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. 
> 
>>>>>