29 | 2003

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
  • Article
    #DEFINE
    Böhlen, Marc (2003)
    Computers represent world through data and data types. The creation of data type reflects both the need for computational efficiency as well as the ideology of the engineers and scientists behind the code. The essay argues that the work of amateurs and artists can be seen as a contribution towards questioning and expanding the limitations of reality representation defined by computational requirements.
  • Article
    BEIGE stylez: GAME MODS. Reverse Engineering SUPER MARIO BROTHERS
    Beige Records (2003)
    This page is a tutorial explaining how / why I recently hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge and erased everything but the clouds. This continues work being carried out by myself and other BEIGE representatives Paul Davis, Joe Beuckman, and Joe Bonn. I have chosen to present my motives behind the work by adding my thoughts about the project as comments in the source code. As a programmer [not a very good one, though a programmer none the less] my thoughts and motives are most easily exemplified by my code.
  • Article
    Coding the Infome: Writing Abstract Reality
    Jevbratt, Lisa (2003)
    Because of their specific history, we think of computer languages and code as symbolic abstractions of natural languages, and computers as universal machines manipulating these symbols. However, today every computer exists in relation to the Internet, whether it is connected or not. Every software is potentially a networked software, a building block of the networks we live within and through. Because of this, code is no longer Text, a symbolic representation of reality - it is reality. To write code is to create and manipulate this reality. Within it, artist-programmers are more land-artists than writers, software are more earthworks than narratives, this creates new and fascinating issues in terms of referentiallity and meaning for the coding artist to delve into.
  • Article
    Conflicting Diagrams
    Galloway, Alexander R. (2003)
    Throughout the years new diagrams have appeared as solutions or threats to existing ones. Bureaucracy and hierarchy are diagrams; networks are too. In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war exemplified most starkly in the war against terrorism. But what happens when "the powers that be" evolve from centralized hierarchies into networked power? For Alex Galloway in the future we are likely to experience a general shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict-networks fighting networks.
  • Article
    Editorial
    Glazier, Loss Pequeño (2003)
  • Article
    Inner Workings: Code and representations of interiority in new media poetics
    Cayley, John (2003)
    'Inner Workings' addresses itself to the methods, properties and practices of writing systems, including human writing systems, whose very signifiers are programmed. What does programmed signification tell us about the inner human writing machine? John Cayley's essay participates in relevant metacritical and metapsychological discussions - reexamining Freud's Mystic Writing Pad in particular - and is specifically sited within the context of debates on code and codework in literal art. Rather than revealed interiority, code is the archive and guarantee of inner workings than reside beneath the complex surfaces of poetics in programmable media.
  • Article
    Media, Software, and Meta-media
    Manovich, Lev (2003)
    What is the relationship between the computer's contemporary identity as a simulator for all previous media, and its "essence" as a programmable machine? Is software art the only real "avant-garde" of new media, or is the more "impure" practice of remixing older media with software techniques equally innovative?
  • Article
    Poetics of Dynamic Text
    Glazier, Loss Pequeño (2003)
    Dynamic texts offer new possibilities for reading and new challenges in how we approach the reading object, forcing the final object away from the idea of a fixed form on a fixed surface. In order to "read" such an object, one must look deeper, into the code itself, and one must consider the various ramifications inherent in a code-based work. Ultimately, one must explore the edge where language apparatuses engage.
  • Article
    Semiotic Considerations in an Artificial Intelligence-Based Art Practice
    Mateas, Michael (2003)
    In my work I engage in a hybrid practice combining artificial intelligence (AI) research and art marking, a practice I call Expressive AI. Computers are fundamentally meaning machines - the long chains of meaningless causal processes that comprise computation can be linked to culturally meaningful signs such that computers can participate in processes of signification. AI consists of coupled rhetorical and technical strategies for structuring computational processes. Artists can consciously manipulate these rhetorical and technical strategies so as to build machines with powerful authorial affordances for crafting audience experiences.
  • Article
    The "Embedded World" of Artificial Intelligence
    Sengers, Phoebe (2003)
    Dynamic texts offer new possibilities for reading and new challenges in how we approach the reading object, forcing the final object away from the idea of a fixed form on a fixed surface. In order to read such an object, one must look deeper, into the code itself, and one must consider the various ramifications inherent in a code-based work. Ultimately, one must explore the edge where language apparatuses engage.
  • Article
    The Computer as a Prosthetic Organ of Philosophy
    Rokeby, David (2003)
    This article looks at issues of language and encoding from the perspective of computer programming. Particular attention is paid to the different relationships between code and encoder/decoder in computer coding and human language coding. Examples of the writer/artist's work and working experience are used to illuminate these differences and a role for computers as philosophical prostheses is proposed.
  • Article
    Word For Word: Encoding, Networking, and Intention
    Minton, Jonathan (2003)
    Is it possible to argue for an underlying "intention" of a networked assembly such as the online literary journal Word For/Word? The very nature of its digital medium invites non-linear, non-sequential readings, thus making it problematic to think of its assembled works only as discrete, autonomous texts. I propose that one way to answer this question is to rethink "intention" in terms of textual encoding. Intention, in this regard, is not a by-product, or end-result, of writing, nor the manifestation of an author's "original" idea, but an always on-going textual drift. My project explores the methods in which JavaScript can clarify this dynamic and seemingly infinite drift of textual intention by encoding and particularizing its recombinant processes.