software art

Mark C. Marino explores some of the ways code is used in art practices and how code has been read and interpreted as a complex sign system that means far more than merely what it does. Includes "What Is Code?", "How Is Code Used In Art", and "How Code Is Read".

POCOS is an outward-looking and thoughtful project which addresses topics of significant complexity for the preservation of digital collections. Preservation is challenging enough for relatively well-understood and self-contained data types like images and documents but the digital estate is increasingly about sophisticated interactions and interdependencies between software, hardware and people. Our digital memory is growing in scale, our interactions with it are growing more sophisticated, and the ways in which elements are constructed are growing ever more subtle. So the challenge is not necessarily getting easier the more we know about it. Those concerned with safeguarding our digital legacy must never fall into the trap of constraining digital creativity - but nor should they be so complacent as to think they can afford to ignore change. Instead of waiting for inspiration to come through introspection or individual genius, POCOS invited, persuaded and cajoled many people to consider the transience of our digital heritage. Three symposia followed, on broad themes of visualisation, software art and virtual worlds. Creators, policy makers, conservators and collection managers shared their aspirations, expectations, priorities and limitations. The resulting reports will become a lasting contribution - perhaps even a roadmap - for research and development. Although those behind it would never be so grand to claim it themselves, it has all the best elements of a 'grand challenges' initiative.

This volume considers the preservation of software art. At first inspection, preservation of software art may seem like an esoteric concern for ephemeral objects. But, as with all of POCOS, it challenges many of our expectations about collection management and preservation. There are complex technical challenges about the interdependencies of software, operating systems, hardware and users. It introduces the inter-subjectivity of meaning and the contexts of performance which defy simplistic approaches to documentation and representation. It crosses the boundaries of institutional genre and raises disconcerting questions about policy and competence. So there is a real sense that software art is a topic for the avant-garde of digital preservation: it pushes the boundaries not for its own sake but in order that all can progress.

(Source: Preface by WIlliam Kilbridge)

Nam Shub is a tool and software art project for the creation, modification and performance of text oriented electronic art ranging from experimental literature to visual sound poetry performances or interactive art installations. The discussed project is the second version or rather a newly developed and enhanced version of HyperString which was presented at e-poetry 2005. This tool will be made available under an open source license in the future so that everybody can not only use but alter and expand it. 

(Source: Author's abstract)

This essay discusses the emergence of lifestyles under the paradigm of urban life, based on the results of research on interface design for mobile connections in ubiquitous computing with pervasive and sentient interfaces, which generate cybrid (cyber+hybrid) scenarios for co-located beings that act in physical and digital space. Artistic creation using software art writes programs and uses hardware that convey a sense of presence and action, with digital collage adding information about the physical scene. The digital material is pasted in layers onto the physical space, redesigning places, reconfiguring actions, and mixing realities in a cybrid manner. In other words, locative and mobile interfaces reconfigure the sense of presence by blending in the digital material that adds information to locations. Computers mix into the periphery through transparent interfaces, enabling enactions and affordances in quotidian actions in calm connections with transparent interfaces. Instants are experienced through computers, which become invisible in portable and mobile technologies: cell phones, PADs, displays, computational vision, tags, RFID, Bluetooth, wearable computers, geolocators, trackers, GPS, SMS, MMS, make us co-exist here and there. Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), social platforms, perceptual and affective computing, wearable computing, among other examples from various artists and scientists, are discussed here.