FILE

In the old days, you could run any program on any data, and if you didn't like the results, throw them away. But the Macintosh ended that. You didn't own your data any more. THEY owned your data. THEY chose the options, since you couldn't program. And you could only do what THEY allowed you-- those anointed official developers.

Fred Cohen was not, however, thinking merely of digital guerrilla war but of life in general, of the dynamics of semi-autonomous programs, highlighting that the two, war and life, are not contradictory modalities, in the sense that both are about mobilizing, about enacting. In this respect, his work has also been neglected, and I am not referring to the objections his research received in the 1980s.[16] Instead of merely providing warnings of viruses, Cohen's work and Ph.D thesis presented the essential connections that viruses, Turing machines and artificial life-like processes have. We cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is viral-like. Viruses, worms or any other similar programs that used the very basic operations of communicatory computers were logically part of the field of computing. The border between illegal and legal operations on a computer could not, therefore, be technically resolved -- a fact that led to a flood of literature on "how to find and get rid of viruses on your computer."

For Cohen, a virus program was able to infect "other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, copy of itself."[17] This allowed the virus to spread throughout the system or network, leaving every program susceptible to becoming a virus. The relation of these viral symbol sets to Turing machines was essential, similar to an organism's relation to its environment. The universal machine, presented in 1936 by Alan Turing, has since provided the blueprint for each and every computer there is in its formal definition of programmability. Anything that can be expressed in algorithms can also be processed with a Turing machine. Thus, as Cohen remarks, "[t]he sequence of tape symbols we call 'viruses' is a function of the machine on which they are to be interpreted"[18], logically implying the inherency of viruses in Turing machine-based communication systems. This relationship makes all organisms parasites in that they gain their existence from the surrounding environment to which they are functionally and organizationally coupled.

I do not want to address the question of whether worms and viruses are life as we know it, but underline that in addition to being an articulation on the level of cultural imaginary, this virality is also a very fundamental description of the machinic processes of these programs, and of digital culture in general. As a continuation to the theme of technological modernization, network culture is increasingly inhabited by semi-autonomous software programs and processes, which often raised the uncanny feeling of artificial life as expressed, for instance, in the various journalistic and fictitious examples describing software program attacks. This uncanny feeling is an expression of the hybrid status of such programs that transgress the constitutional (in Latour's sense of the word) boundaries of Nature, Technology and Culture. Whereas viruses and worms have come to be the central indexes of this transgression for popular consciousness, artificial life projects have also faced the same issue. As transversal disciplines such as ALife have for decades underlined, life is not to be judged as a quality of a particular substance (the hegemony of a carbon-based understanding of life) but as a model of the interconnectedness, emergence and behaviour of the constituent components of a(ny) living system. Chris Langton suggested in the late 1980s that artificial life focuses not on life as it is, or has been but on life as it could be. This is taken up as the key idea for projects that see life emerging on various synthetic platforms, silicon and computer-based systems and networks for example. [22] In a similar vein Richard Dawkins, when he viralized cultural reality with his theory of memes in 1976, referred to the possibilities of finding life even in "electronic reverberating circuits." [23]

If architects adopted the techniques of computer graphics as theoretical terms to talk about their own field, we propose to do the same for all cultural fields. However, rather than only using these terms as metaphors, we also propose to visualize cultural processes using the same techniques.

The time has come to align our models and presentations of cultural process with the new design language and theoretical ideas made possible (or inspired) by software. For example, what will happen if we start conceptualizing and visualizing cultural phenomena and processes in terms of continuously changing parameters - as opposed to categorical boxes standard today?

Just as software substituted the older Platonic design primitives with new primitives (curves, flexible surfaces, particle fields) we propose to replace the traditional "cultural theory primitives" by the new ones. A 1D timeline becomes a 2D or 3D graph; a small set of discrete categorical boxes is discarded in favor of curves, freeform 3D surfaces, particle fields, and other representations available in design and visualization software.

A contaminação do teatro pelas artes visuais, cinéticas e eletrônicas dá um novo salto com a emergência das redes telamáticas que permeiam uma comunicação em tempo real e uma extensão do corpo e da presença, que é eminentemente performatizada.