Re: nettime Notes on the Politics of Software Culture
This is great openning for discussion for both N5M and AE participants who deal with this topic as thay share some commonalities but tend to take further more political (N5M) or economical ...snip websites...avoiding to dig deeper into the messy and fuzzy work of geeks and nerds who lack sence of selfpromotion. Few projects like CCC¥s Blinkenlights manage to get the idea of creative use of IT across, but still somehow miss on being a subject of new media theorists/critics. How can this situation be changed or inverted? Can computer/media art community stop being self-referential and emerge itself in the already established IT community/media platforms, rather than being ecstatic (with years of delay) with phenomenas like open source, p2p, wirelles? Hej Zeljko There are always, thank god, significant activities that don't make the (Mac)spotLight -- don't forget that by actual choice, or by the simple human idiosyncracy of individuals who don't run along with the highly socialized trends of the culture spectacle (of which all the organs you mentioned are really collected -- some more conscious than others) -- there are many people who will never surface in the PR realm. Like one of the concepts around the TAZ, avoid that surficial social visibility (because the western culture is fundamentally obsessed with surfaces and objects (materialism) -- being in its view, under observation, literally, will CHANGE THE OUTCOME OF THAT WHICH IS OBSERVED!) Basic quantum. Why not create movements (experiments) on the premise that they run without that intervention, so, out of that Sight. With only the lively participants engaged with each other. Always, the most humane-ly productive critical engagement occurs at the granular level of human-to-human, regardless of the surrounding social flow (festival or at home in a bar or at academic conference or bunkered down in the squat). Many of the 'trends' that are happening 'now' like wi-fi, etc are re-deployments of the rising Surveillance Society anyway. Capturing the surfaces that it is so attracted to -- meanwhile, lives go on, deeper than that surface view can ever deconvolve. Maybe it's better to not invert an old, tired equation, but to simply make a new descriptive system, a new way. Cheers John -- -~ tech-no-mad : hypnostatic domain: http://neoscenes.net mobile: +1 303 859 0689 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Notes on the Politics of Software Culture
This is great openning for discussion for both N5M and AE
participants who deal with this topic as thay share some
commonalities but tend to take further more political (N5M) or economical
(AE) argumentation.
Additionaly it would be interesting to reflect on the impact of new media
Art/Cultural practices on software industry, media and software
communities (like gloabal free software community or more introvert
ones like demo scene).
Personally I got interested in idea after seeing Linux Journal #107
cover (first art installation on the cover) and than reading inside a
review of FrequencyClock of r a d i o q u a l i a.
Frequency of media/tech art projects getting to the ICT news portals like
Slashdot is still very low (Free Radio Linux, Feral Robotic Dogs,
Blinkenlights, Illegal Art project... any others recently?).
In the same time while Runme.org lists more than 150 projects
(http://runme.org/news/read/+10/) Freshmeat lists 82 projects in Art
category (with 2/3 of it being CSound frontends, midi and fractall
applets http://freshmeat.net/browse/901/?topic_id=901).
Media art festivals/galleries tend to go easy way buy looking for (or
commisioning) work in known outposts like established media-labs (MIT and
V2_lab being the popular choices for AE), art mailing lists and
websites...avoiding to dig deeper into the messy and fuzzy work of geeks
and nerds who lack sence of selfpromotion.
Few projects like CCC´s Blinkenlights manage to get the idea of creative
use of IT across, but still somehow miss on being a subject of new media
theorists/critics.
How can this situation be changed or inverted? Can computer/media art
community stop being self-referential and emerge itself in the already
established IT community/media platforms, rather than being ecstatic
(with years of delay) with phenomenas like open source, p2p, wirelles?
CU @ { AE | N5M }
On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
[the essay below was written for the upcoming Next5Minutes4 reader;
as it scans the field that will also be the topic of the ars
electronica starting on saturday, i thought it might be timely to
post it here; -ab]
Notes on the Politics of Software Culture
Andreas Broeckmann
Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as
a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be
studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on
software for their execution - from systems of e-government and
net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation
of social groups and movements -, it is necessary to understand the
procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the
cultural and political 'rules' coded into them. The 'killer apps' of
tomorrow may, as Howard Rheingold claims, not be 'hardware devices or
software programs but social practices'. Yet, these social practices
will increasingly be determined by software configurations of the
available infrastructure and the degrees and types of latitude that
they offer.
Aspects of software culture - a terrain that encompasses software
development as well as the wide and multi-facetted field of software
application - are being articulated by speculative and artistic
software projects which this text will try to cover in a necessarily
cursory, introductory fashion.
# distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission
# nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Notes on the Politics of Software Culture
[the essay below was written for the upcoming Next5Minutes4 reader; as it scans the field that will also be the topic of the ars electronica starting on saturday, i thought it might be timely to post it here; -ab] Notes on the Politics of Software Culture Andreas Broeckmann Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on software for their execution - from systems of e-government and net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation of social groups and movements -, it is necessary to understand the procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the cultural and political 'rules' coded into them. The 'killer apps' of tomorrow may, as Howard Rheingold claims, not be 'hardware devices or software programs but social practices'. Yet, these social practices will increasingly be determined by software configurations of the available infrastructure and the degrees and types of latitude that they offer. Aspects of software culture - a terrain that encompasses software development as well as the wide and multi-facetted field of software application - are being articulated by speculative and artistic software projects which this text will try to cover in a necessarily cursory, introductory fashion. The term 'social software' has been used by Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood, and others, to describe a type of software that consciously engages the social aspects of its application. Whereas a programme like MS Word, which Fuller has carefully disected in an extensive analysis, tends to conceal the rules and assumptions that served to constitute its structure, social software addresses the more or less specific social context of its application, whether in the form of the Linker software by Mongrel that offers an easy-to-use functionality for multimedia production, or in the online communication platforms that support, for instance, collaborative software and media development and that can easily be tweaked to meet the requirements of a certain co-producer community. For almost a decade, the Nettime mailing list has been an active, international forum for the discussion of software-related cultural and political issues. In a seminal essay posted on Nettime, Behind the Blip, Fuller talks about key aspects of social software and also refers to the Californian researcher Ellen Ullman who has worked on software development as a distinctly social practice for several years. Important practical and theoretical work in this field has also been done by the Amsterdam-based Society for Old and New Media, De Waag, whose software development projects have engaged the needs and possibilities of different user groups by way of models for a 'participatory software design'. In cooperation with De Waag, the New Delhi-based media and communication centre Sarai has also worked on both the practical issues of social software development, and on the critical reflection of software culture on their online Reader-List and in the Reader print publications. While Nettime has often carried postings articulating differences between European and US media cultures, Sarai has, importantly, helped to raise awareness for the differences in software cultures, esp. with regard to developments in South Asia. In his essay, Behind the Blip, Fuller distinguishes social software from 'critical' and 'speculative' software, critical software being 'software designed explicitly to pull the rug from underneath normalised understandings of software'. It critically engages with existing software programmes and mutates or critically analyses them. In contrast, 'speculative software' comes closest to what can be understood as an artistic approach to software: it is, as Fuller writes, 'software that explores the potentiality of all possible programming. It creates transversal connections between data, machines and networks. 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.' The notion of 'software art' has recently made the rounds. It is an attempt to describe a practice that is artistic, non-functionalist, reflexive and speculative about the aesthetics and politics of software, and that takes computer programming as the material proper of the artistic practice. The Berlin-based media art festival transmediale has been holding an annual competition for software art since 2001, looking especially at works of generative art whose main artistic material is program code, or which deal with the cultural understanding of software. Thus, software is not understood as a functional tool serving the 'real' artistic work,
