing from programmed media may still be recognizable as plain text, it will never emergre unchanged after encounter with the code. “Software art makes visible the aesthetic and political subtexts of seemingly neutral technical command sequences”. (Cramer)

Software art can base itself on a number of different levels of software: source code level, abstract algorithm level, or on the level of the product created by a given piece of code.

They are more concerned with the coded processes that generate particular results or interfaces. Their focus is not on design, but on the use of software and code as culture–and on how culture is implemented in software. To this end, they develop ‘experimental software’, a self-contained work (or process) that deals with the technological, cultural, and social significance of software–and not only by virtue of its capacity as tool with which arbitrary interfaces are generated. In addition, the authors of ‘experimental software’ are rather concerned with artistic subjectivity, as their use of various private languages shows, and less with displaying machinic creativity and whatever methods were used to form it.

Software art comprises projects that use program code as their main artistic material or that deal with the cultural understanding of software, according to the definition developed by the transmediale jury. Here, software code is not considered a pragmaticfunctional tool that serves the ‘real’ art work, but rather as a generative material consisting of machinic and social processes. Software art can be the result of an autonomous andformal creative process, but can also refer critically to existing software and the technological, cultural, or social significance of software.

The current interest in software, according to my hypothesis, is not only attributable to a fascination with the generative aspect of software, that is, to its ability to (pro)create and generate, in a purely technical sense. Of interest to the authors of these projects is something that I would call the performativity of code–that is, its effectiveness in terms of speech act theory, which can be understood inmore ways than just as purely technical effectiveness–that is, not only its effectiveness in the context of a closed technical system, but its effect on the domains of aesthetics, politics, and society. In contrast to generative art, software art is more concerned with ‘performance’ than with ‘competence’, more interested in parole than langue –in our context, this refers to the respective actualisations and the concrete realisations and consequences in terms, for example, of societal systems and not ‘only’ within abstract-technical rule systems.