Jack,
Right on. For me maybe the goal is a post-structuralist instrument/machine/system -- one cobbled together out of digital patch environmens, analog synth modules, my body, the stock market, the interwebs, a rock. Or maybe such a machine already exists and it's called the world.
Here is one of my performances that is like a rube goldberg prototype of such an instrument/machine/system:
http://lab404.com/video/cup/
(iteration #3 is the most thoroughly documented one.)
I think it's notable that in that perforance my "signal" is language, but the nodes of my system are just off-the-shelf software (dragon dictate, microsoft word) with corporate-designed interfaces and hidden guts. Whereas Alex's texture language ( http://yaxu.org/colourful-texture/ , way cool!) is using language (code) as the system itself, and his "signal" is audio.
To me, the fact that ultimately everyone's "signal" and everyone's "system" within the digital machine reduces to binary code is not all that relevant, because the last mile of run-time always winds up being on analog human wetware (assuming it's "art").
The really cool and trippy emergent possibility, however, is that when you're in the machine, the (digital/binary) signal that you're passing through your system can purposefully be given permission to alter the (digital/binary) functions of the very system through which it's passing. This is weird and can't really happen with analog signals sent through analog hardware systems. (So for instance, the tone you generate through a chain of analog delay foot pedals can't suddenly reach a gate/threshold where that tone rewires/resolders those delay pedals [in real time!] to behave like distortion pedals. Whereas this kind of real-time [performative] modular modulation can happen in pureData/max.) Then you're onto something emergent that behaves a lot like Deleuze's cosmological topology (aka the world). But then Deleuze based aspects of his philosophy on analog patch environments, so that's not really a coincidence.
The Struggle Continues,
Curt
On Mar 4, 2014, at 5:51 PM, Jack Stenner wrote:
> Curt,
>
> Yes, it's all about the slippages. The dream is to produce a post-structural database. Computer scientists hate the idea, LOL.
>
> Seriously, though, the aspect of performativity that interests me is less a pure machine subjectivity and more one that is hybrid. I want a sort of glitch, but I want it to stimulate my mind to make surprising yet meaningful mistakes/errors. In my installation class I have students read Jim Campbell's classic Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art. He does a excellent job of describing how code can be performative in satisfying ways.
>
> Love Transcryption. For a moment I thought I heard the bathroom scene towards the end of Gary Hill's Incidence of Catastrophe
> http://vimeo.com/5580721
>
> Jack
>
> On Mar 4, 2014, at 2:28 PM, Curt Cloninger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Paul (and all),
>>
>> I love the idea of "run-time" errors manifesting themselves in different ways depending not just on the vagueness/strictness of the instructions, but also on the very (immanent/lived) contexts in which the instructions are received and the means by which they are executed.
>>
>> 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. So Derrida discovers that his name "accidentally" sounds like derriere, but that there is no "actual" etymological connection. But so what? Such accidents play a role in the "actual" historical utterances that wind up constituting the etymologies of words. So why not willfully play such accidents forward? Derrida writes as if his name "actually" has something to do with derriere, and then it does (he craps on strict adherence to etymology). So also, for instance, Ulmer = Elmer's (glue).
>>
>> So this leads to certain experimental esoteric programming languages (esolangs), where the variable values and sometimes even the syntactical rules of the programming language itself erode in real time as the program runs. And it leads to certain forms of viral meme hacking (purposefully hijacking the agreed-upon usage of a human language word).
>>
>> So (back to Derrida via Ulmer), it's not just that we are merely left to deconstruct existing language in order to arrive at an impasse. It's that we can play with langauage productively to arrive at something new. "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out" (William Burroughs). Or, as you say below: "logical 'errors' take on new meaning." Because we are always "making" meaning.
>>
>> ///////////////////////////////////////
>>
>> Here are two of my art projects that seem relevant:
>> 1. http://playdamage.org/transcryption/
>> it's like a translation engine that is fake ("technically"), but if you buy into it (even if only partially) as real, then it's really doing something.
>>
>> 2. http://deepyoung.org/current/google/
>> two wrong answers make a new answer.
>>
>> ///////////////////////////////////////
>>
>> Best,
>> Curt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 4, 2014, at 11:26 AM, Paul Catanese wrote:
>>
>>> e.g. write a set of operations to find a water fountain starting anywhere
>>> on earth - then when students return w/their operations, have them
>>> "perform" each others code. logical "errors" take on new meaning in this
>>> context - questions of strict/loose interpretation/handling of
>>> instruction.
>>
>>>>>>
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