Inke Arns
An Art Yet Unknown: Art Will Be Code, Or It Will Not Be
An Art Yet Unknown: Art Will Be Code, Or It Will Not Be
written for the Anthology of Art The German version of the question I was sent differs slightly from the English version. While the English version asks “What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future art?”, the German version reads: “What could be, given your vision of art today, a future art yet unknown to you?” As I find it more challenging, I will attempt to answer the second question (even if the attempt to describe something yet unknown to oneself is quite paradoxical). A future art yet unknown to me would definitely be an art of code. Already today, within the field of so-called “net art”, we can see attempts which point in this direction. The “codeworks” (to borrow a term by Alan Sondheim) by Netochka Nezvanova (or: NN, integer, antiorp), mez, Jodi and others focus their/our attention on the ‘raw’ program code which our increasingly digitized working and living environment is based upon. As in the future this digitization will be rather increasing than decreasing, it is important to realize that it’s not the glossy surfaces but rather the underlying program code which has performative properties. One could assume the existence of two texts, a ‘phenotext’ and a ‘genotext’, when talking about the properties of graphical interfaces. The surface effects of the phenotext, i. e. moving texts, are generated and controlled by other, underlying ‘effective’ texts, programming codes or source texts. Programming codes are illocutionary speech acts [1] insofar as ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ coincide, and these verbal acts with the ‘power to act’ don’t merely describe or represent something, but directly affect, put into motion. [2] Thus, code, i. e. text (programming languages / binary code) directly affects the virtual spaces in which we are moving, communicating, living. It has the capabilities to directly mobilize or immobilize its users. This is why Lawrence Lessig in his book ‘Code and other Laws of Cyberspace’ [3] claims that “program code increasingly tends towards becoming law.” Today, control functions are directly being built into the very architecture of the Net, i. e. its code. Taking as an example the America Online (AOL) service, Lessig poignantly makes clear how code directly enables or disables freedom of movement, of speech, and of behaviour. Code should not be accepted as something ‘natural’ or ‘God-given’. It is rather written by humans, and can, therefore, be changed, or conceived of differently. A future art yet unknown to me would definitely point to the importance of code and do all kinds of things with and to it. This art of the code will primarily deal with ‘deep code’ and not with the mere ‘surface effects of software’. It will thus essentially be a text-based activity and not a visual representation. This is not to say that images or surfaces will disappear entirely. This is just to say that, increasingly, the digital realm has to be conceived of in terms of text, not image. What’s political is the code. Staying with the surfaces would deny the fact that the computer is, by no means, a visual medium, as Florian Cramer has emphasized, but essentially and primarily a text medium to which all kinds of output devices can be connected. [4] The future art I am thinking of will be characterized by a genuine processuality. This genuine processuality will be very different from what has become known as ‘process-oriented’ art since the 1960s or even since the 1910s and 1920s. It means that art becomes more focused on process itself, that it will get more and more integrated into processes, that it will take place within processes, that it will incite or disguise itself as viral-like activities and work its way deep into the guts of information society’s data body. This will go beyond what we have seen in terms of the ‘dematerialisation of the art object’ since the 1960s. There won’t be objects anymore, only processes which (sometimes may even visibly) affect surfaces. Art becoming genuinely processual will thus increasingly step out of a clearly defined art context in order to directly affect and intervene in the control processes of different realms of the information society. I would not like to loose the term ‘art’ itself, and would not entirely subscribe to Dirk Paesmans’ / Jodi’s radical view, but I am sure that it will definitely be filled with new, appropriate content: “Well, what is art? A pretentious thing that tries to take the fun out of working with the Net and impose its standards on us. Forget about it!” [5] Inke Arns Berlin, Nov. 26, 2001 ............................. [1] John Langshaw Austin: How to Do Things with Words. German edition: Zur Theorie der Sprechakte. Stuttgart 1979 [2] Cf. Inke Arns: Texts That Move (Themselves): Notes on the Performativity of Programming Codes in Net Art. Paper given at the Kinetographien conference, European Academy, Berlin, October 2001 [3] Lawrence Lessig: Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. New York 1999 http://code-is-law.org [4] „Es gibt im Computer nichts als Schrift, woraus folgt, dass Schrift, Text der Schluessel zum strukturellen Verstaendnis des Computers und der Digitalisierung analoger Zeichen ist“. Florian Cramer: Fuer eine Textwissenschaft des Digitalen. Typoskript, lecture at the Germanistentag Erlangen, 01.10.2001, 2 [5] Dirk Paesmans on Jodi, in: Tilman Baumgärtel. net.art 2.0. New Materials towards Net Art. Nuremberg 2001, p. 173 |
