Contemplating giving up code, formal computer programming; the work of elaborating systems that quickly become debilitating complex.
Most of the work is in the elaboration of potential – potential that often passes unrealised in terms of any genuine need. Perhaps only a few instances are ever produced. Very often, what seems an obvious field of generic functionality seems less obvious in use or fails to produce compelling results. And people remain relentlessly focused on images, on things that are literally accessible. Systems – certainly software systems – are just expected. If anything, it is preferred that they disappear altogether. They are at their best when they attain the easy weight of tools. Only when they are rough and inefficient do they attract notice. It would seem that computer code must instantly be transposed into other forms for it to attract any kind of aesthetic interest. Not that you want it noticed as such – exhibiting code itself is simply a mystification – but in order that the constructed system should somehow become aesthetically visible. But in that case why not express it in other terms – in terms more conducive to immediate apperception? It is in a lived, transposed state that code takes specfically aesthetic shape – in terms, for instance, of the paradoxical instructions and rule-based systems of conceptualism.
In the early 1970s, Jack Burnham famously positioned software as metaphor for art. Which still naturally gives rise to the assumption that to literally engage in software writing is to pursue the same issues of system, etc. that are relevant to conceptual art, but is this necessarily the case? Are literal programming code and the rule-based systems of conceptual art and Fluxus genuinely related, or only superficially so? This is a question that I’ve never quite posed to myself adequately – directly; always somehow assuming the integrity of the analogy. But in a sense what we encounter here are two different cultural trajectories: art drawing upon a wider space of productive modeling; and then a specific form of modeling drawing upon a particular conception of art. There is every chance that these tendencies can miss one one another despite all their best intentions, despite the certainty that they are literally addressing one another, that they are conceptually and aesthetically co-extensive.
Within this context, and very provisionally, it is worth indicating that computer programming is a form of mastery, that software construction and elaboration provides many small satisfactions, that the programmer adopts the role of architect and god. Yet at the same time, the systems that are conceived are always bound by the logic of a highly ordered and restricted context of exchange. Code must function. It is bound by the necessity to be interpreted or compiled. As mastery develops, much more is possible, but always on the basis of acceding to the fundamental space of limited expression – the positive lexical universe and the impossibility, for instance, of writing just gibberish, or even speaking in a foreign language, adopting British spelling or having the slightest comma out of place. Mastery then is also a form of adherence, an acknowledgement of the absolute authority of the interpreter or compiler, of the underlying system that provides the basis for the invention of any specific system per se. And this possibly represents an important difference to the work of coding in conceptual art. Within the context of the latter there is no underlying framework of running, except the art system itself. The invented rules and systems are not assessed for their adequacy – for their obedience – before they even appear, before they even take social-aesthetic shape. Nor do the rules function within a clearly constrained space. They are instead immediately susceptible to all kinds of unpredictable environmental forces. The rules are at the very outset couched in terms of a break from ordinary syntax, an alien replaying and articulation of rules within an overall context of rule-breaking. Here there is no possibility of craft-based pleasure, of complacent mastery. Each and every rule and instruction is also an undermining of the same.