[NetBehaviour] a new Microcode: Vito Acconci's 'Seedbed'
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Fri Jul 3 02:42:15 CEST 2009
What you call the absurdity is there even in the original; one doesn't see
Acconci doing anything (there's documentation of course) - it's all within
the register of the imaginary. It could even be considered a black box -
but a piece which also implies the box's abject.
I don't think I'm 'simply' pointing out anything; as we both agreed, we're
interested in different things - I'm following, say, Mary Douglas and
Kristeva here in terms of issues of purity, danger, abjection, within-and-
without the body, and you're concerned, I think, with the aesthetics of
micro-codes, which may well imply a different form of reading. You're
coding what was originally 'dirty' and I'm curious about the dirtiness of
code. And that can go in all sorts of directions - towards the physical
labor that went into code production and/or production of the technologies
that allow the code to 'do something,' the potential abject within the
code - that example of the fan or I think of nn's (Antiorp) protection of
Nato 55 - or her style for that matter - not to mention the problems of
potential wells, quantum tunneling, etc.
You say "But the interesting thing is that
> whereas we usually see programming code as something to be interpreted
> by a computer and then we interpret that interpretation, in this case
> (and in fact this is the underlying concept of the Microcodes in
> general) our interpretation of the code elicits a much stronger, more
> meaningful response than an interpretation of the computer's
> interpretation of the code."
and I'm curious what sort of response the code elicits, what sort of
response you want? (As far as I can tell, not programming) the code is
beautiful, it has its own aesthetics and playfulness. Seedbed on the other
hand was an odd sort of simultaneous assault and deflection that perhaps
(any) code can't touch# at all?
- Alan
On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> I'm probably just being overly stubborn to make a point. Of course the
> idea of the "Seedbed" code is to play around with the dual meaning in
> the line "touch $myself". And if I understand you correctly you're
> simply pointing out the ways in which words and images evoke emotional
> responses even though whatever mediates the words and/or images is
> itself incapable of such emotional responses. This is just our way of
> understanding things. We attempt, maybe even at a subconscious level,
> to apply whatever is being mediated to our own selves (or someone
> else's) to see how that affects us. But the interesting thing is that
> whereas we usually see programming code as something to be interpreted
> by a computer and then we interpret that interpretation, in this case
> (and in fact this is the underlying concept of the Microcodes in
> general) our interpretation of the code elicits a much stronger, more
> meaningful response than an interpretation of the computer's
> interpretation of the code. This is something I want people to
> consider and be aware of, that's why I'm being so stubborn. I'm sure
> there are people out there who experience some discomfort in reading
> the "Seedbed" code. Some might even feel embarrassed, turned on,
> ashamed or all of the above. If I didn't want people to feel this way
> I wouldn't have associated it with "Seedbed". But I hope that they
> will take the time to discover what the words as computer code really
> mean and see the absurdity of it all.
>
> best r.
> Pall
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Alan Sondheim<sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> (Sorry to go on at length here.) This is really interesting to me, with its
>> sense of barriers at both ends, almost pure playing-fields, and then the
>> burst of (abject) 'content' following the includes - of course it's all
>> content, the extrusion is extrusion to the extent we're reading it that way.
>> In any case, this is what I was thinking about, and the central
>> char* appears to almost ooze out across the clarity of the rest. So it's
>> uncomfortable itself, as if empathetic to the seedbed piece. - Alan
>>
>> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, james morris wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> i don't know perl, so this is c code...
>>>
>>> please find a ramp ramping up the cpu usage until it's hot and sweaty...
>>> please find a ramp ramping up and then down and then up and then down...
>>> until the cpu is hot and sweaty....
>>>
>>> my usual dumbass shit. a numerical ramp, the step value is random and is
>>> chosen when the ramp has reached either end of it's limit. as you know,
>>> there are no true random number generators... srand(time()) SEEDs the
>>> 'random' number generator with the time since epochs of seconds 1970.
>>>
>>> there's a terribly rude piece of text. pointer variables are used to
>>> step through the text one word at a time. i would have used strpos
>>> but could not find a man page for it. maybe it is a PHP function
>>> and i'm getting confused.
>>>
>>> this demonstrates how code can easily begin to get complex without
>>> adding actually doing very much at all. but then c is a low level
>>> language, and probably the wrong choice but i felt like using it.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> james.
>>> ----
>>>
>>>
>>> #include <stdio.h>
>>> #include <string.h>
>>> #include <stdlib.h>
>>>
>>> char* strorig=
>>> "I am laying here masturbating fantasizing about you and \
>>> I am going to come on your face and \
>>> I am rubbing my sweaty dirty self on you and \
>>> I am so turned on by it and \
>>> I am masturbating furiously with your image \
>>> fixed in my mind and am i so so hot now and \
>>> am blistering my genitals but i love the pain of it and \
>>> i am going to come all over you uhh ohhh uhhh ohhh.";
>>>
>>> int main()
>>> {
>>> srand(time());
>>> float ramp=0;
>>> float stz=(rand()%10+10)/100.0f;
>>> int w=0;
>>> char* str=malloc((strlen(strorig)+1)*sizeof(char));
>>> strcpy(str,strorig);
>>> char* ptr;
>>> char* end=0;
>>> int i=5000;
>>> int next=0;
>>> while(1){
>>> ramp+=stz;
>>> if(!end){
>>> ptr=str;
>>> end=strstr(ptr," ");
>>> next=1;
>>> }
>>> if(stz>0){
>>> if(ramp>60000.0f){
>>> stz=-(rand()%10+10)/1000.0f;
>>> next=1;
>>> }
>>> }
>>> else if (stz<0){
>>> if(ramp<0){
>>> stz=(rand()%10+10)/1000.0f;
>>> next=1;
>>> }
>>> }
>>> if(next){
>>> *end=0;
>>> printf("%s\n",ptr);
>>> *end=' ';
>>> ptr=end+1;
>>> end=strstr(ptr," ");
>>> next=0;
>>> }
>>> }
>>> }
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2/7/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi Paul,
>>>>
>>>> The essence it seemed to me wasn't self-referentiality or touch (good
>>>> unix
>>>> command too), so much as it was about targeting the ab/use/er, as well as
>>>> dirtiness. And code's always clean; even dirty code's clean, so there's
>>>> that barrier which is interesting and the question is - which for me
>>>> parallels the clean/dirty avatar phenomenology - how can that be broken
>>>> down psychologically - how can that sort of dis/comfort be recreated, or
>>>> can't it? With avatar, it's useful to create a kind of iconicity which
>>>> also functions on an indexical plain - texturing a human face or sexual
>>>> body for example. But code/ascii (pre-compiling which brings up, maybe
>>>> it's in the binaries that this stuff lies) has a different kind of
>>>> clarity
>>>> and it's hard to see how dis/embodiment might function, even comfortably,
>>>> this way. The difference between code as medium (strict code) might be
>>>> clearer than ways of smudging it. Obviously I don't code, or code poorly,
>>>> so in a way I don't know what I'm talking about, and I admire what you're
>>>> doing - I'm just wondering about things like the body of code, the coded
>>>> body, the decoded body...
>>>>
>>>> - Alan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi Alan,
>>>>>
>>>>> One of the primary reasons that I've "redone" a number of known pieces
>>>>> by other artists in these Microcodes is more to point out the
>>>>> difference between code as a medium and other media. So the point
>>>>> isn't necessarily to emulate the work as closely as possible but
>>>>> rather to capture a single "essence" of it in very compact code. I
>>>>> think that trying to work the incline and fantasies into this
>>>>> "version" of the work would result in considerably more code which
>>>>> would in turn make the work overly complex.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Alan Sondheim<sondheim at panix.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I knew Vito well back then and visited Seedbed many times - you're
>>>>>> missing
>>>>>> the grittiness & the compression of the incline - hope you can write
>>>>>> them
>>>>>> in! The work was obviously uncomfortable, and anyone on the slope was
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> target of his fantasizing, not to mention the reverse as well - Alan
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, james morris wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Ahh! I deleted them! But they're archived on the net.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> a less clear version of seedbed:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> #!/usr/bin/perl
>>>>>>> $myself = `id -un`;
>>>>>>> $mybody = "/home/$myself";
>>>>>>> while(1){
>>>>>>> `touch $mybody`;
>>>>>>> print `ls -ld $mybody`;
>>>>>>> print `finger $myself at localhost`;
>>>>>>> }
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> james
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 1/7/2009, "Pall Thayer" <pallthay at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> ....revisited electronically. Those who follow the list closely may
>>>>>>>> see
>>>>>>>> immediately that this was inspired in part by James Morris'
>>>>>>>> 'Microcrudities' a while back. Trying to emulate such human
>>>>>>>> activities
>>>>>>>> in short code is really interesting.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> http://pallit.lhi.is/microcodes/index.php?code_id=29
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>> *****************************
>>>>>>>> Pall Thayer
>>>>>>>> artist
>>>>>>>> http://www.this.is/pallit
>>>>>>>> *****************************
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>>>>>>> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>>>>>> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
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>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
>>>>>> | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
>>>>>> | sondheim at panix.com, sondheim at gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285
>>>>>> ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>>>>> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
>>>>>> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> *****************************
>>>>> Pall Thayer
>>>>> artist
>>>>> http://www.this.is/pallit
>>>>> *****************************
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>>>> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
>>>>> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
>>>> | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
>>>> | sondheim at panix.com, sondheim at gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285
>>>> ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
>> | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
>> | sondheim at panix.com, sondheim at gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285
>> ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim
>>
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>> NetBehaviour mailing list
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>
>
>
> --
> *****************************
> Pall Thayer
> artist
> http://www.this.is/pallit
> *****************************
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>
>
| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
| Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
| sondheim at panix.com, sondheim at gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285
! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim
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