[syndicate] Re: Re: Subject: Re: From:

Tue Feb 11 15:59:23 CET 2003

Am Dienstag, 11. Februar 2003 um 15:18:36 Uhr (+0100) schrieb Fr. M.:
> At 14:09 07/02/2003 +0100, Florian Cramer wrote:

> >The initial idea was to create a weekly digest of artistic posting that
> >got rejected by Nettime moderators (including material by Sondheim, mez,
> >and others that hardly made it from nettime-bold to nettime-l), as an
> >alternative to a moderation fork.
> 
> oh, and that it is digested makes it acceptable to the moderated nettime ?
> that they are no more individual mails or that they have been curated 
> adding some kind of seriosity to the whole thing ?

I think that the Nettime moderation team is chiefly interested in
providing space for critical debates and keep a lid on non-discussion
E-Mail.  (This applies to codework as well as to announcements of events
and publications.) Their reasons are sound, the results no less - as,
for example, the recent Nettime thread on rhizome shows. Unstable digest
offers a way that both Nettime and E-Mail art/experimental net writing
can coexist, and for me, the overall advantages of this outnumber the
disavantages.

> >digests from single archived txt files, and now changed it so that the
> >"To:" header gets included.
> 
> great, I think it definitely enhances it.

Me too, what a stupid failure. - An advantage of collating the digests
with a Perl script is that it's a snap to recreate all previous digests
with "To:" headers included.

> >announcer], perhaps the most important one being that it locks art that
> >is meant to be disruptive in its original context into a ghetto. On the
> 
> is it meant to be disruptive ? sometimes perhaps, but in most cases not.

I agree, and that's why I don't feel bad filtering it into a curated
digest. Still, the fact that Nettime normally moderates it out shows
that it is being perceived as disruptive in the one or the other way.

... What I really would like to do is write a detailed analysis/comment
of one unstable digest here on syndicate to defend what I like and
explain what I find interesting in it. Problem is that I am suffering
from work overload in the final week of the term. But I won't forget
that and reply sooner or later. For the time being, I enclose my Moscow
jury notes regarding an older piece of mez.

Bests,

-F

Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 13:24:21 +1000
To: Florian Cramer <paragram at gmx.net>
From: "][mez][" <netwurker at pop.hotkey.net.au>
Subject: Viro.Logic Condition 1.1

_Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1_

[b:g:in]

::Art.hro][botic][scopic N.][in][ten][dos][tions::
1.[b.ranch outwards||seething
jam-jar curs][ed][ored
drenching s][creening][ounds]

::Neol][o.jism][ithic Rever][b][s.al][l][s::
2.[drink sever][al][ed
c u in he][l][avan
a c][yclops][hair b:cumming sane]

::Gig:a][h!][:cycling::
3.[alert & c.rash.ing
chrysa][s][li][ding!][s//via
code syrup & brooding symbols]

______________________________________________
----------------------------------------------

.The Viro.logic Condition s][ir][ear.c][am][hes the named
N.pu.t][rojan.logic][ strains [or physical N.put if no strands r nominated]
4 possible contaminants. .By de:fault][lines][ the Condition
s.pr][int][eads thru matching bi][r][o][bo][.logic links.

			+
       .There r 3 major cycles of Viro.logic
       con.troll.ed by the following reactions.
			+

-M, --baseline-re:ge][xp][nerative.
.Internet p][atterned][roduced as a wr][h][y.zomic x.pression.

.This is this e.ternal range.

-E, --x.tended-rege][xp][nerative.
.Interphysical person as an x.tendable geophysical x.pression.

-Z, --fixed-stra][i][nds
.Inter.twin.ing of previous patterns as links of fixed strands, stitched
via newbies.

----------------------------------------------______________________________
________________
         the  [-viro] [-logic] [-e condition | 
       -f STRAND] [-d ACTION]  [--searches=ACTION]  [--x.tended-
       reg][exp.eriential][]  [--fixed-strands] 
______________________________________________
----------------------------------------------

[...the named input + technologic strains + physical input if no strands
are nominated + possible contaminants = by default the condition spreads
through machining biologic/robologic links...]

[e:n:d]

.           .    ....         .....
  	net.wurker][M.ollient][
 pro.ject.ile x.blooms.x .go.here. 
	      xXXx             
              ./.               
    www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker
.... .               .???  .......

Here's why I consider it worth discussing as software art:

- If the material of music is sound, the material of Software Art is
  algorithms, i.e. formal instruction code. Contrary to Friedrich
  Kittler who believes that there is either no software at all or at
  least no software without hardware, this doesn't mean for me that
  software is strictly dependent on computers/machines. A fair amount of
  programming code is never run on machines, but solely appears in
  programming handbooks. Readers of these books are normally capable to
  execute the programs in their mind - and that is, at least
  theoretically, true of any computation/any program sourcecode. 

  That's why I consider La Monte Young's Composition No.4 1961, which
  only consists of the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it",
  a piece of Software Art. Another example in our competition is "SCREEN
  SAVER" (and entry #1), which, just as any software, is a formal,
  step-by-step instruction set for manipulating a system, with the only
  difference being that the instructions are executed by humans and not
  by a machine. (And since it manipulates the Windows operating system,
  I consider it meta-software, human-executable software that
  manipulates machine-executable software.)

  < Digressive sidenote: A common weakness of, if I'm not mistaken, all
  the entries we got, is that they use instruction code to the end of
  making processes visible or audible. Compare that to the
  cultural-political subtility of the invisible software that invisibly
  calculates the credit line of your bank account, to quote a famous
  example by Joseph Weizenbaum. This also highlights the real weakness
  of the "Carnivore" entry. >

  --> I therefore would be happy if we don't restrict "Software Art"
  (and our entries) to _machine_-executable code, but define more
  broadly, but still precisely as an art (a) whose material is formal
  instruction code and/or (b) may address given cultural concepts of
  software. (If somebody would have entered, say, a painted web browser
  screenshot with window out of glass, I would still have accepted it as
  an "experimental web browser" and as a piece of software art.) Whether
  or not the code addresses humans directly or (via machine execution)
  indirectly, the addressee always remains human; there is, in my
  opinion, no such thing as art for machines. And I consider it
  questionable to project Renaissance or 18th century notions of beauty
  onto code (as Donald Knuth and his followers do).

- Here comes the next stretch: If we allow the code (input) and the
  effect (output) of a Software artwork to fit into any aesthetic
  classification - including the ugly, the sublime and the beautiful -,
  we shouldn't restrict software to mere technical functionality. In the
  jury work with John Simon and Ulrike Gabriel for transmediale.01, it
  was an important "discovery" for us that a piece could be technically
  half- or even non-functional but still qualify as software art. A good
  example is jodi.org which people (including jodi's provider) believed
  to be a computer virus, although most of it doesn't even contain
  program or script code (but only a clever mix of HTML, ASCII and GIF
  animations). 

  So I would like to make a strong point in favor of broken, pseudo,
  fictitious and imaginary program code as acceptable forms of Software
  Art. If a piece of software is broken, pseudo, fictitious or imaginary
  of course doesn't imply that it's good or particularly "artistic".

Enter a long train of de-mezangelling hermeneutics:

> _Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1_
> 
> [b:g:in]
> 

Following the E-Mail and Usenet convention, underscores ("_") are being
used as replacement for underlined/boldfaced text. mez uses square
brackets ("[","]") similar to bracketed expressions in boolean searches
or regular expressions. 

So the title may be read as "Virologic Condition", "Logic Condition",
"Logic Conditioning" or "Virologic Conditioning". 

Like a computer program, it has a version number and, like many program
languages, the code is enclosed between a "begin"/"end" statment, which
this notation stretches to "bee-gee-in", a phonetic bastard of "begin"
and "being". 

The first two lines create ambiguity about what or whom is being
conditioned and subject to a virus: A human body or a technical system?
This ambiguity remains the leitmotif of the piece. Reminiscent of Perl
syntax, we get three "packages"/objects separated from each other with
marked-up header lines ("::") and 

> ::Art.hro][botic][scopic N.][in][ten][dos][tions::

Again, "portmanteau words" are built with square brackets:

1. Arthroscopic / art robotic / Arthrobotic / horoscopic
2. Nintendos / intentions / DOS

The language folds machines together with human anatomy, making 
both the machine and the mind an organic hybrid:

> 1.[b.ranch outwards||seething

As in Perl and on the Unix commandline, the double pipe ("||") reads as
a logical "or" condition. Again, one can read the line in two ways:

1, as verbs: "branch outwards, seething": a description of what the
hybrid does

2, as nouns: "ranch outwards, see-thing": a description of the landscape
outside

> jam-jar curs][ed][ored

This time, the double meaning is semantically, not syntactically coded:

1. "jam-jar cursed": a jar containing jam is cursed, description of the
interior as opposed to description of the exterior "ranch outwards"

2. "jam-jar cursored": with a cursor looking like a jar of jam; now the
language flips to the level of the computer screen. "jam-jar" is, I
assume, a pun on "Jar-jar", a computer-rendered character in "Star Wars
Episode No.1", subject to intense hatred in computer geek forums such as
Slashdot.org (and accusations of racist African-American stereotyping),
so that "jar-jar cursed" lurks behind the line.

> drenching s][creening][ounds]

"drenching screening"/"drenching sounds"

If one looks at the whole four-line 'object', it becomes difficult to
say who/what acts to whom/what or in what direction: the "arthrobotic",
i.e. virus-infected hybrid branching outwards, jam-jar cursored,
drenching screening/sounds, or the "athroscopic intentions" of the
writing subject, described in his or her home environment.

Next object:

> ::Neol][o.jism][ithic Rever][b][s.al][l][s::

"Neolithic"/"Neologism"/"jism" [=sperm]
"Reverb"/"Reverbs"/"Reversal"/"Reversals"/"all"

The subject feels as if put back into the stone age / feels the stone
age reverberating; or there is a "neologism reversal".

Next to the leitmotiv of intermingling body/identity and technology,
there is another leitmotif of infection and sickness. The text can be
read throughout as a personal account of sickness and as an account of
viral infection of technology. Given this, "neologism reversal" seems 
a pretty straightforward allusion: The virus that becomes, as a
neologism, a computer virus and then again a biological virus. The
speaking subject observes her own sickness, reads it in terms of a
computer virus infection and realizes that she reverses the neologism by
projecting the latter onto the former.

> 2.[drink sever][al][ed

"drink several"/"drink severed"

Again, the account of a sickness: "drink several", taking fluids as a
cure of an influenza infection, while "drink severed" continues on the
semantics of "jam-jar cursed", "drenching screening" and "jism", 
fluids as (poisonous) sources and multipliers of infection.

> c u in he][l][avan

"see you in hell"/"see you in heaven"

Again an Internet-specific allusion, this time to the "cu/see me"
videoconferencing software. Of course, this is the most blatantly stated
semantic ambiguity in the text, with "see you in hell" mimicking the
rhetoric of computer viruses and script kiddie attacks.

> a c][yclops][hair b:cumming sane]

"a cyclops becoming sane"/"a chair becoming sane"/"hair becoming sane"
"to come"/"to cum": "becoming"/"be cumming"

Given the previous allusions to webcams and computer imaging, "cyclops"
could be a metaphor of the computer (as a one-eyed being). Again, it is
ambiguous who is infected and becoming sane; even the act of
reconvalescence takes up, through the sex slang written into it, the
motif of infection.

Next 'object':

>
> ::Gig:a][h!][:cycling::

"Gigahigh cycling"/"Gigahertz cycling"/"Gig cycling"/"Gigah! cycling"

...could refer to the clockspeed of a computer, an extreme feeling of
ups and downs; "h!" quotes N.N.'s lingo, reading as a hidden "hi" to
her/them reading

> 3.[alert & c.rash.ing

"alert & crashing" / "rash"

This paragraph/object is about the organism/machine in its state of
disorder, see next line:

> chrysa][s][li][ding!][s//via

"chrysalis"/"sliding!" ==> // via

chrysalis/larva brings up another biological metaphor which, through the
mezangelle portmanteau wording, creates the neologistic verb
"chrysaliding". 

The organism is at once running amok ("Gigacycling", "rash", "alter &
crashing") and in an atavistic, regressive, premature state of a
chrysalis; 

"chrysaliding //via":

> code syrup & brooding symbols]
> 

Another very blatant mixture of organic biology and programming.
The "syrup" is at once the medication for the writing subject which
recovers, and, as code, the fix of the crashed computer. 

Now comes a break:

> 
> ______________________________________________
> ----------------------------------------------
> 

If we summarize the previous three objects, then they seem to describe
first the (hybrid) organism, secondly, simultaneously putting the
subject/organism into a context and coding this context ambiguously, the
sources of infection and cure, and thirdly the inner state of the
infected being.

On to the next section. It switches from "mezangelle" poetry to
"mezangelle" prose, functioning as a commentary on the above (somewhat
redundant perhaps if one figured out the above, but since the writing,
as we agreed, is difficult, this might be welcome. - )

(Note: mez writes like this real-time and in "normal" correspondence,
she really lives her self-invented language.)

> 
> 
> .The Viro.logic Condition s][ir][ear.c][am][hes the named

"Virologic Condition"/"logic Condition"

"searches"/"sir.cam"/"sir.camhes"

Now an explication: "Sir.cam" is the name of the Outlook Express E-Mail
virus that sent out infected copies of Microsoft Office files found on
the infected computer, with the infamous message body: "Hi, I send you
this file in order to have your advice". 

> N.pu.t][rojan.logic][ strains [or physical N.put if no strands r nominated]

"Input" /"trojan logic strains" /"Input logic strains". 

The sentence also plays with the phonetic similarity of "strain" and
"strand". (Roman Jakobson would have loved mezangelle, as it's all about
finding similarities on the paradigmatic axis and writing them out into
syntagms, but, through the use of square bracket portmanteau words, in
such away that they still bear the signifiers of the paradigm! - Sorry
if I'm getting lost in literary theory here, I just couldn't resist.) 

> 4 possible contaminants. 

Okay, again a pretty clear self-explication of the double encoding of
biological and informational infection: The "Viro.logic Condition"
stands precisely for the duplicity/ambiguity of infection,
searching/"sir.caming" its victims either (1) in technical
infrastructures or (2) biological organisms:

(1) the technical infrastructures/information systems are called here
"N.pu.t][rojan.logic][ strains [", i.e. the possible hosts of trojan
logic nesting in them, or

(2) "or physical N.put if no strands r nominated]", i.e. the human body.

>                          .By de:fault][lines][ the Condition
"default"/"fault"
> s.pr][int][eads thru matching bi][r][o][bo][.logic links.
"sprints"/"prints"/"spreads"
"biologic"/"robologic"

The prose sticks to the paradoxes of the verse. Possible expansions of
this statement are:

"By fault, the condition spread thru matching biologic links"
"By default, the condition spread thru matching biologic links"
"By fault, the condition spread thru matching robologic links"
"By default, the condition spread thru matching robologic links"

So this sentence (and others using the square brackets to encode
ambiguity) doesn't just pretend to be executable code, it _is_
executable code, because it is 

- a compact, linear sourcecode which can be expanded/computed into
many possibilities of output, i.e.

- a notation of a combinatorics.

...but just a much more clever and dense one than that of classical
concrete poetry (like Brion Gysin's, Jackson MacLow's and Eugen
Gomringer's permutation poems of the 1950s-1970s, which were actually
computed with self-written software) which went through the dull pains
of writing out all these expansions.

> 
> 			+
>        .There r 3 major cycles of Viro.logic
>        con.troll.ed by the following reactions.
> 			+
"controlled" / "coned" / "troll" (a "troll" is in geek-speak, as you all
know, an incompetent person who, not realizing this, goes on other
people's nerves). - Nice wordplays.

But on to the "3 major cycles of Viro.logic". - The following lines
emulate the output/screen typography of a Unix (in this case even more
specifically: GNU) commandline tool if you start it with the "--help"
option or read the Unix manual page via "man". (The two line-sentence
quoted above clearly mimicks the technical prose of man pages as well.)

> 		+
>        
> -M, --baseline-re:ge][xp][nerative.
> .Internet p][atterned][roduced as a wr][h][y.zomic x.pression.
>     
> .This is this e.ternal range.
> 
> -E, --x.tended-rege][xp][nerative.
> .Interphysical person as an x.tendable geophysical x.pression.
>  
> -Z, --fixed-stra][i][nds
> .Inter.twin.ing of previous patterns as links of fixed strands, stitched
> via newbies.
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------______________________________
> ________________
>          the  [-viro] [-logic] [-e condition | 
>        -f STRAND] [-d ACTION]  [--searches=ACTION]  [--x.tended-
>        reg][exp.eriential][]  [--fixed-strands] 
> ______________________________________________
> ----------------------------------------------
> 

But now the gory details:
>        
> -M, --baseline-re:ge][xp][nerative.

"regenerative"/"regexp" -> "regexgenerative"

"regexp" being shorthand for "regular expression", the pattern matching
language used in many Unix tools (grep, sed, vi) and in the Perl
programming language and from which mez' code language draws. - If you
don't know them, think of regexps as improved wildcards.

> .Internet p][atterned][roduced as a wr][h][y.zomic x.pression.

"patterned"/"produced"
"wry"/"rhizomic"

So the notion of the "pattern" present in "regex" becomes semantically
expanded into its common-language meaning here. 
>
> .This is this e.ternal range.

The first three lines of the 'online help'/manpage have described the
Internet itself, the technical information infrastructure as the first
major "cycle" of "Viro.logic". (I find "wr][h][y.zomic" a particularly
beautiful mezangellism.)

Now the second cycle:

>
> -E, --x.tended-rege][xp][nerative.

"extended regexp"/"extended regenerative"

A play with the term "extended regular expression" (i.e. even more
improved versions of the improved wildcards as common in egrep, vim and
other Unix programs). 

So spreading infections/diseases is being equalled to pattern/wildcard
matching, with computers/organisms as the data being scanned; a dense
poetic analogy, which exposes the implicit thought
patterns/epistemologies in computing, software and the Internet by
looking at them as if they were literal. (This is a great example of
what Shklovskij and the Russian formalists called the "estrangement" in
poetic language!)

> .Interphysical person as an x.tendable geophysical x.pression.

Clear; while the first "cycle" is the technical infrastructure, the
second one is the human network, distributed over the globe.

Now the third one:
>  
> -Z, --fixed-stra][i][nds

The ambiguity of "straints" / "strands" echoes the line
"N.pu.t][rojan.logic][ strains [or physical N.put if no strands r
nominated]" from the first part of the text, using the same semantics;

"strains" for artificial systems, "strands" for biological organisms.

> .Inter.twin.ing of previous patterns as links of fixed strands, stitched
> via newbies.

"Intertwining"/"twin"

As the ambiguity of "strains"/"strands" shows, cycle 3 is the link
between 1 and 2, thus necessary to kick off the "virological condition."

- I didn't mention the irony and humor of the whole piece, but I think
it's obvious enough in such phrases as "stitched via newbies", all the
more in the passage of (mocked) manual page prose. 

> ----------------------------------------------______________________________
> ________________
>          the  [-viro] [-logic] [-e condition | 
>        -f STRAND] [-d ACTION]  [--searches=ACTION]  [--x.tended-
>        reg][exp.eriential][]  [--fixed-strands] 
> ______________________________________________
> ----------------------------------------------

Now we get the brief summary of the commandline options. In other words:
The "Virologic conditioning" is a program, and here we get its runtime
parameters and internal logic. 

Compare that to our entry #65, "tactical virii", which I found, quote
myself, "a pretty generic description of what many if not most computer
viri do". In mez, the difference is not only a much deeper
anthropological/cultural reflection of and speculation about viruses and
infection, it's also infinitely more sophisticated and dense in its
writing; it's not just writing about code and code viruses, but
a writing which reinvents its language for an adequate reflection.

The second last sentence...
> 
> 
> [...the named input + technologic strains + physical input if no strands
> are nominated + possible contaminants = by default the condition spreads
> through machining biologic/robologic links...]
> 

...is a reprise of a previous part of the text, but with its 
mezangelle complexity being flattened out:

"s][ir][ear.c][am][hes the named N.pu.t][rojan.logic][ strains [or
physical N.put if no strands r nominated]
4 possible contaminants.
.By de:fault][lines][ the Condition
s.pr][int][eads thru matching bi][r][o][bo][.logic links."

This was the sentence I used to explain why the language of the text
works as combinatory sourcecode, expanding into multiple, contradictory
output lines. One could consider the "flattened" version one of those,
but, as a subtle difference, it modifies "matching" to "machining", thus
introducing another ambiguity.

I find it interesting how much, if you intensely read the text, the "flat"
version loses in comparison to the mezangelle version. And I hope that,
by now, I could make a strong argument for not simply viewing mez' code
as ornamental pseudocode similar to randomly interspersed Japanese
characters in an English text!

> 
> 
> [e:n:d]
> 
> 

"[end]" closes the statement that was opened with "[b:g:in]", but
pronounced "ee-en-dee" it also sounds like "and", inscribing the end its
simultaneous negation.

- I think I am too exhausted to start another in-depth reading with
"#!/usEr/is/per.verse][ly routed][".

++++++

To cut a long story short: Of course, I can't deny that, being the
literature guy I am, I have strong affinities to the whole entry,
finding it excellent and intense. 

If there's a problem accepting this as "Software Art" as such, then I
would argue that mez' writing is in the same league as Perl Poetry. 90%
of Perl poetry (and I systematically collected it since years, including
the early pieces of Larry Wall and Sharon Hopkins) is non-executable
pseudocode as well. There is, however, one difference: All Perl poetry I
know is just as naive as the original hacker ASCII Art (with its kitsch
hearts, bunnies etc. painted as ASCII). You can find all kinds of love
poems and haikus in Perl, but nothing that is actually interesting as
contemporary poetry. 

So with her work, mez does for code poetry as jodi and Vuk Cosic have
done for ASCII Art: Turning a great, but naively executed concept into
something brilliant, paving the ground for a whole generation of digital
artists. 

Florian

-- 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
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