Please remove me from this thread. I couldn't care less about the
performativity of code.

David


On 26 March 2014 20:20, Ami Clarke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> Hi all, thanks for inviting me Victoria, and apologies for not being able
> to contribut until now.
>
>
> I've been trying to find an
> appropriate place to butt in, with these great threads of thought that are
> unravelling here.  I've not managed to
> read everything, so apologies if this is just a repetition of stuff already
> said.  I'm not someone who can comp code
> either - I come at it from a post-digital publishing and natural language
> pov.
> and various performativities I can see at play.
>
> I'm Ami - I run a reading room with
> an archive dedicated to Artists' publishing and experimental project space
> on a
> train platform in Hackney: Banner Repeater - the location's important for a
> number of reasons but crucially to site critical art within what might be
> termed the public realm.  We open at 8am
> in the morning (4 days a week) to take advantage of the public transport
> networks to distribute Artists works, publications and pamphlets to a
> packed
> platform of commuters (4,000 footfall a day - they don't all stop...).
>
> There's a long back story to the
> conceptual framework of the project (that I tend to call a technical
> object) -
> railways regularised time during industrialisation - concepts of time and
> labour (and diagrams) play an important part in the programme - as are the
> transport networks to distribute artists publishing (and other alternative
> publishers) - it
> allows us to consider both material and immaterial networks of
> communication,
> in relation to what I call post-digital publishing (both digital and
> paper) -
> which takes into account the history of publishing - ie authorship, issues
> of
> copyright, intellectual property and so on.
>
> I'm both facilitator of this space
> as an artist and specifically I'm interested in the performativity of
> language
> (in terms of it always having been so) but now amplified due to digital
> media
> and extensive interconnectivities.  My work that runs in tandem with the
> running of the space also address' these concerns in a variety of ways.
>
>
> Of importance to my thinking is
> Christian Marazzi (the political economist's) comments that
>
> "language operates in the symbolic realm of 'institutions like
> money, property, marriage, technologies, and work itself"
>
> and that
>
> "communication
> processes [are] the crux of today's social and political transformations",
>
> I would include publishing, as a form of
> performance, and as an instrument of production, bringing forth through
> creative acts for all extents and purposes, our lived reality.
>
> What I'm really intrigued by - and
> this relates to structures (cybernetic theories of homeostasis, feedback
> loops,
> autopoiesis and so on) now in place through a variety of coding mechanisms
> - is
> what is actually creatively possible within these structures?  - that
> isn't immediately assimilated into a whirlpool of images and a
> torrent of text that slips by at such speed as to be incomprehensible -
> that
> doesn't profit the old hierarchies that exploit through a lense of
> efficiency and profit.  I'm v
> interested in intensified uses of these same structures as potential
> strategies - especially related to language.
>
> I'm afraid my comments may be a
> little broad for this conversation, so apologies if that's the case.
>
> I've really liked what I've had time
> to read - especially a few comments:
>
>
> Hi
> Barbara and list,
> >>
> >> So a diagram of this, then, would be a line made up of points, with no
> >> hierarchy of parts or actions, so that each point can cross-reference
> >>any
> >> other.
> Victoria
>
> And then the comments from Barbara
> Lattanzi and Laura Plana Gracia were great too
> _____
>
> Picking up on Stephanie's point
> below about digital labour makes me think about code performativity from
> the
> other end. In Stephanie's examples, people are effectively performing for
> code.  Tom Schofield
> _____
>
> I wanted to pick up on Victoria's
> question around bodies and performativity as well as comment on something
> Rachel mentioned. I actually don't think the body is always the one giving
> the
> code life per se (although in my Hacking Choreography example it is) but
> the
> human element is what is interesting to me.   Kate
> ____
>
> Observing the cybernetic feedback
> loops in each of those cases, both for myself and for my students has been
> rather a challenge. How is one inside and outside of such a loop? How are
> we be
> both inside and outside of language?   Justin Lincoln
> _____
>
> Beyond the look of code, though,
> what interests me these days are various strategies to unpack ideology in
> code,
> or ways power, though code, is formed/masked via its operation in culture.
> Critical Code Studies, Software Studies, Platform Studies, E-Lit, and
> "digital
> humanities" (troublesome as the term may be) in general, are exciting in
> this
> regard
> ______
>
> But in some sense, programming
> cannot be live at all. Programmers
> don't program *in* time, they program *with* it. Back to that knitting
> analogy; programmers work with the thread of execution, or the
> timeline, by working on the higher-order level of the knitting
> pattern. The thread of time does not run through their fingers, but it
> does run through their ears, and their computers. Their fingers are
> instead working on the knitting pattern which are working outside of
> time, controlling the whole process, composing and manipulating
> patterns for present and future iterations.
>
> No wonder then that live coders rarely look present at all in the
> performances they give. Their audience experience the music now, but
> the live programmers step out of time, abstracted out into an amodal,
> ungrounded timeless void. In a strange reversal the audience create
> all the spectacle, and the performers sit quietly in the corner,
> completely still apart from flurried typing and the occasional sip of
> mezcal. Maybe the next step for programmers is to learn to work with
> time while being in it.  Alex.
> ______
>
> Jack mentioned Gregory Ulmer, and I
> find Ulmer's take on Derrida (in _Applied Grammatology_) super provocative
> and
> productive. The idea is that human language progresses via slippages which
> happen during actual utterance events. So rather than always concerning
> ones-self with adhering to the etymology of a word (as if a word's
> historical
> etymology was somehow God-ordained), one can also concern ones-self with
> the
> future evolution of a word.   Curt
>
> Ami
>
>
> Banner Repeater
> Platform 1
> Hackney Downs Railway Station
> Dalston Lane
> Hackney
> E8 1LA
>
> www.bannerrepeater.org
>
>
> >________________________________
> > From: Jack Stenner <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Sent: Wednesday, 26 March 2014, 12:42
> >Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] March Discussion Begins: The
> Performativity of Code
> >
> >
> >Thanks again for assembling this discussion Victoria and Suzy. It's been
> wonderful and I've learned a lot...the creative juices are flowing!
> >
> >
> >On Mar 24, 2014, at 9:29 AM, Victoria Bradbury <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> In the spirit of CRUMB's practical approach to research, I propose that
> we
> >> spend the final week giving examples of
>  performativity and code within our
> >> own work by responding to a question of When:
> >>
> >> When, in your own art practice, does performativity occur?  Is it when
> the
> >> code is written? Is it when you perform with your body or voice?  When a
> >> participant encounters your work?  At all of these points, at another
> time,
> >> or not at all?  Can you give a specific example?
> >>
> >> You may choose to comment on the way you are defining performativity in
> >> your answer (many definitions have been offered over the course of the
> >> month).
> >
> >All of the above, + life. Life is a performance that is revealed through
> the artifacts we construct.
> >
> >Game-Space (2008-10):
> >The performativity
>  of spectatorship. Institutional looking, local and distributed looking,
> what it means to look at and be looked at. Human and machinic looking. Not
> only do we use computer vision to track lookers, we simulate their
> "viewpoint" and mirror that to the network. The machine performs the look,
> creating a hybrid subject (complete with errors). Here, the situation is a
> sort of "stage set" for the performance of viewing.
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TasxQbTFeDU
> >
> >Open House (2010-2):
> >Again, a stage set for the play of looking, but also the tangibility of
> interacting. The squatters embody the space/place simultaneously living in
> an artwork. Viewers, both local (neighbors), and distributed (network via
> computer or mobile) commingle with the space/place/squatters, so the
> encounter is performative and durational
>  (2+ years). The set of performances discussed in the video below, are
> more traditionally structured "acts" that play out specific aspects of
> conceptual interest within the "set."
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwpUJdU2yiU
> >
> >Maintaining Appearances (2010):
> >The performance of social code; the act of obscuring "reality" to
> preserve order. Simultaneous performativity from first and third person
> points-of-view. Documentation of a first-person life performance.
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ypTuiD3a9E
> >http://jackstenner.com/art/maintaining-appearances
> >
> >Murphy's Well-Being (2012):
> >Multiple levels of performance here. We, the EmerAgency (collective),
> performed as an art consultancy, advising the community on social policy,
> privileging well-being to complement the typical advice provided by
> corporate, governmental and scientific experts. While that was a
> "performance" we took it seriously: art can provide/perform the missing
> balance in social deliberation. Then there was the performance of the
> community in our dealings with the issues surrounding ecological disaster,
> particularly when the work was unveiled to those on opposite sides of the
> battle. The code was performative in that the set of conditions that
> structured the display of information was designed to create dynamic
> associations through montage, etc.
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Hs1K495Pc
> >http://emeragency.electracy.org/projects/murphys-well-being
> >
> >That's more than enough. I think any work that incorporates interactivity
> necessarily engages performativity. I recall a sculpture I made back in the
> '90s called "Blink" that was essentially a Donald Judd chrome box with a
> switch and shutter. I was reading (and barely understanding) Whitehead at
> the time, and like Curt mentioned for himself, it had a HUGE impact on me.
> I was thinking about how interaction (computer or otherwise) interrupted
> classic notions of contemplation and context.
> >
> >So for me, performativity, via code or otherwise, naturally emerges from
> concept and context. Very often it is the way we assist understanding
> rather than illustrate it; doing versus showing, enacting versus watching,
> emphasizing behavior more than
>  process.
> >
> >Jack
> >
> >
>