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Words Made Flesh

01/12/2005
Pau Waelder

Although it was not until 1957 that mathematician John W. Tukey coined the term “software,” its history can be traced back to Antiquity, according to Florian Cramer [1]. One of the main advocates of Software Art and long-time researcher on the relations between literature and computing, Cramer has written the book Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination[2] during a fellowship in the Media Design Research program at the Piet Zwart Institute [3] in Rotterdam. In this 140-page essay, he develops a historical overview of the philosophical, mystical, literary and artistic currents that lead to the present concept of software as a cultural practice.

First and foremost, the main orientation of this research towards establishing deep historical and cultural roots for the practice of software seems to be a response to what the author perceives as an underestimation of programming on the part of current media theories. In 2002, in his text Concept, Notations, Software, Art [4], Cramer stated that “the history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers”. These words echo in the conclusion of his latest book (or booklet, as he describes it), in which we read: “Software history can thus be told as intellectual history, as opposed to media theories which consider cultural imagination a secondary product of material technolog”. Software Art as a genre has a short history: in 2001, the digital art festival Transmediale was the first to give it recognition by dedicating an award solely to software art works. A member of the jury, Florian Cramer denounced in several texts that the concept of “[new] media art” focuses on the visual, acoustic or tactile product, overlooking the process that supports it: the programming code. Digital art is produced using computers and thus software, which is indispensable, yet it is the final product that is considered, the code being hidden from the user. This had led to considering software as a simple tool and completely ignoring to what extent the code is defining the artwork. In order to overcome this situation, Cramer extracts software from the context of computers, establishing parallelisms with instructions and permutations in art and literature, and relating it to the wider concept of culture (see, for example, Software Art and Writing [5], drafted with Ulrike Gabriel in 2001).

In the last line of “Concept, Notations, Software, Art”, the author left the discussion open, with the following words: “histories of instruction codes in art and investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still remain to be written”. Three years later, he has taken up the task himself by writing this well documented, yet at times a bit digressive, non-linear history of computation as a cultural practice that serves as an authorized argumentation on what had already been sketched in previous approaches.

A definition of software
In 2003, the Wikipedia’s definition of software was rather deceiving: “Software art is a term for the graphic design of visual elements contained in software, eg. GUI (Graphic User Interface), Icons etc.” (quoted from Florian Cramer’s Ten Theses about Software Art [6]). The actual definition [7] (as of november 2005) provided by the open source encyclopaedia is now much closer to Cramer’s, yet it still shows the influence of Jack Burnham’s view of software as concept art. Looking for an all-encompassing definition, Florian Cramer has extended the concept of software to a form of culture that includes programming code as well as its execution and the cultural appropriation of users (as, for instance, when we use the verb “to Google” for performing a search on the Internet). This being the final objective of the whole book, we can now trace the themes that are contained in it by examining in detail the definition of software with which the author concludes his essay:

“Software, it follows, is a cultural practice made up of (a) algorithms, (b) possibly, but not necessarily in conjunction with imaginary or actual machines, (c) human interaction in a broad sense of any cultural appropriation and use, and (d) speculative imagination. ” (p.125)

(a)algorithms: from the Sefer Yetzirah’s mystical permutations of the names of God to proteic poetry in the 16th century and Burroughs and Gysin’s experimentations in 1960, algorithms are present not only as calculations but also as a material for artistic creativity. Either as a method for developing almost infinite possibilities, introducing chance (as in Tristan Tzara’s cut ups of 1923), or creating constrains that must be creatively overcome (as in Oulipo’s experiments in 1949), algorithms become a tool that go well beyond the context of computers.

(b)possibly, but not necessarily in conjunction with imaginary or actual machines: another important point in Cramer’s discourse is specifying that software does not depend on hardware, and that hardware is not always physical. The “machines” conceived by Ramon Llull, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer or the Turing Machine itself are imaginary, their operations being a product of intellectual speculation and not of the action of mechanical or electronic systems. On the other hand, software does not need a computer to “run”, as shown by the actions based on instructions performed by the Fluxus group, among others. Furthermore, the idea of software can extend into political or social action, as demonstrated by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Movement.

(c)human interaction in a broad sense of any cultural appropriation and use: in 1968, in his book Algol, Noël Arnaud made a first attempt at using a programming language as material for poetic compositions. Later on, the hacker slang “leet”, Alan Sondheim’s Codework and Marie Anne Breeze’s Mezangelle all apply code as a material than can be recomposed to create a particular form of written language that is recognised as “computer talk”, imitating command lines but readable as some sort of English. In the same way as James Joyce experienced with language in Finnegan’s Wake, these new forms of writing create their own semantics and a meta-language with social and cultural implications. On the other hand, the work of George Pérec, Jodi, the I/O/D group, Netochka Nezvanova or Adrian Ward’s Auto-Illustrator introduce what Cramer defines as “software dystopia”, the reflection on software not as a subservient, domesticated assistant but as a fearful, obscure and incomprehensible golem that may revolt against us at any time or take its own decisions. Under this light, software becomes much more than just a tool, it is part of a broader concept of culture.

(d) speculative imagination: Ramón Llull’s combinatory system for developing all the possible attributes of God was a profound influence in a large series of philosophers and thinkers, that range from 17th century encyclopaedists to software for computer-aided poetry and Artificial Intelligence research. As a figure of thought, computation offers the possibility of imagining the infinite, of encompassing all possible knowledge, as is described in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel. Speculative imagination has long went after the seductive possibility that all creation could be computable and on the other hand has made this an arcane form of knowledge, haunted both by its demiurgic implications and the “ghost in the machine”.

Software culture
In the final lines of Concept, Notations, Software, Art, Florian Cramer described two opposite approaches to Software Art, that of “Software Culturalism” (represented by Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood and the groups I/O/D and Mongrel) which regards software as a cultural and political phenomenon, and “Software Formalism” (represented by Adrian Ward, Alex McLean, Geoff Cox and the eu-gene mailing list, among others) which focuses on the aesthetics of software. Both positions leading to reductive visions of the subject, in this essay Cramer seems to finally cover all possible approaches to the practice of computation, although his view is balanced more to the side of Fuller’s group. Armed with this historical and conceptual background, software is thus extracted from the context of computing and the consideration of a mere tool to establish itself both as practice and culture.

[1] http://floriancramer.nl/
[2] https://monoskop.org/log/?p=99
[3] https://www.pzwart.nl/
[4] https://monoskop.org/File:Cramer_Florian_2002_Concepts_Notations_Software_Art.pdf
[5] Cramer, Florian, and Ulrike Gabriel. “Software Art and Writing.” American Book Review 22, no. 6 (2001): 8.
[6] https://monoskop.org/File:Cramer_Florian_2003_Ten_Theses_about_Software_Art.pdf
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_art