read_me, Software Art and Cultures, Buch

read_me, Software Art and Cultures

Aarhus
Buch, 396 pages, 21 cm
2004
Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin
ISBN 87-98844-404-0

Software Art and Cultures Conference (2004 : Århus, Denmark)
Software art is a practice that regards software as a cultural phenomenon that defines one of the principal domains of our existence today. Thus, software is not regarded as an invisible layer, but rather as a decisive level and a language working at reproduction of certain orders, whether aesthetic, cultural, social or political. Software art creatively questions and redefines software and its ways of functioning.
Contents
Pt. 1. Software Art and Cultures Conference: papers. Software art and cultures : people doing strange things with software /​ Christian U. Andersen and Søren Pold
Read_me today /​ Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin
Digital objects /​ Matthew Fuller
No carrier and other stories from Philippine BBS culture/​ Fátima Lasay
Made by users. How users improve things, provide innovation and change our idea of culture : problems and perspectives /​ Mirko Schaefer
Software art and political implications in algorithms /​ Pau David Alsina Gonzalez
A glimpse beyond search engines. "Verb thou art, and unto verb shalt thou return" /​ Christophe Bruno
The world according to the Web /​ Douwe Osinga and Ernst Wit
The sequencer paradigm /​ Alessandro Ludovico
A re-declaratoin of dependence : software art in a cultural context it can't get out of /​ Jacob Lillemose
Mise en abyme in software art : a comment to Florian Cramer /​ Troels Degn Johansson
Coding praxis : reconsidering the aesthetics of code /​ Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, Adrian Ward. ♭t.
Read_me, run_me, execute_me : software and its discontents, or : it's the performativity of code, stupid! /​ Inke Arns
(Mostly WestEastern-European theoretical blabla-) lego for a meta-theory of meta-art-forms /​ Andreas Leo Findeisen
Code art brutalism : low-level systems and simple programs /​ Simon Yuill
Live algorithm programming and a temporary organisation for its promotion /​ Amy Alexander ... [et al.]
The software language art /​ Janez Strehovec
(Software) structures /​ Casey Reas
Super-abstract : software art and a redefinition of abstraction /​ Brad Borevitz
An exploration of the visual mind of the software artist /​ Ewan Steel
pt. 2. Runme.org software art repository: project features.

Notes
"This book is published as a part of the Read_Me 2004 Software Art Festival. It consists of papers from the Software Art and Cultures Conference and features projects from Runme.org Software Art Repository"--T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographic references.

The basic question is: Can software in itself, as a collection of code, instructions, structures and protocols, objects and classes and whatever else it might include, be considered as an artistic medium? Can a program, however simple or complex and in whatever language or programming environments it is written, be a work of art? Is there a software aesthetic? Or is it just an intermediate carrier of something else, like paint in a painting or timber in a building? Is a program merely a string of (dis)functional bits and bytes operating in a hardware context and performing tricks at the programmer’s or user’s will?