Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel (2001) jury statement and in  'Software Art and Writing' American Book Review, vol.22, no.6.]


The jury statement for artistic software of the transmediale.01 art festival in Berlin, has become a touchstone for defining software art. Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel carefully historicise the terms for what was at that time a new category, drawing attention to the structures of programming that lies behind the new media work. They see this as part of a historical trajectory that has tended to overlook the material and aesthetic aspects of software, the programming code that is inevitably a part of all art that is digitally produced and reproduced. Their example of software practice is the Fluxus performance score of La Monte Young's Composition 1961 No. I, January I: 
'Draw a straight line and follow it'. 
The point for them is that 'the score is not aesthetically detached from its performance'. (2001)
This is explained as the collapse of 'concept notation and execution' (quoted in Johansson, in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 156). 

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Micz Flor (2002), '"Hear me out" - Free Radio Linux', Nettime, May 12; written for r a d I o q u a l i a's "Free Radio Linux," 
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/

The aesthetic qualities of code at their extreme seem to be best exemplified by the alleged readings as if poetry. However, another highly conceptual example is radioqualia's 'free linux radio' (2001) in which the entire source code of the Linux kernel, the part of the operating software Linux on top of which
all other applications run, was webcast over the Internet using a speech synthesizer  to convert the 4,141,432 lines of code into talk radio taking about 593.89 days to read.  Cultural production in this scenario is literally reduced to code and the wider  context of the open source movement, as language is necessarily context bound. Larry Wall explains this in the context of the programming language Perl:  
'A language is not a set of syntax rules. It is not just a set of semantics.
It's the entire culture surrounding the language itself. So part of the
cultural context in which you analyze a language includes all the
personalities and people involved--how everybody sees the language, how they
propagate the language to other people, how it gets taught, the attitudes of
people who are helping each other learn the language--all of this goes into
the pot of context.' (Larry Wall, quoted in Flor, 2001)