http://www.dichtung-digital.org/english.htm

[claudia westermann]

http://www.dichtung-digital.org/english.htm

Newsletter 3/2003
5.Jg. / Nr. 29 - ISSN 1617-6901

ed. by Loss Pequeño Glazier (Editorial)

BEIGE stylez: GAME MODS [English]

Cory Arcangel explains how / why the BEIGE programming ensemble 
hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge and erased everything but the 
clouds. He presents their motives behind the work by adding his 
thoughts about the project as comments in the source code.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-beige.htm



#DEFINE [English]

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. 
Marc Böhlen 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.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-boehlen.htm



Inner Workings [English]

What does programmed signification tell us about the inner human 
writing machine? John Cayley's essay reexamins Freud's Mystic Writing 
Pad and is 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.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-cayley.htm



Conflicting Organizational Designs [English]

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.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-galloway.htm



Poetics of Programming [English]

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. As Loss Pequeño 
Glazier states 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.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-glazier.htm



Coding the Infome. Writing Abstract Reality [English]

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, Lisa Jevbratt argues, 
artist-programmers are more land-artists than writers, software are 
more earthworks than narratives.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-jevbratt.htm



Media, Software, and Meta-media [English]

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? Lev Manovich lays out 
the way to answer these questions and to illustrate his concept of 
meta-media by showing and discussing a few of the classics of new 
media art.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-manovich.htm



Semiotic Considerations in an Artificial Intelligence-Based Art 
Practice [English]

Michael Mateas combines artificial intelligence (AI) research and art 
marking, a practice he calls Expressive AI. AI consists of coupled 
rhetorical and technical strategies for structuring computational 
processes. Artists can consciously manipulate these strategies so as 
to build machines with powerful authorial affordances for crafting 
audience experiences.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-mateas.htm



Word For Word. Encoding, Networking, and Intention [English]

The very nature of the online literary journal Word For Word invites 
non-linear, non-sequential readings, thus making it problematic to 
think of its assembled works only as discrete, autonomous texts. 
Jonathan Minton thinks of an underlying "intention" in terms of 
textual encoding (Intention not as the manifestation of an author's 
"original" idea, but an always on-going textual drift) and explores 
the methods in which JavaScript can clarify this dynamic and 
seemingly infinite drift of textual intention by encoding and 
particularizing its recombinant processes.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-minton.htm



The Computer as a Prosthetic Organ of Philosophy [English]

David Rokeby looks at issues of language and encoding from the 
perspective of computer programming. He discusses the different 
relationships between code and encoder/decoder in computer coding and 
human language coding and uses examples of his work and working 
experience to illuminate these differences and to propose a role for 
computers as philosophical prostheses.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-rokeby.htm



The "Embedded World" of Artificial Intelligence [English]

How can we conceive of engaging in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
practices while reflecting on the social effects of AI technology? 
Traditionally, AI saw itself as a 'closed world' outside of culture; 
now, Phoebe Sengers argues, we may instead be able to speak of and 
act on an 'embedded world' of AI-in-culture.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-sengers.htm





next issues
4/2003 (No. 30):
guestedition by Marku Eskelinen: Scandinavian Special, among them:
Anders Fagerjord: Four Axes of Rhetorical Convergence
Teemu Ikonen: Moving text in avantgarde poetry
Jonas Ingvarsson: Notes on the machine produced subjects in Swedish 
prose fiction
Aki Järvinen: The Elements of Simulation in Digital Games (Grand 
Theft Auto: Vice City)
Lisbeth Klastrup: Pause before theory: Interactivity and its discontents
Torill Mortensen: The Geography of a Non-place
Jesper Olsson: Writing Through the Data Banks. Notes on Poetry and 
Technology in the Swedish 1960s
Ragnhild Tronstad: The MUD Adventure: Questing as Game, Performance & 
Seductive Discourse
Raine Koskimaa: tba