For many years I was deeply committed to programming-based projects. I could perhaps term them experimental, artistic projects, but I was never quite sure. They were certainly always equally engineering projects. The instrumental side of things was part of the aesthetic – an aesthetic perhaps of self-denial, of deliberate resistance to all the usual signs of the aesthetic. If software art was meant to be about ingenious strategies of software critique or demonstrably non-instrumental speculations, my interests lay awkwardly elsewhere – wrapped up in the thinking of tools. Ironic, but hardly surprising, that it was only when I produced explicitly visual work that the projects gained any kind of traction.
Now I find myself turning away from programming, partly with the sense that I have exhausted a particular trajectory of work and partly in an effort of self-preservation (unwilling to commit myself to further long, monastic bouts in front of the screen). My interest has turned towards dimensions of everyday life, particularly the complex positioning of the aesthetic within everyday life, regarded the aesthetic not as a colonizing force, nor even as a coherent reflective lens, but as a thin and permeable layer within the everyday.
So I am in the position then of returning from the digital to the analogue. No doubt this is too simple – the everyday is inextricably tied up with aspects of digital, virtual interaction and the digital is no longer some exclusively abstract, programmatic, screen and keyboard based realm – but the distinction has some heuristic value. It points to some key areas of difference, relating specifically to the affective, experiential frameworks which characterise these modes of practice. Worth trying to list a few of them:
Positioned within: while it is easy to to get lost in a code-based system (to build something that exceeds one’s capacity to fully, or even adequately, comprehend its operations), there is always also the sense of the potential finitude of the system and of one’s own authorial role as builder, maintenance worker and janitor. The programmer serves as uncertain god to many small and unruly worlds. In this sense, however lost they may get in this world, however unmanageable its various complexities become, still the programmer retains a capacity to stand back from the world and regard it as their own. The field of the everyday is larger and less determined. I move within it without ever being able to circumscribe it, to precisely define its substance or its edges. There is also no capacity to withdraw from it – it is the world that I inhabit.
Performance: the agency of the programmer is in writing, in designing a system. Performance is left to the machine. However intimately considered, even felt, performance exceeds the programmer. I write an iterative loop, but it is the machine that performs it. My everyday life experiments (walking and the like), however, draw design and performance together. I could pay somebody else to do the walking, but I prefer to do it myself. This is actually one of the best aspects of shifting away from programmatic interaction. Algorithmic processes develop an intimate link between the conceptual and the performative.
Ephemeral output: computational processes need not produce any kind of recognisable output. They can just happen, but typically there are words, images, manifest operations or whatever. It occurs to me that it may be worth writing software that does all kinds of marvelous hidden things without producing any kind of humanly accessible output, just as a kind of experiment in computational ephemerality – in permitting the computer rich dimensions of experience that leave no trace. Of course this already happens with all kinds of looping self-monitoring functions that are entirely invisible to the end user. But to do any of this would be deliberately perverse. Programs are designed to process input and produce output. Everyday life preserves much more apparent currents of silence and ephemeral process. The aesthetic challenge is not to compromise these.
Impurity: computational systems are restricted and focused. Aesthetic interaction with the everyday is complex and multi-layered. It is irreducible to the aesthetic system – it relates to all manner of other motivations, interests and practical/conceptual spheres.
Open-ended constraint: programming involves a work of precise definition. The natural tendency is for projects to grow and become increasingly complex and brittle. The constraints harden until they become unproductive and then the programmer moves on to the next project. The problem is always of maintaining the project at that delicate point in which it is both useful (it functions) and yet is also amenable to change, so that it can respond to new creative opportunities. For a million reasons the field of everyday life demands that constraints be constantly adaptable. As much as one may wish to pursue the same iterative scheme interminably, it is never possible. Things are always led astray.