Vinyl records encrypted with a morse code. The text is a French manifesto available here :

http://lafeteestfinie.free.fr/a_mort.htm

The stake of this work is inside the discrepancy between the meaning of the code and the visuel aspect of it on the surface of the record. If the encryption system is merely elementary and known, the morse code is something common, it is not as far so easy to decipher the meaning of the content.

The record embodies in this way several dimensions, the emission of a meaning spontaneously inaccessible and inserted like a parasite within a common consumption product. The object invites us as well in a process of exchange and circulation. Each of us can listen a record, set it on a record player, take one at home and share it with other people in other places.

It’s a video project which consists in an interview between a contemporary  artist and an addictologist. This one has to listen and advice his patients as sort to help them to fight and control their addictions. The artist has to deal as well with some addictions, in particular with his practice and all the consequences it has in the society. How the artist lives with its the stakes and problematics coming from his involvement. How could he better live his integration or disintegration from the networks (social and informal networks) ? How could he exist without playing the game of cooptations and collusions?

How could the artist assume this part of contradiction between the necessity to live from his art and in  the same way never be submitted to other peoples (decisions-makers, galerist, curators…)?

Hijack of the videogame : “Singstar”. A game for the playstation, sort of karaoke with a vocal recognition and totalisation of scores. Usually, these games include a lot of songs general public, popular music and all other hits. We’d like to hijack this device and insert revolutionary and popular song, songs which leave a mark within several stikes, actions ans social upheavals.

Art-Act offers to develop a deviant contagious tool of autonomizing knowledge by the means of an obsolete mass device which, as an early symptom of embedded technology, is emblematic of post-industrialized societies shift: the GameBoy.

What we’d like to do is to develop a GameBoy’s circuit bending project in sort of making several operational units and begin to spread a DIY method and shared contents which enhance autonomizing knowledge.

Art-Act is mainly inspired by Michel De Certeau thinking of mètis which “concentrates the most knowledge in the least time. Reduced to its smallest size in an act transforming the situation, this
concrete encyclopedia takes after the philosopher’s stone!”. Linked to technology, we think mètis through the hypra-low-tech idea which is a slacker’s praxis. And indeed this project is about slacking as Patrick Durkee defined it, that is to say a “politics of waste”.

Technically we’d like to delete original contents from GameBoy games and replace them by new contents defined as autonomizing knowledge: all kind of content that has to do with self-determination, DIY, what helps to understand what rules the world. Then we want to initiate an exchange program of contents based on infokiosque’s philosophy which is free culture. Our purpose is to question the use of technology, the knowledge it involves and the capacity to re-invent modalities to recover its symbolic value.

GameBoy is a disused device which has been nourishing the hacker’s imaginary as a paradigm of jamming dedicated and locked technology. This is likely an open-source activation. By re-engineering the waste we attempt to create an alter(ed)-economy. We’d like also to make a video of the work in process as a documentary tool of an experience to share and as a questioning of knowledge,
particularly its hierarchy organization, and what do our own choices of content mean.

Liste des textes placés sur les cartouches Gameboy :

Cartouche 1
« Actions directes – mode d’emploi » (Les Pokemons activistes, 2001)
« Appel pour l’action directe » (Zanzara Athée)
« Manuel de sabotage, par la CIA » (Éditions Clandestines)
« Manifeste du sabotage en entreprises » (Spank the Bank & Sabotage à tous les Étages)
« Petit guide pratique pour défier les forces de l`ordre: Tactiques et système d`autodéfense pour le
manifestant moderne, résistance à la violence policière » (Sarin)
« L’art et la science du détournement publicitaire. » (Bilboard Liberation Front)
« Comment blanchir l’argent sale, manuel pratique pour crapules modernes et citoyens naïfs » (les
Renseignements Généreux)
« La guerre civilisée, La défense par actions civiles » (Gene Sharp, traduction Bernard
Lazarevhitch)
« L’abolition de la guerre, un but réaliste » (Gene Sharp, traduit par Traducteurs sans frontières)
« Gaz CS, comment en combattre les effets » (indymedia Nantes)
« Contre le fichage ADN »
« Face à la police/ face à la justice » (Elie Escondida & Dante Timelos)
« Guide des violences policières » (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme)
« Kit­Keuf » (RAIDH, Réseau d’Alerte et d’Intervention pour les Droits de l’Homme)
« Que faire lorsqu’on est arrêté par la police lors d’une manifestation » (Syndicat de la magistrature)
« Pense bête juridique, manif/actions contre­sommet de l’OTAN 2009 » (Legal Team Strasbourg)
« Non, c’est non. Petit manuel d’autodéfense à l’usage de toutes les femmes qui en ont marre de se
faire emmerder sans rien dire. » (Irene Zeilinger)
« La java du code barre » (Catherine Bourgain)
« La randonnée, un art de vivre » (Indymedia Nantes)
« Le Squat de A à Z » (Collectif)
Cartouche 2
« Informatique, sabotage, contre­pouvoir » (Hannibal Lecter)
« Cultures de la Sécurité » (Crimethlinc.)
« La résistance électronique et autres idées impopulaires » (Critical Art Ensemble)
« Machine Chair » (Critical Art Ensemble)
« L’Invasion Moléculaire » (Critical Art Ensemble)
« Le sabotage artistique » (Hakim Bey)
« Le terrorisme poétique » (Hakim Bey)
« Guerrilla Gardening »
« Allotments and guerrilla farming » (Graham Burnett)
« Atelier Jogging d’Action » (Fondation Babybrul)
« Nous autres » (Yevgueni Ziamatine)
« Culture Libre » (Laurence Lessig)

Cartouche 3
« Un autre monde est possible. Energie, matières premières, informations autonomisantes » (C.J.L. Energie)
« Bière Open Source » (Ekopedia)
« Le Pain » (Ekopedia)
« Les yaourts » (Ekopedia)
« Friteuse magazine, spécial filtration, 3 recettes faciles » (les ateliers permanents)
« Produire son biogaz, réalisation d’un biodigesteur de démonstration. » (onpeutlefaire.com)
« Calendrier du potager »
« La Permaculture » (Masanobu Fukuoka, Newlimits)
« À la recherche du jardin propre : l’agriculture synergétique » (Patrick Bletsas, Olivier Barbié)
« Permaculture » (Bill Mollison)
« Le Bois Raméal Fragmenté » (Ekopedia)
« Compostage » (Ekopedia)
« La conservation des aliments » (Ekopedia)
« La lactofermentation » (Ekopedia)
« Les laits végétaux » (Ekopedia)
« Les graines germées » (Eric Viard)
« Comment traiter l’eau ? » (onpeutlefaire.com)
« La toilette sèche » (Ekopedia)
« Dôme géodésique, sur le modèle de No Border » (Boîte à Outils Éditions)
« Street Medics, manuel pour un peu plus d’autonomie face aux premiers secours » (Joviale et Peter Benton)
« Les illusions du progrès technique, la course au high tech, ses conséquences et ses alternatives » ( Les Renseignements Généreux)
« Créer en SCOP, le guide de l’entreprise participative » (le Réseau des entrepreneurs participatifs)
« La Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif »
« Qu’est­ce que le S.E.L. » (selidaire.org)

Read more about : Culturissime.Pancevo’s Biennial (Serbia), September 2008

http://www.bijenaleumetnosti.rs/

For the 13th Pancevo’s Biennal in Serbia, Art-Act presents one the module of the Culturissime’s project : the fitness area. A workout space which deals with the articulation of the body and the spirit within a specific cultural context.

Photos credits (Ana Vilenica, 13th Pancevo Biennal’s Curator)

Culture, as a norm which establishes agreements of being and living together, implies as well a counterculture. Balloons embody the slackspace metaphor : a free space which allows potential actions in an insidious way. Culture is an envelope containing an invisible air and the counterculture is this air giving a shape to the envelope. As one is formal, the other one is iformal. And the outward appearance comes from the confrontation and tension between these two elements.

We place on these gym balls all possible definitions of culture, got from a generative software. Two videos broadcasted on the area are debating and unveiling the question of culture associated to bodybuilding as well as intelligent games (Who wants to be a millionar?, Run for Gold -push the button, give me the answer, be the faster) or fun house games (punching-balls on whih teenagers test their strengths).

4 posters (1,20m x 80cm) show and invite everyone to workout : “If only I knew then what I know now”

The audience observation is interesting. If we were afraid the participants to be too shy and fear to manipulate the balloons, in fact, it was absolutely not the case. We wished the audience to play and be self-confident with the installation. Kids threw them balloons to the face, jumped on it, redid the exercises. Adults used them as seats and tried some series of sit-ups as they were reading the posters.

Culture, I throw it.

Culture, I’m sitting on it.

Culture is getting damaged, culture brings me some rest , culture is vaster than what I’m seeing on it, culture is fragile, culture is a link, culture is mixed, complex, culture is immediate…

MyFlag is a visual anthropology interpetation about self-representation’s issue. How to resume the individual complexity in a single sign ? Piracy offers numerous examples in regard of the Jolly Roger (dead head pirate flag) variation designed with symbols related to the pirate embodied by the pavilion.
In regard of the self-representation’s spaces proliferation like MySpace, it is interesting to flashback on those pavilions hanging under the sees in a sign of claimed and assumed freedom.

MyFlag, social networking and dialogic reappropiation by Lilith Knup
Visit MyFlag on Myspace.

Following generations are extracted from programming generators. They combine randomly drawings made by Art-Act.

Generateur 2_2_1

Générateur 4_3_

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Generateur 4_3_2

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We had to find the right moment and place to activate these generators. As we were wandering in the city of Pau (south-west of France) and during the Great Race Car, we knew it was the perfect opportunity to insert our posters. Indeed, for two consecituve weeks, the city was totaly transformed. There were several automobile races, WTCC, WRC, vintage cars race, fast cars growling all the day, roaring, farting exhaust fumes. This period was amazing, not because of the these races but more in reason of thepublic spaces restrictions, privatisations and barricades.

The town council, first complice, didn’t hesitate to restrict access and lock several spaces, unless you buy a ticket. Besides the exorbitant costs of these passes, it seems unacceptable to block the streets, pavements and force the pedestrians to walk on the streets with cars, to forbidd the access to the public places and see security guards and policemensetting shackles and padlocks on the fences.

The citizens have to bear the noises and all restrictions of circulation, pollution, night nuisances and all others annoyances withouy any compensation. The political speech will give a wide bunch of arguments and will defuse our position, saying that such events are bargains for the city, opportunities to let the city exist outside its own area, positive effects being notable for the restaurants, hostels, shops and so on…

Bla bla bla bla bla, we all know the discourse of powers, enough to understand its mechanisms. But the reality of the ground and the violence are telling us the opposite. The city of Pau, each year becomes a camp with its authorized and non-authorized spaces, a zone of wich the handling gets away from the view and the daily environment. The violence is moreover obvious because the show is only available to those enough wealthy. As we’re living a chaotic period, economically and socially,this feeling of exclusion increases. The public space is selled off and divided into several small parts. It’s in this particular context that Art-Act decided to step in. MyFlah asks the identity and self-representation notion, MyFlag invites us to reappapropriate the spaces playing between this paradox : public/private, virtual/real… Then, let’s do!

The poster campaign we did included about fifteen posters and we pasted them on fences, walls and other strategic places. Each poster is about 1,50 meters and 3,50 meters tall. Some of them were 4,50 meters high and have been unrolled from bridges just near stables.

Others were placed on pools, builded with gym mats.

Here are some pictures of these brief actions.

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Be honest, our objective didn’t deals specifically with billsticking. We don’t want to be permanent and let traces eternally in the public space. We wanted by these actions - certainly was it something minor in comparison of the whole territory - put in evidence and with irony, the absurdity of a such territorialization. Anyway, if decision-makers consider normal to privatize the circulations flows of the city, then the passerby has the right to reaffirm his territory.

Translated by Justin Katko & Camille Paloque-Bergès / http://camille.pb.googlepages.com

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Introduction: a poetics of information?

If the limits of digital literatures have not yet been defined, then we know – at least since Lev Manovich articulated an “informational aesthetics”¹ – how to approach textualities elaborated by and for the digital medium. A Macluhanian criticism of media (medium equals message) is replaced by a critique based on the study of the language of digital media, where the processing of data determines cultural forms whose ideological values are flexible and ambiguous. An informational approach was already that of Roman Jakobson, resituated by Sandy Baldwin into the lineage of Claude Shannon’s statistical theory of communication²Shannon undertakes to define information in a context of mediation: information moves through channels, carried by combinations of units, units that are both signals (material) and symbols (conceptual). Shannon proceeds with a quantitative and statistical analysis of symbols, in order to determine how information is produced, and thus, what information is. For a given message, if the combination of units is improbable, information is produced in high quantity; if the combination is redundant, less information is produced. Jakobson’s poetics would be coming from Shannon’s system: literature, characterized by interconnected structures, is defined by a literary ratio, the index of its “defamiliarization”. This ratio is the motor of an innovation that renews informatic systems, repositioning expectations and redundancies in a structure of probabilities. Baldwin explains that: “For Shannon, the more complex and difficult the encoding of a message, the more information it contained. […] Now, the novelty of literature was Shannon’s singular example of information density […] Since information theory addresses systems of coding and transmission, literature remains necessary to the definition of information while lying outside its space of application. Literature is the medium of information ‘itself’”³ This conclusion is only possible in a context where messages are inscribed within a larger structure, an interconnection of writings defined by the structure’s inter-mediality (or medial connectivity in an exchange network); above all, this sense of interconnection reinterprets its context as a frame in which processes (not only of communication but also of signification) are at stake – a virtual community where codes are not only functional but also semiotic. One could argue that an innovative mode of textual agency, i.e. hijacking speech acts and injecting noise into informational systems, renders this superimposition of codes a dead-end. This essay asks: what kind of poetics, elaborated with the help of early information theories, could emerge out of a confrontation between actors in a networked communication system?

Agonistic noise experimentation with listserv protocols

Virtual communities running lists-servs have a practical understanding of interconnection: it is a textuality contributing to the development of the problem of a “language plus code”, as formulated by N. Katherine Hayles⁴ Going back to an early pragmatic, informational, and code-oriented theory of communication may enlighten the literary (hypertextual) and sociologic (collaborative) definitions of interconnection. A semiotic approach might ask: what are the textual strategies⁵ at play in the poetic processing of information? The most obvious examples of this are the Codeworkers’ interventions on listservs. But can the study of a textuality that confronts protocols (in the computational sense of a ruleset that determines the format – and thus the meaning – of messages exchanged between computers) limit itself to the analysis of interpretive strategies, or should it take into account the stochastic⁶ dimension of informational systems?

As Florian Cramer reminds us, Codeworks are originally only e-mails⁷; but more particularly emails sent to listservs, which are channels of communication allowing a group to share information or discuss topics of common interest. Since the mid-90s, listservs have been created by art centers or other communities of theorists and practitioners in the field of new media. Codeworkers intervene regularly on these lists, and these interventions constitute their “works”. Several Codeworkers have created their own lists, such as Alan Sondheim or mez⁸. Theoretically, these lists welcome and even encourage Codework-type e-mails: the most active, <nettime>, describes itself as “a moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets⁹”, which echoes in part the text-processing techniques of Codeworkers. But the term “filtering” is ambiguous in the sense that it refers also to strategies of listserv moderation. Generally, moderation is automated: a program controls the circulation of e-mails and filters out spam. As a matter of fact, Codeworks have been compared to spam because of their illegibility and frequency. French net.artist Frédéric Madre has coined the term “Spam art” for these interventions. mez herself, in an e-mail sent to the Syndicate list in June 2000 and referring to a nettery, describes Spam art as: “One of the early Incitation Netiterature Genres seeking to validate the use of the email network and procedural collaborative responses as an acceptable fictocritical medium. Spam Art is essentially a misnomer that has concreted itself within the netiterature […] Influenced by the now-infamous NeoNetitures [click to Mezangelle, NeoNetiture, RE_WORKINPR, Antiorp, Warnell, Webartery] whose stylistic rhizomatic emails also incorporated radical emotive tracts from sub-collaborative reactors.”¹⁰ Note that Madre and mez are both Spam artists as well as theorists. They undertake the definition of a literature of informatic poetic speech¹¹ using an oblique and negative process of identification: genre (“Incitation Netiterature”), name (“misnomer”), intertextual paternity (“the now-infamous NeoNetitures”), form and style (“rhizomatic emails”), etc. But also by describing methods: a subjective approach of collective and public contexts of the network that articulates a reactive political position (“emotive tracts from sub-collaborative reactors”). Spam art participates in the definition of an ars poetica of Codeworks.

Syndicate, a listserv initiated by Inke Arns and Andreas Broeckmann in 1996, was a site of Spam art’s early experiments. One of the first lists, Syndicate was un-moderated, un-filtered, and relayed announcements of new media-related events in Europe. In 1997-98, Syndicate came under a Spam art attack performed by the collective NN (aka “nn”, “Netochka Nezvanova”, “integer” or “Antiorp”). NN’s works are in the lineage of mez’s faux-code texts or Sondheim’s texts generated through subjective programming, and seem to materialize the production of noise in a communication system in
a way less metaphorical than mez or Sondheim. In 1997, one of their first actions was to unsubscribe all of the Syndicate participants. Then, blitzkriegs: e.g. from August 13th-19th 1998, “antiorp” bombed the list with messages parodying promotional speeches, calls for work and subvention proposals (recurrent practices in artistic environments)¹². NN especially targets conference announcements, as in their 2005 intervention where “integer” delivered ironic rants on the intellectual masturbation of theorists (“self.lubricating”), pseudo-philosophical jargon on machinic bodies and artificial intelligence (“bodiez need soulz”) and rigid reading protocols at colloquies (“i read u listen_…/sch/sch […] sacred synaptic landscapes […] schhhhhhh…”)¹³. NN was eventually collectively banned from Syndicate, then eventually re-admitted, but only until their last attack on January 4th-5th 2001, when they sent a series of viruses to the list, viruses that were inoffensive but with spectacular effects¹⁴. A month later, Syndicate went down. In “Rise and Decline of the Syndicate”¹⁵, Arns and Broeckman denounce the aggressive behavior of NN, referring to a code of ethics for network communication, a “netiquette”. NN consistently breaks the rules: they promise to behave well and attack even more; they abundantly use self-promotion through vanity links and long epidictic texts on the glory of Netochka Nezvanova’s persona (or better, its staged vanitas)¹⁶; they over-parody manifestos in a speech that uses multiple languages¹⁷, faux-code, gibberish, pseudo-anarchist propaganda, sarcasm and grandiloquence.
The purpose of these interventions is to generate a noise capable of disturbing the open channels that mark a listserv as a community. Alan Sondheim, the high priest of Codeworks, assigns a political mission to noise, terming it “social turbulence” in a system of communication where “address [is] coded”¹⁸. This perspective has ties to Language poets such as Bruce Andrews, who writes on the political repercussions of noise: “Dissonance expands the possible range of what can bear momentum and drive it forward - to make incompletions (or frictions) that solicit a resolution in the future. Instead of information, this is deformation - a universalizing of tension, stoking chaos, by denser (and freer) articulation […] A free play that the equivocal, undefinitive quality of sound units in language makes possible - as long as they are not recruited as doubling echoes, indentured to stable systems of stable meaning. Noise as chaos.”¹⁹ Noise (poetic noise, in this case), might seem to have an entropic and counter-informational value: according to the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, “information is entropy with a negative sign”²⁰. But this entropy is accounted for by the Language poets in terms of quality, which is an interpretive leap from entropy’s primary definition: “an average quantity of information attributable to a message constituted by a set of signals, representing the degree of uncertainty in which each signal manifests itself”²¹. It is precisely this definition, based on signal, that Andrews rejects: “The reduction of sounds to signals may help with a project of subgroup boosterism or identity politics empowerment. But it may also abandon a project of decoding a larger antagonistic social outside”²². The Language poets’ project can be thought of as a will to substitute the Objectivist poet George Oppen’s “discrete series” for the mathematician Claude Shannon’s “discrete translators”: to disturb language automatisms, to provoke a “shock mimesis”, to replace the discrete units of linguistic rules by sound sequences and language (re)compositions. This can be meaningful in the context of a reflection on natural languages, which are referential by definition; but what happens in the context of auto-referential informatic codes? What kind of object can mimesis shock? The very quality that poetics “adds” to language, and which modern and post-modern literary experiments have praised, should be interrogated once again in a digital context where text generated by code (or hybridized textcode in Codeworks interventions), suddenly engenders new questions²³.

NN’s interventions are excessive, disturbances in an environment where moderation, collaboration and cooperation are the basis of communication²⁴. Noise, in computer jargon, is defined as what threatens the constitution and documentation of informational patrimony. NN performs in the field of human conflict, refusing the constructive logic that transforms a group into a community: they fight with agon (a verbal confrontation on stage). On the Pavu collective website (a trio of net.artists close to NN), a manifesto-type axiom can be found hidden in the source code: <meta name=”description” content=”pavu.com After Contemporary. Forget the avant-garde, get ReadY for the En-gArde!”> This war cry²⁵ heightens the militaristic metaphor embedded in the notion of the avant-garde, by asserting the desire for direct conflict, the duel: an almost playful confrontation in a virtual community that takes political commitment seriously. Geert Lovink, initiator of <nettime>, another victim of Spam art, speaks up in 2004 after Alan Sondheim accuses him of censoring Codeworks: “Many will find a relief that such postings and related debates no longer happen, but that’s perhaps a personal matter. What might be true is the shift towards political economy, away from arts and culture. The political economy (of new media) thread has been part of nettime from day one, at least in my understanding. And I am not sure that one can find these debate anywhere […] The question could be: what moves people these days? I think that’s a more interesting–and urgent– question than the old issue of ‘censoring’ nn or mez.”²⁶ In effect, it is true that Codeworkers protest against censorship as soon as the community voices its discontent²⁷ palais-tokyo-list@pleine-peau.com” http://mail.v2.nl/v2east/2000/Feb/0166.html]. But this protest is purely formal: they provoke their own censorship in a refusal, not of the possibility, but of the positivity of discourses on “political economy”.

Is text-code a critical reproduction or a speculative reprogramming of discourses?

The “codes” to which Semioticians refer to, and after them, the Codeworkers, have to be decoded through a critical reading of intertexts and social behaviors. But social “decoding”, understood in the context of software, codes, and “debugging”²⁸ techniques, has the quality of an analogy whose metaphoric value should be considered with care. In cybernetic theory, noise is not an addition but a loss of information, writes Norbert Wiener: “as efficient as communications’ mechanisms have become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it”²⁹. The value of addition assigned to the phenomenon of entropy is actually a leak of information and a dilution of the units (symbols) in noise. Thus, this essay asks if the poet-performers on listservs are “external agents” who invent new modes of control in an ars poetica belonging specifically to the informatic medium³⁰ Poems often have as their subject the very nature of control as beauty. The poetic choice […] is personal, even temperamental: to risk absolute communication or take the risks of extreme control”, in The Triumph of the Mobile: The Structure of Information, the Language of Computers and Contemporary Poetry, Writers Forum, 2000 (1972), p.14], or “agents provocateurs” who create artificial interference in communication by manipulating error codes and toying with disinformation.

According to Shannon, in an information system, transmission errors tend to be re-encoded; noise is reduced to facilitate the distribution of messages: thus communication doesn’t create anything new. As the first works of the ARPANET testify, redundancy is a condition for optimizing network communication.³¹ The problematic of Codeworks does not concern the introduction of new information to be encoded, but a new situation of disturbed communication (i.e. noise) to re-encode: the fight between a “free play”³²|ulation||“(http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/free.htm)] and “doubling echoes” (to use Bruce Andrews’ terms). The only possible answer that the informational community can provide to these attacks is redundancy: re-encoding noise through filtering. It’s paradoxical in the sense that this redundancy is precisely what the Codeworkers denounce: the interventions provoke these reactionary positions, or, better said, they generate them (almost programming them). The paradox is articulated in the image of parasitism used by the organizers of Syndicate, Arns and Broeckmann: “The irony of this process is that, like any good parasite, this artistic practice depends on the existence of lively online communities: it not only bites, but kills the hand that feeds it. - These parasite nomads will find new hosts, no doubt, but they have over the past year helped to erode the social fabric of the wider net cultural population so much that communities have to protect themselves from attacks and hijacks more aggressively than before. Their adolescent carelessness is partly responsible for the withering of the romantic utopia of a completely open, sociable online environment. However educational that may be, we despise the deliberation with which these people act”.³³ The only possible co-existence between Spam art and new media communities is of a parasitic nature.

Alan Sondheim develops a speech of resistance close to Bruce Andrews’: a network is a space of technical and ideological redundancy in communities controlled by system administrators (“systadmin”) or moderators, “nodal gate-keepers at the heads or tails of flux-vectors”³⁴. Against this backdrop of surveillance, Sondheim foresees the future in terms of liberatory tactics: “Look for increased hacking in the next millennium, hacking as a way of life, the hacking culture, with its emphasis on anarchic bricolage, becoming the seeds of a future renaissance.”³⁵ This is preparation for Mackenzie Wark’s theory of vectorial economics: the vectorial class is a reinterpretation of Marx’s bourgeois factory-owner within the contemporary information economy: a class that owns intellectual property over software (“intelligent machines”). Codeworkers seem eager to execute the hacker’s program of resistance, and play the role, within online artistic communities, that hackers play within the world of corporate high-tech. The problem is that “the hacker” is a fantasy, a wish as Wark himself admits in Hacker Manifesto³⁶. The Codeworks’ ars poetica formulates language hacks as a method of infiltration and a critique of networks – but this in an endless play of images that blurs any political distinction. Their works betray a hope in the quality of noise’s transmutation and the fantasy of a “technological sublime”³⁷ that would fight network indigestions sustained by a hyper-subject (supposedly the digital persona saturated in information redundancy, or better, drowning in an information overload³⁸) – from this perspective, text in excess (in entropy) is laxative.

In a virtual community, what should be the quality of information? What should be the purpose of critique? The “new media community” has an ambiguous relationship to Codeworks.³⁹ In praising the quality of Software art in 2003, Andreas Broeckmann writes: “Software art […] can be the result of an autonomous and formal creative practice, but it can also refer the cultural and social meaning of software, or reflect on existing software through strategies like collage or critique”⁴⁰; this was two years after ranting against NN’s <nettime> disturbances. Yet NN’s interventions into listserv protocols operate on principles analogous to the social and cultural meanings of Software art; their textual strategies are a direct confrontation with the coded rules of the Internet (code as law, as formulated by Lawrence Lessig⁴¹). Codeworks are related to Software art, which is considered “speculative” by Matthew Fuller, and following him, by the trio of Software artists Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward in “Coding Praxis” (2005): “Software, part of whose work is to reflexively investigate itself as software. Software as science fiction, as mutant epistemology. Speculative software can be understood as opening up a space for the reinvention of software by its own means.”⁴² This mutant epistemology belongs to viruses, the first model for the art of code defined by artist-programmers, who put into play the quality per se of code: auto-reproduction. Viruses are a good example of code as discourse in their ability to auto-generate themselves and contaminate rhetorics via media. In 1994-1995, the famous Good Times virus⁴³, for instance, was a hoax, merely an e-mail warning of the existence of a dangerous virus that would not only damage machines, but propagate by sending itself to e-mail addresses found in the victim’s computer; the message’s conclusion is a warning prompting the user to warn their contacts. But by 1994, the capacity for auto-reproduction had not yet been implemented in any computer virus. It was the exponential quantity of Good Times virus alerts that started bringing down users’ e-mail servers: “In a sense, the warning was itself viral […] it replicated itself by exploiting vulnerabilities in the human mind.”⁴⁴

Codeworkers are circumscribed by this critique of the modes of information processing, by imagining textual metaphors for programming. Their interventions, hybridizations of informatic codes and natural languages, present themselves as performative (following the idea of speculation) and in performance. Virtual communities are their privileged space-time for action, being eminently both textual and coded. Espen J. Aarseth has described MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) societies⁴⁵ (discursive and rhetorical by definition) as performing textualities⁴⁶ intended to be read. This makes them textual, and the unique aspects of MUD communication […] well worth comparing to other types of texts”]. These textualities are constituted in a software environment, through which usage puts into play the three positions described in Claude Shannon’s communication diagram: the sender, the receiver and the observer.

Observation and tattling in textual situations

Shannon, in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, distinguishes between communication channels with noise and those without. For those with noise, he proposes a noise reduction model.⁴⁷ An observer must be integrated into the circuit to witness the message at its entry and exit points, making noting of the errors (noise manifestations) produced during transmission. The observer then transmits a “data correction” report to a “correction system”. Under certain conditions, these errors can be encoded into the message for it to be sent once again, reducing the percentage of noise. The quality of a communication’s transmission is thus indexed by “transition probabilities”: the probability of sending and receiving a signal without error. It would be interesting to consider network (and software) users not only as receivers but also as “observers”, i.e. as participating, second hand, in the production of the message – or, more precisely, in its reproduction. In effect, when you circulate through networked spaces your usage of digital tools is put to the test of observation. An application closes without warning, and an error message pops up to alert you that a report has been sent to the developer; a webpage does not show up, and an error code appears along with a text that asks you to contact the webmaster to report the problem; etc.

In ideological terms, the positions of sender and receiver have use-values (good or bad) in relation to the software. The position of the observer is inflected with degrees of thoughtful participation and engagement, from which two extreme behaviors emerge: passive observation (“lurking”) and collaborative observation (in order to determine the rules that define the community, “for its own good”). This last mode is problematic: the observer in Shannon’s “correction system”, transposed to a moral level, becomes the figure of the reporter, and moreover, the tattler. The idea of community is often used to justify the act of reporting; in an online community, the stakes are more intimate (and more virulent) than an error report sent automatically to a software company to improve its product. What’s at stake in tattling involves a folding of the semantic content within the semiotic context of the report: processes of signification, not products. The Codeworks interventions can be read as noise injections intended for the observer-reporter position, aimed specifically at its activation. Its agential action is parasitic and viral: it calls forth a general tattling, hypertrophing and hyperinterpreting the observer function in a message’s transmission. In 1998, the artist-programmer duo JODI jammed the Eyebeam list with a Spam art intervention⁴⁸. In an e-mail sent Friday 13th⁴⁹, they staged a hoax-performance during which some Eyebeam members were subscribed without their consent to a new list called Cyberstar. The victims responded by sending e-mails with the command status “unsubscribe”, a code instruction supposed to activate an automatic un-subscription from the list. Rather than executing the unsubscribe commands, the bot-server, programmed as a hack, sent back the commands as messages to the unwilling participants. As a response, the victims reformulated their desire to unsubscribe, this time in the form of demands (or even insults), linguistic messages addressed to a hypothetical manager of the list. These messages were appeals for a human hand to remedy the server’s coding “mistake”, but they were processed in the same way as before, sent back out as new messages, creating a glut of reprocessed commands and demands in the victims’ mailboxes. JODI’s intervention effected a radical equivalence between code and data, an equivalence inefficient in terms of performativity (activating the list’s commands afforded no result), yet efficient in terms of performance (the commands themselves became a metaphor for the decay of linguistic agency within the machine). Amidst the sabotage of protocols, listserv members become puppet-actors: the only discursive power they have is the power to tattle. They take on the roles of senders and receivers, their actions performing the morality leap of the hypertrophied observer. An Eyebeam member comments on the victim emailers’ behavior, their becoming-aware of their status as a group forced to communicate with a broken code: “Sometimes it takes an emergency situation to see some of the issues we’re discussing on embodiment and information in action. There is a situated physicality here that erupts as if at the site of an accident, when all of the protocols are flung out the window in the urgency of the moment. A scrim of social convention momentarily stripped away.”⁵⁰ JODI’s listserv interventions expose social behaviors in communication situations because they cross the wires of spoken languages with programming languages, speech acts with informatic commands⁵¹.

Protocols of public community: informatic and semiotic codes

Lawrence Lessig suggests that one should question the conditions under which problems (logical or social) are solved with programming⁵². A poetics of Codeworks would reformulate Lessig’s suggestion in a speculative way, i.e. wagering on textual mini-bombs released into the network, the stakes being whether or not the texts will undergo a leap into executability. This wager is based on an analogy between the performativity of informatic codes and the performativity of text, the former being logical (algorithmic) and the latter semiotic (linguistic)⁵³: text disturbs code and vice-versa. Following Lessig, Bernhard Rieder and Michaël Thévenet describe the digital public sphere as a “procedural space”: “The interpretation of messages, of their importance, is an activity which is deeply subjective; however, under the pretext that information classification processes […] are mechanical, modernity requires that it is enough to elect them as a guarantee for precision and objectivity. Here one faces the real question of agens that one should attribute to procedural spaces: spaces that filter, classify, interpret and decide autonomously, and claim a new perspective upon the organization of the public sphere, now hybrid.”⁵⁴ This agens is a fundamental property of coded environments such as listservs, where human question-answer situations are problematized by the command-execution system functioning both parallel to the human and saturating it completely. There are two modes in which communication shifts unexpectedly into protocol: semiotic and informatic. When these two levels of code are superimposed by a Codeworks provocation, they are subject to discursive noise. This agentive quality is at work in texts that claim to belong to a “404 aesthetics”⁵⁵ questioning the community’s discourses by manipulating the very tools that enable them. What’s gained is an expressive power: algorithms, commands and protocols, data processing, filtering techniques, moderation, etc. Codeworkers are the human negative double of the “informational agent” (defined by Rieder as “intelligent agents […], mediators, […] autonomous and intelligent systems [that] settle between man and machine in order to help us live in the digital era”⁵⁶): they are agents provocateurs. Network artists question the notion of the “public” and the representation of their interests by art and/or politics. This problematic is inherited from the Tactical Media Art movement⁵⁷, which interrogates the legitimacy of representation discourses and the expression of “the public good”: what is the public, and, whatever it is, does it have a common voice and common interests? Often the installation of art works in public space result in neighborhood protests. What is the corollary in virtual communities? NN and JODI consider public taste and propriety to be decoys, representations they seek to disturb. They follow a program of critical deconstruction and reject distributive and collaborative ideals considered as “good intentions” of the new media community. They take a position on the unstable border of political activism: by intruding in groups, invalidating discourses of action, replacing them with reactionary texts, and manipulating opinions. The political effect is null, in the sense that either noise is re-encoded by the community via redundancy, or noise destroys the community (as with Syndicate). The poetic effect seems an echo of Jakobson’s reinterpretation of early communication theories: literature becomes an informational medium. The new doesn’t come through informational content but through its remediation in spite of the social protocols of the community (according to the notion of “defamiliarization”). Textual provocation is only efficient to the extent that the text is performed, in motion and in action, on the social arena: but it accomplishes this by confronting the conditions of its own production (in this case, informatic codes and commands). To use mez’s terms, netiteratur wants to analyze its nettery. Thus, the letter of the text is bound only to the support of that upon which it is parasitic: text in itself has no reality, but is an idea processed by and between several media (in the logic of intermedia). It is not material but always literal (by adopting the form of its support). It is a simulation of programming, a circumstantial supplement assigned to a task: something that happens on site, at one specific moment – it would be hard to imagine an anthology of Codeworks appreciable outside of the network context. Network text, as a bruitist intervention, happens where it should happen, mimicking principles of programming and speculating on the effects it can have on behaviors. In that sense, it participates in the renewal of writing via programmatics.
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To come, Disobbedienti.

More info on Oliver Ressler, visit his website :
http://www.ressler.at/

A Film by Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
41 min., 2008

“What Would It Mean To Win?” was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. (more…)