[syndicate] CodeChat - a system for open discussion of art-related code

[Pall Thayer]

Hi
I've been working on something for a while now and am ready to  
release a prototype. This is something that requires the  
participation of people to be successful. Here's the background and a  
little info on what it is:

Recently, an interview appeared on the Rhizome list in connection  
with an exhibition in Spain. Amongst the people interviewed was  
Christiane Paul. In the interview she mentioned something along the  
lines of understanding the language of new media. I replied to this  
interview posting with a posting asking, what exactly is the language  
of new media? In my response I suggested that it was somewhere within  
an understanding of code. And it makes sense as far as "coded"  
artwork goes. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.  
What we need is more open discussion between artists regarding the  
value and importance of code and coding methods and the conceptual/ 
aesthetic implications of such practice. We, the arist-coders, need  
to openly discuss our methods so that others, not versed in code, can  
pick up on some of the issues and discuss them in less technical  
terms. That's the whole idea behind the project I call "CodeChat". A  
side-effect of this whole thing is that artists will have to open- 
source their code or at least portions of it to allow people to  
discuss it. The system is very simple to use. It consists of a single  
Perl script that you feed your text-based code file through and it  
automatically generates an html file with comment sections for each  
line of code. The commenting system is AJAX based, driven by  
Javascript, PHP and MySQL. For now, I want to test the system and  
hope that as many people as possible will join in and generate some  
discussion. After the testing, I will release the system under the  
General Public License and hopefully others will help in making it  
more dependable and secure.

The whole idea of this kind of discussion was sparked by another  
project, also from Christiane Paul, the CODeDOC exhibition on the  
Whitney website:

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/

Where the code was put on center stage and artists involved were  
asked to publicly comment on each others code.

The CodeChat prototype is running at:

http://pallit.lhi.is/~palli/codechat



--
Pall Thayer
pall at fa.is
http://www.this.is/pallit



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