[NetBehaviour] a new Microcode: Vito Acconci's 'Seedbed'

Alan Sondheim sondheim at panix.com
Sat Jul 4 06:03:37 CEST 2009



There isn't any "absolute minimum" - if you don't know Seedbed, the whole 
point is missed. If you've experienced Seedbed, the distance between code 
and installation is enormous. "Seedbed" is absolute minimum:

k2% Seedbed
ksh: Seedbed: not found

which pretty much sums up issues of representation in a literally dumb/ 
founded sort of way (perhaps).

- Alan, wondering how the theory of possible worlds / proper names fits in 
here -


On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, lotu5 at resist.ca wrote:

> At the risk of stating the obvious, perhaps the problem here is that there
> is no one essence of this performance, or any performance for that matter.
> While you do say "a single 'essence'", and not "the", to me a major part
> of the very idea of performance is to create something which is in excess
> of language and representation, something which the techne of words or
> photo or video don't capture, much less a few lines of code. While I think
> the notion of translating a performance into code is interesting, perhaps
> what this discussion precisely raises is that there are a multiplicity of
> essences, dirtiness, fantasy, masturbation, soreness, mystery, discomfort,
> the body, the absence of the body... Your microcodes seem to be a sort of
> review or remix of another work, based on your personal interpretation. In
> fact, I think that the reduction of the body to a set of files in your
> home directory is in itself an abjection and a sadness, a departure from
> all the rich, sensual complexity of the body and a reduction to a few
> digital bytes. Perhaps the sadness of the digital is expressed very well
> here.
>
>>> Pall Thayer wrote:I guess by "the essence" of the work, I'm
>>> considering the absolute minimum that it takes to bring to mind
>>> "Seedbed" when looking at the code.
>
> Hmm, but here is sounds like you're talking about a simlpe representation,
> and I think being very reductive! Wouldn't the absolute minimum be
> something like
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> $p = `seedbed`;
>
> ? When in fact, the interesting part is to go beyond simply bringing the
> performance to mind, but as the furtherfield review writes, to bring it to
> life, to enact it, to redo it, to reperform it, in the form of an actual
> running program?
>
>
>>>>>>> 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
>
>>>>>>>> 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.
>
>
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>



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