CGI

These three poems by Nick Montfort take an ancient literary and cultural tradition, the riddle, and brings them into the digital age by using CGI scripting to allow readers to guess the response without the riddler needing to be present. The poems provide a simple input cue: a text box where the reader can type in their guess and a button that submits that response to a script, which checks the answer for a match and sends a response, whether it was correct or not. This script was probably written in Perl, a programming language Montfort uses extensively, particularly in his “ppg256” series of poem generators. Part of the interest in this choice of scripting language is that he is able to keep the answer hidden from readers, even from those who like to take a peek at the source code (like me). It also means that he could design a riddle without a correct answer, enacting what Philippe Bootz calls “the Aesthetics of Frustration.”

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Directed by Benjamin Bardou
Produced by Data Films
Music composed by Steve Moore - Logos from "The Way In" album (1990 - Inner Ear Recordings)
CGI from the videogame GTA IV (Rockstar Games/Take Two Interactive)
Data Films - 2013 (Source: Vimeo page description)

Computer Graphics Imaging, CGI, is a rapidly growing industry permeating a variety of disciplines such as the military, the arts, and the sciences. Despite its state of the art character, CGI is a gendered technology manifesting itself in gendered disciplines. The application of CGI marks two highly significant events: one is the virtual and real experience of sexualized death and destruction. The other is reproduction by virtue of its presence and application in Bioinformatics.

Due to CGI's genderedness, in both instances, the image of woman and its meaning is altered while she herself remains absent. As women are portrayed through images of sexualized aggression and increasingly are invited to the front lines (virtual and real), women may potentially lose ground on that which thus far has been identified as typically female: the power of reproduction. At the heart of these developments are programming languages [code], informing technology which in turn informs culture. Code is the categorical rationalization of language, no longer instrument for lyricism or expression but the tool to command technology. To write code means to have power, or rather, code is power. Women primarily remain illiterate when it comes to the production of this powerful and influential new text.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)