about Fréquences – project for iPhone

As soon as I acquired a smartphone, I searched for everything it offered under the term « book ». The applications which resulted from this search were just as numerous as they were disappointing.

Photo: © André Baldinger

Their content: reprises of the great classics (Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe) or bestsellers (Dan Brown, Mary Higgins Clark). Their form: an outdated animation esthetic, with sepia-toned pages akin to those of a spellbook, accompanied by a page-turning sound effect. Or, in a poorer version, barely formatted raw text, universally accessible and often free, but visually similar to an rtf. What I discovered was frankly an insult to the history (both graphic and editorial) of the book, without anything gained. I dreamed of something more—of a book truly designed for smartphones, which would exploit all its possibilities (visual, audio) and fully assume its format. A portable experimental book that would also be a beautiful book.

Fréquences was born from this desire. It also came out of my encounter with André Baldinger, visual designer and typographer, Sébastien Roux, composer, Martin Blum, multimedia designer, and Graziella Antonini, photographer. Together, we imagined an unclassifiable electronic book that was independent of any standard (eReader, Stanza, etc). After a first stage version of this text initially conceived as an opera libretto (produced in 2004 at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, with music by Claude Berset, directed by Fabrice Huggler), we continued to explore this text by imagining it being broadcast on another stage, which would associate creative radio composition and graphic design. The story: a man drives across a winter landscape. We follow the driver’s journey from nightfall to daybreak. He listens to a radio program during which speakers confide fragments of life, pieces of intimacy (see illustration 1).

The text conceived for the stage (with alternating recitatives and arias) was rewritten. Stage directions became sounds or graphic motifs (snow, see illustration 2). We invested in linear, black and white, landscape format, touch-screen buttons triggering images or sounds that act as speed bumps, or offering real pauses, suspensions, in reading. The work is meant to be heard exclusively through headphones for optimal immersion and intimacy. And for each character, we created a particular sound color, or a little melody, as a leitmotiv.

For me, writing for a smartphone was an unprecedented, collective, experience. An experience where the text became an element of a landscape that was both bigger than the text and generated by the text itself. Fréquences is a sensory and cognitive score that has all the elements of a miniature stage play. In this sense, it is an extension of other digital writing experiments, such as the interactive multimedia work by Xavier Malbreil and Gérard Dalmon, the (very beautiful) Livre des Morts.

Célia Houdart (December 2011)
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

Fréquences – projet pour iPhone. Photo: © André Baldinger

Fréquences – project for iPhone
> www.frequences-livre-audio.net/
text: Célia Houdart
visual design and typography: André Baldinger
sound design: Sébastien Roux
photography: Graziella Antonini
direction and development : Martin Blum | Blumbyte Design
iPhone sdk development: ELAO
production monitoring: Grand Ensemble
production: Stanza
coproduction: Cie D. Houdart-J. Heuclin, Le Phénix Scène Nationale de Valenciennes, éditions P.O.L, La Muse en circuit, Centre national de création musicale
with the participation of Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication-DICRéAM, Bourse Orange-Beaumarchais/SACD formats innovants 2010

literature in all its media

If machines awaken in the imagination an « uncanny strangeness » (Unheimlichkeit (1)), they also constitute a material environment that interferes with the arts. To what extent does the development of technology condition creative practices?

Bartolomé Ferrando, Texto poético, 9 – Obra poética, 1999. Photo: D.R.

There is no doubt that artists have always had a choice in their medium of expression, and that there is only voluntary technological art and literature (2). However, « mediological mutations »—which Jean-Pierre Bobillot defines as a technological innovation reinforced by a symbolic innovation (3)—are radically changing the conditions for producing and distributing works. But whereas visual and sound arts, for which the medium is essential, have had no difficulty admitting the role of technology in their creative process, literature remains surrounded by a strange aura of idealism. Even if it is generally accepted today that the transition to the printing press or mass media has considerably marked writing practices, literary studies have hardly been preoccupied with the relationship between literature and its immediate technological environment. The use of « writing machines » is regarded, at best, as self-evident, at worst, as a guiltily materialistic indifference toward the intellectual, if not spiritual, nature of literary art.

This denial of the influence of technological transformations on the modalities of writing does, however, reveal two distinct movements, which are also two attitudes: on one hand, these new technologies are being gradually integrated (when a medium becomes dominant, its common usage makes technology less of an issue); on the other, these same innovations (and their effects) are being questioned. The recent development of digital writing shows that it is possible for these two movements to coexist. If the first, widespread, takes into account extra-literary phenomena (technological development, accessibility, ergonomics…), the second, founded on experimentation with new devices and the invention of adequate writing procedures, manifests the attention that literary creation has always paid to the development of these technologies.

From multiplying media to media-literature

Full awareness that the use of technology could affect literary practices comes late, and is linked to reproduction and communication technologies. A growing interest for these media emerges in the last third of the 19th century, as an important, if poorly studied, dimension of European symbolism. Books are questioned as objects, as in Mallarmé’s exemplary Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (« A roll of the dice will never abolish chance ») in 1897. At the same time, the material conditions for distributing writing evolve (invention of the typewriter in 1868, linotype in 1885), just as writers encounter new media (photography, telephone, phonograph), even if their use is not widespread until the early 20th century. Thereafter, books are clearly designated as outdated objects, or at least to be completely reconstructed (along with a dense contemporary analysis of typography). From poster to record to radio, literature explores every medium of modernity.

As literary media diversify, a conscious sign that « everything can become a medium » (4), they attract more attention to their function as media (particularly in the context of communications criticism, which has become dominant since the mid 20th century). But contrary to digital literature, which developed rich theories on the changes brought about by the medium in terms of both creation and reception, reports on the preceding innovations are rare. Those that do exist are shallow, focusing on the way the machine is explored, exploited for what it is—the same relationship that exists between concrete poetry and the typewriter, or between sound poetry and magnetic tapes and the microphone. Here, the machine is not limited to an auxiliary function but makes possible a specific work, which in turn renews the relationship between the author and the reader.

Bartolomé Ferrando, Texto poético, 9 – Obra poética, 1999. Photo: D.R.

New perceptions of « me, here, now »

Besides its capacity to invest in the medium itself, the changing mediasphere conditions new modalities of perception. Modern communication devices transform our relationship with time and space, sharpening our awareness of the synchrony of events and giving the illusion of ubiquity. This accelerated experience of the modern world finds a parallel in the increasingly instant nature of machine-based writing. According to McLuhan, the coincidence of text production and reproduction is the main advantage of the typewriter (5), just as « real-time processing » is one of the more fruitful uses of computers.

This immediacy, which has also led to the gradual disappearance of crossed-out text (industrially produced paper favors it, while typewriters make it complex and computers erase it), is paradoxically accompanied by a distancing effect. The common characteristic of these communicating machines, which both fascinate and perturb the latter part of the 19th century, is that they lead to depersonalization, or literally, disembodiment. The typewriter obliterates the traces of the handwritten gesture, just as the telephone and the phonograph detach the voice from the body, and photography and film separate one’s appearance from the being that animates it—a phenomenon that recalls the immobile projection of logging in to cyberspace. In the act of writing itself, this dematerialization is also expressed by the growing distance between the artist and the artwork, which Abraham Moles analyzes, in the case of computers, as an « objectification » of language (6).

The paradox is reversed, however, when the double effects of dissociation and exteriorization imposed by the machine bring the body back. Just as the plume or the pen is grasped like a tool and an extension that adapts to the body (the plume fits the hand), typewriting assumes an adaptation of the body (a constraint) that involves a rhythm, a « gesticulation » (7). The rising practice of sound in literature and, to a greater extent, in performance, confirms that machines not only amplify but also reveal the body by manifesting its interiority (François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin). The return of the body through the machine and the emphasis on immediacy coincide with a new way of considering an artistic act, not as that which produces beauty, but as that which, like machines, transforms the world. Hence the more valorized definition of art as « intervention » or « action », which is a common trait among avant-garde practices.

Writing informed by technology

In this rapid overview, we must finally consider the consequences of technology on writing procedures. Many studies attest to the stylistic changes that have accompanied the changing technosphere. Friedrich Kittler reports the claims of several writers who, because of the typewriter, have gone « from rhetoric to telegraphic style » (8). For ergonomic reasons, as much as the intent to translate modern modes of perception or material effects related to the machine, a « technological style » has developed, focused on mechanical procedures. In response to the efficiency, absence of emotion and rhythm of the machine, we find concision, objectivity or a taste for permutation in literature. Language is transformed and accelerated—we « abolish syntax » (9), prioritize the word, even the letter, as this elementary link of language; we give precedence to verbal material, which echoes the new materiality of the act of writing.

In addition to this « translation » of mechanics, some writers question their relationship with these new media and develop new literary forms, voluntarily dependent on their chosen format. But while the historical avant-garde of 1920-1930 live it as a euphoric fusion, the neo-avant-garde of 1950-1970 seem to consider the relationship between the artist and the medium as a power struggle. The two attitudes are opposed, even if the machine always appears as a constraint. On one side are those who use the tool according to its potential—concrete poetry adopts the minimalist aspect of the impersonality and stark visual style of the typewriter, while in the audio field, literature integrates the sounds that can be recorded and fixed. On the other side are those who intervene on the machine in order to thwart its use—interventions on magnetic tapes and sound collages blur audibility, while delinearized, even illegible texts produced by « typist-poets » mirror the useless machines of the dadists and the self-destructive machines of Jean Tinguely. In both cases, the machine is reappropriated to produce art and becomes an esthetic object in itself. In this sense, even as literature develops under the constraints of technology, it offers in exchange new uses that invite reflection.

If McLuhan’s affirmation that « the medium is the message » may seem extreme, at least this research invites us to recognize the medium in the production of meaning. In the face of « passive » literature, which requires a tool for mass production, « media-literature » (10) emerges, going beyond technological concerns to focus on the medium’s impact in the creative process as well as its use to challenge academicism and social attitudes regarding esthetics.

Isabelle Krzywkowski
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

(1) This was the term used by Sigmund Freud in the essay Das Unheimliche (1919), referring to the automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, The Sandman (in The Night Pieces, 1816), an essential text about the relationship between human and machine.
(2) According to Raymond Queneau, there is only voluntary literature (quoted in OuLiPo, La Littérature potentielle: créations, re-créations, récréations, Gallimard, 1973, coll. Folio essais, 1988, p. 27).
(3) Jean-Pierre Bobillot, POésie & MEdium (2006), p. 2. Accessible online at:
http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/DOCKS-datas_f/collect_f/auteurs_f/B_f/BOBILLOT_F/TXT_F/Doc(k)s-Bob.htm
(4) Trois leçons de poésie: du bru(i)t dans la pointCom, films by Jean-Pierre Bobillot and Camille Olivier (2006 / 2008) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylcxSz33c2w — www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwxjgXwALn4
(5) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (McGraw-Hill, 1964), Chapter 26:  The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim.
(6) Abraham Moles, Art et ordinateur, (Casterman, coll. Synthèses contemporaines, 1971, p. 108).
(7) Adriano Spatola, Verso la Poesia totale (1969) — Vers la poésie totale, (Éditions Via Valeriano, 1993, p. 112).
(8) Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typerwriter, (Berlin, Brinkmann & Bose, 1986, p. 294).
(9) Filippo Marinetti, Manifeste technique de la littérature futuriste (1912).
(10) This term was inspired by the anthology Media Poetry conceived by Eduardo Kac in 1996.

is there anyone in the machine?

The theorist Friedrich Kittler, who died last October, is still relatively unknown in France. His originality was to create a dialogue between the ideas of Foucault and Lacan and media theory, especially McLuhan. His own theory postulates that today, writing is linked to computer code—code which has become increasingly user-unfriendly.

The Hansen Writing Ball,1865. Photo: D.R.

In an interview, the Germanist and media theorist Friedrich Kittler stated: I can’t understand why people only learn how to read and write the 26 letters of the alphabet. They should at least add the 10 digits, the integrals and the sinuses (…). They should also master two programming languages, in order to possess what, at the moment, constitutes culture. Elsewhere, he denounced the computer industry for wanting to rob users of their grip on the machine.

The question has haunted the debate between technophiles and technophobes: Are humans using machines to produce meaning or is it the machines that are producing humans and their productions? In a word, who are the masters and the slaves of our digital century, where computers have become the ubiquitous managers of our practical and theoretical activities? This question may still be relevant in media theory, but not so much in reality, considering that humans have never mastered their own meaningful productions, in the sense that they would have been fully aware and autonomous. This is the starting point for Friedrich Kittler.

What is his dominant thesis? That the writing system of a period, i.e. the techniques used by a culture to record, transmit and treat information, determines what we are, what we think and how we see ourselves. But while we may speak of Kittler’s technical determinism, his theories were more inspired by Foucault than by Marx. Like his French predecessor, who wrote in The Discourse on Language: If there are things that are said, do not ask for an immediate reason of the things that have been said or of the people who have said them; first consider the system of discourse, its possibilities and impossibilities of enunciation, Kittler is dedicated to shining a light on the conditions that would make possible different types of discourse allowing successive productions, by period, (from the flight of birds among the Romans to the symptoms of neurosis) to become meaningful to their contemporaries. In any given period, and independently of the speakers’ intentions, not everything can be said, or heard. But where Foucault is exclusively interested in the orders of discourse that determine language production, Kittler expands his field of investigation to the technical environment as a whole.

Writing was the first technical system used to record, transmit and treat information. For a while, it was the only channel for memory and the constitution of the world. Its monopoly was challenged in the early 20th century by the phonograph, photography and cinema. Beyond the fact that they offered a new plurality of representations of reality, these new media caused a break—contrary to writing, which reproduced reality symbolically, their mode of representation consisted of recording the physical effects of reality, thus preserving the traces of the body or event. In Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Kittler analyzes this in Salomo Friedlaender’s story Goethe parle dans le phonographe (1916), which imagines the possibility of hearing Goethe’s voice again by recording the vibrations of his speech, among which some, bouncing from object to object, still persist today, albeit much weaker. Recorded sound, like photography, was thus mechanical proof of the object’s existence. Writing produces meaning through symbols, the phonograph and photography through recording.

A new system for producing meaning in the 20th century.

The new media acted on the education system that had instituted this writing system of 1800, putting an end to what could be called the rule of meaning. Up until 1800, it was the mother’s voice murmuring gentle words into her children’s ears that taught them how to speak. Between these syllables and the first words pronounced by the children, continuity was established from an instance of meaning. In the same way that the syllable « ma » was born from maternal love, little by little transforming into the word « mom », speech came about naturally from syllables establishing the affectionate mother-child relationship from the very first meaningful words.

Thomas A. Edison, Home phonograph, 1906. Photo: D.R.

But the rule of new media has changed the modalities of speech transmission. Now, just as the phonograph records the sounds emitted from the vocal cords before any ordering of signs or meaning whatsoever (vibrations are frequencies that escape our perception of movement and cannot be transcribed or written), learning language consists of processing data, itself devoid of meaning. Learning to talk and write has become a process of learning meaningless syllables, which are combined to form words and sentences. The syllable « ma » has lost its emotional value to become little more than the result of a systematic production of sounds based on the letters of the alphabet (ma-me-mi-mo-mu…). Children no longer memorize through a natural and continuous process of language spoken by their mothers, they acquire language through a series of syllables with no meaning. The writing system of 1900 rolls the dice with discrete units ordered in series. This is what media are in the modern sense of the term: meaningless building blocks, designed by random generators, selected to form arrays.

The resulting discourses are no longer the same. According to Kittler, we must radicalize Walter Benjamin’s idea that cinema produces dispersion, which opposes bourgeois concentration. This is much more general and systematic. Film has no primary role among the media that are revolutionizing art and literature. All are provoking a flight of ideas in the psychiatric sense. In Das Aufschreibesystem, Kittler relates the experimentations of the Viennese psychiatrist Stransky (1905). The subjects of his experiments, including both colleagues and patients, had to speak into the tube of the phonograph for one minute (if possible quickly and profusely). He observed the same behavior among all of them: saying sentences with no regard to meaning. The phonograph produced provocative responses, which no self-respecting civil servant or educator would dare to write. Individuals who must talk or read faster than they can think necessarily wage their own little war against discipline.

This new paradigm is still affecting the production of meaning today. Since 1900, the instance of producing discourse that transforms inarticulate babbling into meaning has been replaced by a random process of recording and combination.

A new role in the system for the digital revolution?

Computers have only served to accomplish the meaningless aspect of discrete elements which combine to produce meaningful statements. With binary code, the flow of acoustic, optical and written data, formerly differentiated and autonomous, are now coded by the same basic elements and transmitted by the same fiber optics. The monopoly of writing has been succeeded by the monopoly of numbers, while the link to reality introduced by the phonograph and photography has been broken— reality is no longer reproduced by recording, but by coding. Sounds and images, voices and texts are nothing more than interfaces created by a series of digits. The differences between media are only superficial.

Logically, the technical level of producing meaning (the code) is not the semantical level of the existence of meaning. Kittler emphasizes the gap between the code, becoming increasingly inaccessible to the users, and the interfaces, and points out the efforts of the computer industry to restrict consumer access to the machine, transforming the computer into a ready-to-use tool, which it is not. Thus, the possibilities of intervening on the machine and modifying its technical parameters are limited, while users’ desire to do so is channeled by immediate and easy-to-use interfaces.

If humans have never mastered their meaningful productions, as stated earlier, if today we are only determined by our own binary system of writing, the digital era leads us to ask ourselves if there is an author in the machine, that is, if and how users can overcome these digital determinations to reappropriate a meaningful intention.

Frédérique Vargoz
Associate of philosophy
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

Bernard Stiegler, through his critical approach to Western intentionality in Réenchanter le monde, perfectly demonstrates that behind the turning point of democratized technology also lies a turning point in human sensibility, characterized by a lack of attention and the transformation of identification processes.

Internet_Encephalography, Art of failure. Photo: D.R.

Technology in context

However, far from indulging in a purely negative observation, he shows that what may be a poison, through the reversibility of any pharmakon, can also become a remedy. If technology obliterates attention to the point of preventing any true investment in one’s activity, especially through the industry of mass entertainment, it can also, as a potential means of existence, clear the horizon for some form of reversal. From the passivity implied by technology, where humans are factory workers chained to cybernetic logic, weapons can also emerge to challenge the dominant ideology that determines the use of these technologies.

Before discussing the issues of integrating digital technology into the performing arts, we must first explain why it is necessary. For the past 30 years, control of individuals, bodies and desires, in both the individual and collective memory, has increasingly developed using technology that extends well beyond the simple computer, as Critical Art Ensemble pointed out in their Electronic Civil Disobedience manifesto. From videosurveillance to our own livelihoods, the possibility of digital control has enveloped our very existence. Heidegger was right when he wrote that we have gone from the age of truth of the reduced being to the essence of technique.

For this reason, our metaphorical relationship with technology has gradually become the medium of research itself. Such is the case in performance art with Stelarc’s Third Hand (1), as well as in poetry, where humans are transformed into technology, as in Anne-James Chaton’s Événements 99 (2). The poet is the mechanical membrane articulating all the codes accumulated during the day, linking this list to the current flow of events. Avoiding any dichotomy between proper and improper, Anne-James Chaton is both one who is articulated by a society of commercial codes and one who creates its micro-plans, micro-movements, and disturbances.

Writing accidents

In this technical age, performance has transformed itself and, more or less following what William Burroughs already announced in The Electronic Revolution, has questioned various media in order to produce forms of accidents. While it is possible to question the medium and how it relates to control by emphasizing the development and derailment of the relationship between writing and technology through the staged representation of theater, as does Magalie Debazeilles in C2M1 (3), for example, performance questions the resistance of media by doing so within a presentation through the very medium in question. What all these current technologies have in common is coding, algorithmic logic. Code as a processing procedure is itself considered to be an intangible format that allows for infinite reproduction and inalterable memory. Nonetheless, some works question the materiality of this material illusion. They also challenge the implicit ideology of controlling the world, beings and objects in terms of digital potential and its pseudo-dematerialization.

Internet_Topography, Art of failure. Photo: D.R.

Code then becomes the place where the writing of power is disrupted; it becomes the matter and the stage for these new forms of writing. Démolécularisation—Jean-François and Jérôme Blanquet (4)—tests and produces this disturbance of performing arts technologies. The two performers are on stage, close to each other, lost in electro-analogue interfaces of audio and image processing. By taking pornographic texts, filtering them through voice recognition and little by little introducing the specificities of the active technologies, the artists disrupt the spectacular hyper effect of pornography, radically destroying the audience’s attention and their captive expectations of it in the interference. The image is projected like sound, demolecularizes, dilates, erases what it contained so that the medium appears as nothing more than a medium.

Art of Failure—Nicolas Montgermont and Nicolas Maigret (5)—radicalizes the “bugged” performance genre in 8 silences, which at first seems to be a sound piece, but is actually about writing. Beginning with a silence, a series of 1, little by little, code sent from server to server distorts then destroys itself, until all that is left is a sonorous mass of hyper noise. The computer message is not immaterial, not virtual, it travels and then destroys itself, it obeys interfaces and is altered by them. These performances show that the transparency and immateriality of information is an illusion caused by blindness to technology. As Theodor Adorno wrote regarding the attention given to the medium which favors bugs, the dissonances that scare [the audience] speak to them about their own condition; it’s for this reason alone that they are intolerable (in Philosophy of New Music).

Flesh

But at the heart of criticism of technical domination is the relationship with the body, the possibility of alienating, identifying and controlling it. The Spanish performer Jaime Del Val (6) highlights this in Anticuerpos, where he questions and criticizes the determination of the body as identified with a genre. As a militant homosexual, he stages himself naked in the street, loaded with cameras and pico-projectors, and neutralizes the definition of the body by projecting details that prevent it from being identified. Much like the first page of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, the desiring and desired body, in terms of its impulses, is neither male nor female; no longer contained in its envelope, it unfolds into space, its limits and boundaries almost imperceptible. It decharacterizes the perception of the body and repolarizes it through wandering fragments. Jaime Del Val criticizes one of the primary pretensions of our society of control and surveillance: control of the body, and by extension, the possibility of categorizing identities.

Hypomnesis feedback

Lucille Calmel (7) undermines another illusion of technology: archives. After archiving all her online correspondances from 2000 to 2008 in Identifiant Lucille Calmel, which was realized for the Open festival at Paris Villette in 2011, she created an installation involving the body, real space, online space and motion sensors such as Kinect, to show exactly how this hyper memory of the Internet is fragmented, deformed and can only be revived through a new form of writing, which would itself produce a new archive. In a fine example of différance as defined by Jacques Derrida, she uses bugs and saturated writing to spotlight the indissociability of organic and digital material, then through feedbacks and flashbacks, she shows how digital archiving contracts and materially alters itself.

Identifiant : Lucille Calmel, avec Philippe Boisnard (kinect hacking, programmation), Cyril Thomas (sélections textuelles), Thierry Coduys (conseil en interactivité, mastering sonore), Open festival des scènes virtuelles, Paris-Villette, juin 2011. En coproduction avec le Théâtre Paris-Villette. Photos © Corinne Nguyen

In the same vein, Hortense Gauthier’s hp process (8) critiques the supposed relationship between communication networks and the lisibility of their traces. In her performance Contact, a man and a woman write to each other, but their writing is presented according to an esthetic logic of stacking and on-stage interlacing, as well as live online, redeploying this correspondence in space. Behind the assumed control and transparency of writing, these two performances demonstrate how writing life, live writing, escape the determinations of control by playing with the media in question.

Transforming the ideology of means

It is no longer just a question of spectacularly representing political power. Politics, which has abdicated its power to economics ever since the 20th century, forces us to consider the very means of production. Capitalism is dominated by property, it relates to the world through appropriation, and therefore through substracting possibilities from other people, in real life. At the moment, large computer companies are driven by patents. This ideology of copyright not only takes on an economic dimension, it has become the ideological foundation of our relationship with being, of our personal inventory. Every perspective on being can be patented, displaced from public access to private property.

The performances presented here are all built on other ideological possibilities. Not only are they an explicit criticism of what has happened, they have also transformed their relationship with their means of realization. Whether it’s by reappropriating technologies or developing open source programs and freeware, the above-mentioned artists link what they make to their own practice. How credible can one be, criticizing the very medium in which they choose to operate? It is therefore important to stress that the artworks mentioned here (by Art of Failure, Lucille Calmel, hp process) were all programmed using open source code, itself resulting from the criticism of capitalism and its logic of appropriation: Pure Data created by Miller Puckette.

Unconscious decisions and education

We can see in many of these performances how criticism is not possible without first understanding the means of domination as well as the development of techniques that rival these means, while offering other forms of relational and economic models. But it should also be noted that few institutions integrate these new practices. Pure Data appears to be a perfect example. Far from being confined to a small community, this programming language has been used by many artists for professional stage performances, workshops and installations.

However, the languages that dominate most computer courses in France are ActionScript linked to Flash, and Max/MSP. Both languages are proprietary and require licences in order to be exploited. Hardly open-source, they are open to a form of commercialized algorithms… which means that we are unconsciously educating students to reproduce this intentionality of copyright and private property, against the collective intelligence of open source. And thus, unconsciously, are we preventing certain types of questioning and critique concerning the ideology of technological media.

Philippe Boisnard
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

(1) stelarc.org/?catID=20265
(2) aj.chaton.free.fr/evenements99.html
(3) www.desbazeille.fr/v2/index.php?/projects/c2m1
(4) projectsinge.free.fr/?paged=2
(5) artoffailure.free.fr/index.php?/projects/laps
(6) www.reverso.org/jaimedelval.htm
(7) www.myrtilles.org
(8) databaz.org/hp-process/?p=105