Conceptual art and software
Martin Howse argues for free software and open code as contemporary art forms beyond the
narrow confines of objects and executables
Outside The Black Box
U
nder a proprietary model, the executable
is everything. Forget about the aesthetics
of code, there is no code. In this world of
pure functionality, getting the job done is all that
counts. Creative approaches to computing are
barely visible as closed source developers are
quarantined inside the black box of the runnable.
And code poetry, such as that practised by Perl
mongers, is out of the question in a closed
source world. Little wonder that the free software
community is such an attractive space for artists
who prefer to think outside the box.
Coding software is quite obviously a creative
activity, though as always it’s obviously a
question of degree. Coding yet another online
0100101110101101.ORG’s biennale.py virus perfectly
mirrors the political aspects of free software and
open distribution
Coding software is quite obviously a creative activity
shopping app in a mundane language such as
PHP, or one more database frontend may not
Environment, interface and language are just some of the many issues exactly get the creative juices flowing, but
addressed by ap’s fm01 (film machine) project
hacking new languages for artists or indeed
developing an artistic operating system
definitely fits the bill.
At the same time, examining source code is
often compared to looking under the bonnet or
delving into the guts of the beast, expressions
which certainly imply getting one’s hands dirty.
Coding is relegated to the status of a craft or
skill, again at the service of the mighty
functional executable. Yet, given high level
Her self-invented mezangelle language, a
languages such as Scheme or Lisp and the
complex abstractions which these highly artistic
strange hybrid of English and pseudo-code languages afford the contemporary coder,
which throws protocols and broken software programming is very much an art form.
into the pot of conceptual code
Of course, there’s a long history of discourse
amongst hackers concerning the beauty of
code. Almost 40 years ago, Donald Knuth,
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Conceptual art and software
creator of the exemplary TeX text processing
package, wrote on the aesthetics of code. And
core Unix utility TeX is itself considered as both
elegant code and beautiful executable. Paul
Graham, with his excellent Hackers And Painters
essay (see issue 42), also neatly explains the
parallels between the two arts, offering clear
advice for the would-be artist-hacker in the
emerging medium of coding. However, it can
be argued that both Knuth, Graham and other
key hackers such as Stallman, express a
somewhat old-fashioned, classicist view of art
and beauty, which has many parallels with
mathematical ideas of elegance and aesthetics;
a formalist viewpoint which has little time for
wider cultural considerations. As we’ll see, the
field of what could be termed conceptual code,
is all about examining code within the larger
context of history, language and culture, with
the work of cutting edge artists digging deep
into the rich seam exposed by the split nature
of code as both executable and text.
Conceptual code is code which doesn’t fit,
falling neither comfortably within the remit of
audiovisual software nor in some cases
rendering any human accessible form.
RADIO ON
It’s possible to argue coherently that free
software can itself be considered a work of art,
when considered as open culture and as self-
referencing writing or intertextuality. In 1999
the Linux kernel was itself awarded the Golden
Nica in the Net category of Ars Electronica, the
world’s most prestigious digital arts festival. And
in February 2002, the 4,141,432 lines of code
which then made up the Linux kernel
commenced broadcast online and on air as
computerised spoken word by Free Radio Linux,
an initiative set up by the online art
collaboration r a d i o q u a l i a. Free Radio
Linux obviously runs using free software such as
Ogg Vorbis, and its creators argue with great
wit that the project continues the tradition of
FM code stations in the eighties who distributed
source via radio, allowing early hackers with
home computers, such as Sinclair ZX81s or
Commodore 64s, to demodulate the analogue
signal through a modem and run the code. Free
Radio Linux obviously provides a similar service
for contemporary hackers, equipped with pen
and paper for code transcription.
Berlin-based theorist, Micz Flor, argues that
Free Radio Linux digs deep into questions of
code and language, technology, art, and culture
as well as opening up debates on freedom of
speech and copyright protection. Free Radio
Linux exposes the wider cultural context
surrounding free software, and as Larry Wall,
creator of Perl, argues, a language is not just a
set of rules or semantics, it is rather the
complete culture which surrounds the
language. This context includes all the people
involved in the language, how people learn the
language and help each other with the
language and interact with each other. And few
would argue that such a rich cultural context
can only exist under a free software
development model. This is one message that
Free Radio Linux clearly broadcasts. And the
LinuxUser & Developer 43
 Conceptual art and software
political dimensions, which boil down to
questions of code and language, of Free Radio
Linux are even plainer, with clear parallels to the
publication of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) source
code by MIT in 1995 which unhinged legal
prohibitions placed on its distribution. And it’s
also worth mentioning the DeCSS debacle, with
T-shirts bearing the utilities source code being
examined in court. Such a distribution model
was neatly engaged by the Bologna-based
artists group 0100101110101101.ORG in their
biennale.py work, a Python-based fake
computer virus, which was exhibited on a
thousand T-shirts during the opening of the
Venice Biennale in 2001.
READ OR RUN
The read or run continuum from text to
executable offers many opportunities for
interesting investigation, both by programmers
and artists. Indeed, as Paul Graham intelligently
asserts, programmers can learn much from
artists and one could even argue for an
equivalent exchange in the other direction.
Live coding really is the new black, with some of
the world’s best artist-hackers jumping on the
Toplap bandwagon
Artists and programmers really aren’t such
different beasts. Interesting parallels can be
made from code to a film or theatre script, or
system of notation, which can instantly be
performed by the compiler or interpreter, and
artists such as Adrian Ward or ap have
intriguingly investigated this realm.
At one extreme end of this continuum we
can find code which even fails to run and is not
written for any known architecture or language.
This pseudo-code which has many parallels with
obfuscated code (particularly in the Perl
language), code which does not willingly give
up its intentions, or with toy languages such as
Brainfuck, an eight-instruction Turing-complete
complexity, can readily be found on the artistic
_archive_ mailing list. And one of the finest
practitioners of this somewhat obscure art is
44 LinuxUser & Developer
mez, an Australian net artist with her self-
invented mezangelle language, a strange hybrid
of English and pseudo-code which throws
protocols and broken software into the pot of
conceptual code. However, even mez’s un-
executable approach still sits comfortably with
the work of computer science gurus, Abelson
and Sussman. Their seminal work, Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs, opens
with the following directive, “Programs should
be written for people to read, and only
incidentally for machines to execute.”
At the same time, what could be termed
social software occupies the more executable
end of the read and run spectrum, with an
emphasis on the social functionality of
empowerment and free distribution, and an
examination of user interaction at the sharp
end; how users are defined by contemporary
algorithms and interfaces. Social software
questions the black box of productivity-led
interface design with more playful approaches
to interaction. Of course, the history of
computer science is peppered with lively
pioneer figures such as Alan Kay who, way
before the birth of the personal computer,
envisaged Dynabooks as enabling creative
thought or as “fantasy amplifiers”. However,
contemporary software art, particularly the
discourse of Matthew Fuller, rounds this out
with more political concerns. Fuller intelligently
defines both speculative and social software in
terms of reflexivity and sociability respectively.
These are both key aspects of a free software
approach, and Fuller makes this explicit, whilst
at the same time bemoaning projects such as
KOffice which appear too locked into a
Microsoft mentality. Within key essays such as
Behind the Blip: Software as Culture, Fuller
defines a new genre, software criticism, which
would rank alongside art or literary critiques. To
further elaborate his arguments Fuller quotes
from Richard Feynman’s Lectures On
Computation in which 13 levels to any
operating system are described, from electronic
circuitry to the shell. Fuller argues that since the
time of writing in 1984, a huge number of extra
levels or abstractions can be added including
the various protocols of interface, licensing,
network and marketplace.
INSTRUCTION SET
Of course software art or conceptual software is
by no means necessarily allied to a free software
approach. Yet the guru of the conceptual or
software art scene, Florian Cramer, lecturer in
the Department of Comparative Literature at
Freie Universitat Berlin, remains firmly rooted in
the free software movement. He provides a rare
example of a theorist attracted to open source
who actually practises what he preaches.
Whether hacking Perl poetry, contributing
patches to the community, or lecturing on such
subjects as free software as collaborative text,
Cramer knows full well that free software and
software as culture go hand in hand. And rather
Programs should be
written for people to
read, and only
incidentally for
machines to execute
than hiding behind both Powerbook and
Powerpoint, Cramer exposes a neat, but rather
battered IBM Z50 running NetBSD and larswm
window manager at conferences and debates
worldwide.
Cramer provides perhaps the most coherent
exposition of this scene and its concerns,
intelligently dissecting both the formalist
approach as evidenced by Alex McLean and
Adrian Ward, and more socially aware projects
such as those of Fuller and Harwood (see Giving
It Back) as well as tracing the origins of the
movement within the literary, instruction-based
texts of the Dadaists in the 1920s and the
conceptual art works, including the oeuvre of
John Cage or Sol LeWitt, of the 1960s and early
1970s. Indeed, Cramer, in a paper delivered at
the seminal Read_Me festival in 2002, picks up
 Conceptual art and software Conceptual art and software

on the fact that one of the first shows of

conceptual art in New York was entitled
Software. This show, curated by art critic and
theorist Jack Burnham, is of key importance
within the history of software art, featuring
installations of conceptual art alongside
intriguing computer software such as the first
prototype of Ted Nelson’s hypertext system
Xanadu; forerunner of the Internet and free
software movement which this technology
spawned and enabled.
Concept art was defined in the early 60s as
As its title implies, London.pl retraces and
retranscribes Blake’s bleak 18th century poem
London into code and comments
duality of code, artists Alexei Shulgin and Olga
Goriunova curate and organise both the yearly
Read_Me software art festival and the runme.
org Web archive which offers a huge repository
of openly submitted art code and software
concepts. Work under both projects exhibits a
performance tool or language lab.
This notion of linguistic creation and
experimentation is of great appeal to artists,
and is possible only within a semi-interpreted,
open code model. Artists such as ap really push
out the language boat, questioning
ity) of Live (Algorithm|Audio|Art|Artistic) contemporary models of coding and established
Programming), group very much to the fore. architectures. In these instances, and under ap
Toplap is all about making runnable code visible projects such as ap02 or gdapp, a virtual
to the audience, again mirroring the core machine approach is used, adding one more
concerns of a free software approach. During layer to Feynman’s rapidly multiplying levels of
the Dorkbot City Camp, which neatly dovetailed abstraction within computation. Virtual
PublicAddressSystem.pm, which would be used
for the manipulation of the Vortex4 129 Db
outside warning system. If properly executed
london.pl would calculate and broadcast the air
displacement needed to represent the public
scream of dispossessed children in london from
1792, the date of the original poem, until today.
Harwood’s work lives and breathes within the
social duality of code, presenting both a re-
interpretation of Blake’s poem and code
for interpretation.

Key Links
an artform which has ideas as its material, just huge variety of approaches to artistic code, with Read_Me, Toplap threw live Perl, machines can be used to examine the artistically
as sound is the medium for music. Cramer though in the last Read_Me iteration, held in SuperCollider, and Scheme coders and a foot rich area of enquiry pinpointed by Feynman,
argues that software art, with instruction set as Aarhus this year, the emphasis was very much operated VJ interface into the mix. Subtitled how low-level switches or logic gates which can
material shares both a collapse of the duality of on live virtuosic coding, with the work of the “people doing strange things with software”, be implemented in electronic or other physical Free radio Linux:
notation and execution, and a language-based newly formed Toplap, or (Temporary|Transnatio the Dorkbot camp rounded up Dorkbot forms enable supremely high level abstractions radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux
medium, with concept art. nal|Terrestrial|Transdimensional) Organisation groupings from the USA and Europe. Dorkbot to be built on top of complex programming
Neatly echoing these concerns with the for the (Promotion|Proliferation|Permanence|Pur events are held in cities such as London or languages such as Lisp. Biennale.py
Ghent, and, in keeping with a spirit of www.0100101110101101.org/home/biennale_py
CODE.PL
Giving it back
openness, allow members of the public to
present diverse hard and software projects Social software is all about community and no-one knows Although Lisp in one form or another does seem Mez
this better than Mongrel. Their latest Nine(9) piece uses
Community forms an important, not to say essential, part both of a free software which fall outside the norms imposed by proven free software to great effect to be gaining much ground amongst artist- www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker
development model or culture, and the practice of software art. However, nowhere is this commercial demands. Dorkbots present a rich hackers, Perl offers a rich artistic culture and
made more explicit than in the work of the Mongrel team (Graham Harwood and Matthew mix of artists, hackers, hacktivists and hecklers. history, as evidenced by creator Larry Wall’s well Alan Kay
Fuller in collaboration with others), using common free software tools to facilitate both on coders and users are the linguistic, cultural, written thesis concerning software culture. www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
and offline communities amongst those often denied access to such technologies. Mongrel’s SOFT MACHINE artistic aspects of programming as exposed by Within both the code poetry and obfuscated
remit is often as hard to pin down as their collaborators, though the emphasis is very much And if conceptual code is primarily a question of conceptual code. And if computer languages code scenes, Perl is a hot favourite and Perl’s Matthew Fuller
on providing tools, models and teaching experiences which would often be overlooked in language, coding is also a question of present a workshop for conceptual code, then easy text handling makes for decent integration pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdma/staff/mfuller
applications which economically and conceptually dominate contemporary software. It’s a languages. Computer languages are the domain the language of choice must surely be Lisp, with artistic prose. Perl is favoured by artists
fluid investigation of software and practice which falls between the gaps, exploring the of flame wars, but also perhaps the natural which is commonly considered as a language such as Alex McLean for its semi-interpretative Florian Cramer
essential issue of interface within community. And it isn’t just about software as an enabling habitat for a discourse on conceptual code. laboratory for fermenting ideas. Indeed, aspects which play well with the shell and make userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage
force, Mongrel also work a great deal within a wider cultural context. Mongrel Mervin There’s a long history of artistic and Sussman and Graham share this point of view, for decent live coding opportunities. McLean’s
initiated and now runs the Mongrel Container project, literally a large freight container which philosophical approaches to computer with Graham expounding a new philosophy of excellent work with Perl includes forkbomb.pl Alex McLean
has been shipped to Jamaica to function as mobile media lab and computer workshop for the languages, aside from humdrum concerns of programming, under which rather than writing which more than emphasises the intimate yaxu.org
disenfranchised. It’s an initiative which has parallels to other such projects which aim to business and productivity, which with intense an application in Lisp, a new language is connection of text and technology in a code
bridge the so-called digital divide. However, here the emphasis is perhaps more on disruptive evolutions, offshoots and sharing of ideas makes created which can sit on the same level as the poem which crashes machines. His feedback.pl Read_me
technologies in the context of cultural production. Or, as Mervin phrases it, “We want to hot- for exciting reading under the spotlight of app, enabling extension and customisation. And is a masterpiece both of live coding technology readme.runme.org
wire Jamaica into the machine that will make the Upsetters of the future.” conceptual code. Again Alan Kay, with Squeak and reflexive software, incorporating text editor,
There can be little doubt that Mongrel’s latest Nine(9) software project will fulfill an and Smalltalk (see issue 42), is a figure to be dynamic code runner and self-editing Run_me
important role within this cultural upsetting. Nine(9) plugs together a raft of free software reckoned with. And the work of Abelson and Fuller defines a capabilities. runme.org
tools and packages to provide an online network, archive and community. Nine(9) means
nine groups which provide each nine archives in turn providing nine maps which contain
Sussman can easily be considered as an artistic
work enacted within the self-questioning or
new genre, software However, it’s Graham Harwood who has
really pushed forward the textual qualities of Dorkbot
nine images each with nine links to any of the 2125764 files on the server. The numbers are reflexive world of computing. Descriptions of criticism, which would Perl, reviving the very English, social poetry of www.dorkbot.org
arbitrary but provide a neat summary of the play between freedom and a Unix-style meta-circular compilers certainly fall under the rank alongside art or William Blake. Alongside fellow Mongrel (see
permissions model which is at work in Nine(9). Nine(9) has structure, but its rabid linking
potential unravels this rigidity. The structure is provided by overarching groups, and by the
remit of speculative code. In Sussman’s first
lecture which opens the now classic Structure
literary critiques Giving It Back), Matthew Fuller, Harwood is
obsessed with the social uses and misuses of
Toplap
www.toplap.org
organisation of visual material online as a kind of knowledge map. Links are made to sounds, And Interpretation of Computer Programs algorithms and code, for example how software
images, text, video clips and also to other parts of the same map or other people’s knowledge series, the notion of a “computer science” is in their heyday, Sussman and Guy Steele would and interfaces in financial institutions impact on ap
maps. It sounds simple, and the components which bring this online network into play are unravelled, with Sussman demonstrating that create new languages and dialects of Scheme the lives of the poor. Harwood’s london.pl, www.1010.co.uk
standard packages such as ImageMagick and MySQL, but like all social networks Nine(9) what usually falls under this banner has very (itself a dialect of Lisp) by the dozen. Particularly rooted firmly in Perl poetry yet dealing with
exhibits good snowballing potential, thanks in part to underlying linking code which forges little to do with either computers or with in the era of the Lisp Machines, Lisp spawned a more serious issues, is a masterful expression of London.pl
connections between maps and even emails mapmakers as links are made. This throws the science. In Hackers And Painters, Graham number of wonderful environments under these concerns and of the dual nature of code. www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?LondonPL
social connection back into the mix, forming relations outside the strict Nine(9) structure. pushes this argument further, arguing that which IDE and interface merge, fulfilling an As its title implies, London.pl retraces and
Nine(9) makes visible the sociability of software which is central to a free software model; “Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously important social function in perhaps retranscribes Blake’s bleak 18th century poem Nine(9)
how software changes and develops as a result of ongoing cultural interaction between users related areas thrown together by an accident of undermining the user, programmer divide. A London into code and comments. And while, 9.waag.org
and programmers. As Harwood so eloquently puts it, “The various forms of its freeness or history, like Yugoslavia.” well configured GNU Emacs running with SLIME unlike the work of mez, london.pl presents
openness are being developed as part of the various rhythms of the life of this software; its Yet what unites that which can now, thanks or an inferior Lisp process presents a syntactically correct Perl code, it would not run, Mongrel
production and critical engagement with the process of permission.” to free software, be considered a community of contemporary artistic IDE which can be used as relying as it does on the imaginary code module www.mongrelx.org

46 LinuxUser & Developer LinuxUser & Developer 47