Matthew Fuller (2004) 'The Digital Object', in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 26-41. Matthew Fuller reminds the enthusiast of software art what is missing from many debates: 'a thick, brilliant, absolutely enraged, vividly sexual and gregarious involvement with multiform life. Software is part of this, but not much.' (2004: 28). He is thinking of the work of David Wojnarowicz who died of an AIDS related illness in 1992, and his realisation that he'd not only contracted a virus but also the realisation that society was diseased too. Software has a politics but he is concerned to focus attention on the digital object itself. He partly does this by returning to Walter Benjamin's arcades work where ideas of the history and future are embedded in objects (even something as seemingly immaterial as dust). His historical materialism would invest objects with history and a sense of the future possible (2004: 29). Fuller sees certain software operating in this manner through an engagement with temporality and that an 'object is never in itself complete' (2004:30). The digital objects or software he chooses to illustrate his point are deceptively simple, but crucially are enlivened through participation and social context: 'combining the synthetic powers of software with those of the social.' (2004: 38) The definition of software is extended to include social interactions perhaps. -- Mirko Schaefer (2004), 'Made by Users: How Users Improve Things, Provide Innovation and Change our Idea of Culture - Problems and Perspectives,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 62-77. Clearly users adapt and use consumer technologies in innovative ways. This unofficial development or hacking is increasingly recognised by manufacturers and corporate culture. Mirko Schaefer argues that software products are particularly prone to adaptation and further innovation by users with technical competence and by the use of network communications to share ideas under open source principles. His examples are turning the Microsoft Xbox into a Linux web server, a Nintendo Gameboy into a music editor, and Sony's AIBO robot pet dog into an electronic pit bull. (2004: 63). Is this an example of general intellect? Certainly modification or hacking of existing software and hardware demonstrates the creative and collective desire to adapt prescribed uses of technological goods and positions the consumer as producer too. The thesis of the Culture Industry appears to dissolve. Yet, the case of the AIBO is a particularly neat example of a subcultural activity being successfully recuperated. First introduced in 1999, and soon hacked and published on Slashdot for others to follow suit. At first this intervention was frowned upon by Sony but later regarded as contributing and supporting the development of their product (2004: 72). On the one hand this seems like Sony supporting the creative freedom of users, but of course it also provides excellent and cheap research and development for the company. Moreover, they have nothing to worry about from a few users, if threatened sufficiently from this activity, they have the legal apparatus to turn to. -- Jacob Lillemose (2004), 'A Re-Declaration of Dependence - Software Art in a Cultural Context It Can't Get Out Of,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 136-149. It has become commonplace to examine software art in relation to the emergence of conceptual art practices from the mid 1960s as a continuation of the 'dematerialisation of art'. Jacob Lillemose relates the aesthetics of code and programming to two strands of conceptual art that are formal in character: 'linguistic conceptualism,' associated with Sol LeWitt, Art & language and Joseph Kosuth, that considers art as a 'self-reflexive logistic system composed by writing and ideas, and a language in which form and content tended to merge'; and secondly, the work of art as a set of instructions or composition, associated with La Monte Young and John Cage, 'as a purely mental, non-physical, phenomena.' (2004: 139) Added to this is a more cultural or political dimension associated with Hans Haacke, Victor Burgin, and Gordon Matta-Clark, and a more performative one associated with Vito acconci, Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. These examples serve to emphasise that software art follows a similar trajectory in rejecting the notion of the autonomous work of art for praxis that takes account of wider issues such as communication, information systems and social processes. In recognition of the importance of context, Lillemose puts it this way: 'the contextual nature of conceptual art points towards an aesthetics based on the relationship between the internal structure of the work of art and external non-artistic structures.' (2004: 140: he is paraphrasing Sarah Charlesworth's 'A Declaration of Dependence' of 1975). So an artwork is not determined by context by works dynamically with its context as 'both a condition and a potential' as Lillemose puts it. This is overtly referred to as software in Burnham's Software exhibition of 1970 as a metaphor for conceptual art that goes beyond mere art. This is a neat chronology of conceptual art and positions software art as an activity both produced by and producing culture - the activity of 'programmers of programming possibilities (Lillemose, 2004: 143; quoting Thomas Dreher). Lillemose regards this activity as a 'fourth generation' of conceptual art in a rather teleological argument that places software art in an art historical continuum. Perhaps it is preferable to see the potential of software art to break this continuum - at least that's what a historical materialist would seek to do. Lillemose is avoiding what he sees as a trap of describing this emergent practice as avant-gardist, preferring to regard it as 'primarily conceptual and only secondly formalistic, and because it is conceptual it is contextual' (2004: 145) He is arguing for a contextual understanding of software art as 'software not-just art' (extending Matthew Fuller's phrase 'not-just art') but recognising this is one of many ways of conceptualising of its history and cultural understanding. Note: In 'Anti-Capitalist Operating System/ Together we can defeat capitalism,' (http://runme.org/project/+ACOS/) it is made explicit that operating systems are the puppet masters of all other software and laden with political implications (Lillemose in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 338). -- note: The false dichotomy of software formalism and culturalism is also raised by Troels Degn Johansson in 'Mise En Abyme in Software Art: A Comment to Florian Cramer' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004). -- Inke Arns (2004), Read_Me, Run_Me, Execute_Me: Software and its Discontents, or: it's The Performativity of Code, Stupid,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 176-193. What lies hidden behind the surface of software for Inke Arns, is not only the program code but its performativity and it is this she aims to emphasise through speech act theory referring to the ability to act and perform (2004: 177). The performativity of code is theoretically contextualised by reference to John Langshaw Austin's How To Do Things With Words: 'that language does not only have a descriptive, referential or constative function, but also possesses a performative dimension' (2004: 185: ironically this sounds like Chomsky's generative grammar!). The performative aspect of speech is social and semiotic and context-bound. Like a speech act, Arns sees this as analogous to program code in that it says something and does something with consequences. The action has effects. [Code animates the machine. Code is read by the machine operationally, and not culturally - but it is has cultural effects.] Using Saussure's terms, software art is more concerned with parole than langue. She continues: 'In our context, performance and parole mean the respective actualisations and concrete realisations and repercussions a certain priogram has on, let's say, social systems, and not only what it does or generates in the context of abstract-technical systems.' (2004: 186) She usefully cites Tilman BaumgŠrtel's article 'Experimental Software' (from 2001) describing the difference between early art work using computers from the 1960s and software art. BaumgŠrtel describes software as: 'not art that has been created with the help of a computer, but art that happens in the computer, software is not programmed by artists in order to produce autonomous artworks, but the software itself is the artwork. What is crucial here is not the result but the process triggered in the computer by the program code.' (Arns, 2004: 184-5) Like others, she quotes our earlier aesthetics paper in this connection: 'the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply its written form' but this was not meant in the way she describes as privileging the end product - the point was to emphasise the process of execution as part of the work, the end product remains a by-product of this process. It was just expressed poorly or at best ambiguously. Her contention is that this avoids 'code works' that are often not executable, or executable only on a conceptual level. She states the obvious to effect in that sometimes software is not necessarily generative. For her and she is thinking of the inadequate definitions, the problem lies in the fact that generative art does not engage sufficiently with the apparatus. -- The etymological root of program relates to mark-making, emphasising the material production of code as something before the act. Much software art expresses the raw materiality of code, especially work that uses simple programs and assembly languages. The significance is that low-level languages are seen to have a close proximity to the mechanics of the hardware (Simon Yuill, in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 229). Simon Yuilll calls this 'code art brutalism' in recognition to his analogy to brutalist design aesthetics. -- note: on Sol Lewitt Casey Reas in 'Software Structures' explores the relations between software and the work of Sol Lewitt, playfully describing his work as 'paragraphs on Software Structures' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 295). He describes approach to software production: 'I want programming to be as immediate and fluid as drawing and I work with software in a way that minimizes the technical aspects.' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 277). -- note: software culture needs to take account of cultural difference.