On Mar 17, 2014, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> are there instances of *images* performing as software code?
>
> there are QR-codes, but they are encodings/encryptions of text files
> which are then treated as data to be processed by software.
Good question, Andreas. One precedent is CMU computer scientist Dave Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers, which features the infamous DVD-cracking algorithm rendered as images, movies, and even a DVD logo.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
Touretzky founded the gallery in response to U.S. district judge Lewis Kaplan's order to expunge DeCSS code (and even links to it) from the Web. Against the plaintiff's argument that censoring the DeCSS software was akin to stifling free speech, Judge Kaplan contended that computer code was unlike speech because it was executable.
As a practicing programmer, Touretzky believed that there was a continuum between software and speech, one that could not easily be divided and legislated, and his call for variations on the "illegal" DeCSS code generated haikus, GIFs, and dramatic readings on the spectrum between executable and expression. I love the fact that these audiovisual representations were also performative *legally*--since they was adduced as evidence in the trial's appeal.
In a previous message in this forum, I mentioned that _Re-collection_ argues that replicating behaviors may be the best way to preserve software art. Rick Rinehart and I go further to claim that new media are not exactly disembodied in the way that a prerecorded show playing on a screen is disembodied. Even when mediated by machines, they execute rather than represent. This means that many of the “bodies” that perform new media—a browser running JavaScript, a Playstation running C++, an Intel CPU running machine language—can be modified and distributed inside emulators and other virtual environments. And we believe that "proliferative preservation" is key to their future.
jon
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