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Useless Utilities
Saul Albert
www.twenteenthcentury.com/saul
pdf (24 Kb)
"The useless alone is truly beautiful; everything else is
ugly, since it is the expression of a need, and man's needs are,
like his pitiful, infirm nature, ignoble and disgusting. - The
most useful place in the house is the latrines"
Théophile Gautier's 1835 Preface to Mademoiselle de
Maupin is often cited as the "manifesto" of the
romantic notion of "Art for art's sake". While his feelings
about his fellow humans seem thankfully outdated, it is surprising,
and disturbing that his feelings about aesthetics are still widespread,
and even worse, misunderstood.
There is a common misconception in art and technology crossovers
that any cultural product can become art if it is robbed of it's
utility, that the product of a scientific or technological process
is art if it has been done simply because it can be done. This
misunderstanding replaces "art for art's sake" with
"anything for it's own sake".
This is the logic behind the pretty microscope photographs of
dyed cells that pharmaceutical companies are so fond of hanging
in galleries, the aesthetically pleasing by-products of their
"too-complicated to explain to the public" experiments.
"Art for public relation's sake".
In the context of tech-art culture this logic has produced an
even more horrible misunderstanding: "art for technology's
sake". The reliance on some kind of unconscious, artistic
intuition performed in front of a computer has resulted in the
installation of countless adverts for Macromedia, Apple, Sony
and other culturpreneurial technology companies in high-profile
art galleries around the world.
The problem for artists who do not want to be unpaid advertising
executives is that without careful and critical attention to the
processes and imperatives of software, their work can be processed
into bland "content" and aesthetic pleasantry through
an unacknowledged collaboration with corporate software.
Utility is also the myth of the software tool. Personal experience
as well as statistics indicate that computer use can slow productivity
and create huge expense and inefficiency.
Technology companies cover over this absurdity by creating and
fostering needs for their software's unnecessary and distracting
"features", creating problems by anticipating them with
software solutions. Compatibility problems are built into software
to leverage increased market share and even worse "mind share".
This term is used constantly by software marketing people, but
never defined. The reason for this becomes clear when we try.
Market share can be defined as "a company's control over
consumer spending expressed as a percentage of the sales for the
total industry". So with this in mind, the term "mind-share"
takes on a sinister, Orwellian meaning.
The ultimate goal of the company is to become the "industry
standard" (100% market and mind share), entirely framing
the work of the media producer, writer, or artist with the rules
and potentials of their software. And by framing the work of the
media producer, their intentions filter down to the media consumers.
This situation can be seen in terms of a hierarchical food chain
diagram, with the media consumers, the public at the bottom, their
mind-share being consumed by the media producer, whose aggregated
share is in turn consumed by the programmers of their software
tools.
software producers
-----
/|01*10|\
| |0***0| |
\|01*10|/ +------------+
--+-- |intervention|
X |point 2 |
/ \<---------+------------+
/ \
media producers
| |
v v
0 +-+ 0 +-+
+\-| | +\-| |
| *+-+ | *+-+
+-+--+ +-+--+ +------------+
/ | \ |intervention|
/ | \ |point 1 |
/ | \<-------+------------+
/ | \
media consumers
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
| | |
v v v
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+
| _O_ | | _O_ | | _O_ |
| | | | | | | | |
| / \ | | / \ | | / \ |
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+ figure 1
Computer technologies of media viewing or "browsing",
and particularly the web browser capitalise on mind-share by selling
a percentage of their mind-share to the highest bidder, and then
framing the act of looking, of absorbing information with advertising.
Artistic software projects have often intervened at this point
in the hierarchy, between the media producer and the consumer
(see fig. 1 - intervention point 1).
The classic example is I/O/D's Webstalker, a lean, stripped down
browser that cuts through the distracting visual complexity and
commercial glare of the web and reveals the quietly expanding
information framework underlying it. This and the minimalist,
unfamiliar interface breaks the integrity of the simulated "Desktop",
the graphical user interface and it's extension to the web through
the browser.
The 1980's video game style graphics of Nullpointer's Webtracer
software has a similar aim and method, to unsettle the metaphor
of browsing and our casual acceptance of that single visualisation
of the web as a 2 dimensional shopping mall.
Jodi's "%wrong browser" collection is the least "user-friendly"
of these "art browsers." The usual situation in which
the browser is produced by a single multinational corporation
and then used globally is turned on it's head. Each of the %wrong
browsers has a domain name. ".co.kr (Korean) ,.nl and the
ubiquitous .com and .org. Each of these browsers exhibit a difficult,
illegible interface that slowly reveals a kind of personality
for each browser. The Korean browser is very nervous, has no words
or symbols, only a shivering cursor on a dark screen that suddenly
erupts with scrolling colour and text like a malfunctioning Times
Square billboard display. ".com" is flamboyant, brightly
coloured and social, graphically linking roughly drawn browser
windows and happily spreading the html thickly over the screen.
".org" is a monstrous bureaucrat-printer, maniacally
documenting and recording every site that it visits in semi-sensible
ASCII and saving it's mutilated source code as text files all
over the computer. ".nl" is a reserved, dry gatherer
of information with a low-tech green-screen aesthetic. The behaviours
of each browser could be seen to correspond to putative national
and multinational domain name identities and stereotypes. Each
flattening out the user's experience of the disparate spaces of
the web into a continuation of their own fractured personalities,
just as one might argue that Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator
flatten out the disparate spaces of the web into a corporate mono-culture.
Over the last few years there have been many more "art browsers"
(i) , and although these projects
make very astute comments about the state of the web and the browser,
the potential of software as an artistic medium offers much more
than this kind of software-art "intervention".
In "A means of mutation", Matthew Fuller describes
the definition which the Webstalker aims to fulfil as "not
just art". A piece that would be relevant in multiple contexts,
could move between use value and conceptual value seamlessly.
"Not just art" rejects the dead end-dichotomy of culture
vs. counter-culture and suggests hybridised, developmental, unstable
cultural forms that can sustain themselves outside of art's frame
of reference and financial backing.
Although there are ways to make use of the Webstalker in a non-art
context (visualising the structure of web sites for development
purposes), no development team has emerged with new ideas for
how to improve it as a tool, Webstalker 2 was promised, but never
emerged. "Not just art" did not happen with the Webstalker,
and in "means of mutation" Fuller almost acknowledges
this. He calls it "tactical software" and observes that
it's development was limited by money, time and available skills.
As tactical software the Webstalker was very successful, generating
huge amounts of media attention, critical thinking and inspiring
further developments in art and software, but I would argue that
to become "not just art" the artwork must have utility
outside of the frame of art.(ii)
In the diagram above, the most influential position is clearly
that of the software programmer, and the most obvious point for
intervention is there, between the software producer and the media
producer. (See fig.1 intervention point 2).
Two artistic software projects that fit into the category of
media production tool, and function as "not just art"
are Auto-illustrator by Adrian Ward and b1257+12 by Netochka Nezavanova.
On first inspection Auto illustrator looks like a standard vector
graphics program. However, once you start using it, the quirky
interface and the difficulty of making the program behave as expected
makes explicit the fact that another agenda is at work.
A favourite features are the bugs; rule-based automata that drag
lines of colour around behind them. This is a playful reference
to the 60's Fluxus art practice of dipping insects in ink and
letting them draw a path over paper as a way of challenging conventional
notions of authorship. In this case it becomes a light-hearted
joke and an incitement for the user to engage with Ward in a struggle
over the authorship of the piece. Certain vectors of control are
available to the user (add and remove bugs) but the behaviour
of the bugs is determined by the algorithms Ward used to program
them. In this way a third party is brought into the struggle for
the authorship of the piece: the generative code that underlies
many of the features of Auto-illustrator.
I am no expert, but for the purposes of examining this artwork
a quick introduction to these ideas may be necessary:
Biologist Aristid Lindenmayer gives his name to the mathematical
modelling of growth patterns in nature, trees, leaf structures
etc. The generative grammars developed to model these processes
work by recursive development of a limited set of symbols. For
example, if we start with a phrase: AGGDB, and say that for every
iteration we replace A with AGG, G with DDA, B produces B and
D produces BBA.
A=AGG
G=DDA
D=BBA
B=B
on the first iteration we have
AGGDB
on the second,
AGGDDADDABBAB
on the third
AGGDDADDABBABBAAGGBBABBAAGGBBAGGB
past here it is better done by computer.
If A meant "draw a line 10 pixels long" and G meant
"move left 10 pixels" you can see how this kind of generative
code can produce unpredictable but formally coherent visual developments.
(The coherence is due to the inevitable self-similarity of the
designs).
Emergent behaviour systems work in a similar way, a simple set
of rules is given to a bug, for example : walk forward, turn a
random number of degrees every 20 paces and don't bump into other
bugs or drawings. When you have one bug, a human can anticipate
the results of this behaviour quite well. Once there are 200 bugs,
all avoiding each other, and changing each others paths, the complexity
is immense and again, the results cannot be anticipated without
computer modelling.
So by incorporating these kinds of algorithms into Auto-illustrator
there is a loss of authorial control by all parties, neither Adrian
Ward, nor the user, nor the computer can completely determine
the outcome of their collaboration.
This complex conception of authorship as a kind of running battle
has been extended in later releases by the "Swap Artwork"
plugin. While working on a drawing, the user can apply the "Swap
Artwork" filter which uploads the user's image to the auto-illustrator
server and swaps it for an image being worked on by another Auto-illustrator
user. Yet another player is brought into the authorship competition:
the collective user group of the program at any one time.
The effect of all these generative features and sudden, worrying
distortions of the artwork is alternately fascinating and aesthetically
horrible.
Netochka Nezavanova's "b1257+12" which she describes
as a real-time interactive sound processor is similarly difficult
to manage.
At first the interface is completely illegible, lists of numbers
respond to mouse or keyboard activity, sliding scales with no
labels respond anti-intuitively to mouse movements. Even if importing
and working on a familiar sound file, it is unclear whether the
tumult of sound emerging from the machine are being effected by
the user's activity at all.
However, after playing and experimenting for a long time it is
possible to tease a method of use out of the software, find ways
of behaving and moving that for some reason produce a desired
sound. In this way, using b1257+12 becomes a very personal experience,
each user determines their own technique while at the same time,
random re-configurations of key commands and responses constantly
alter the programs functioning, undermining this familiarity with
the software, forcing the user to start again.
What both these artworks succeed in doing is making explicit
the hidden struggles and difficulties of conventional software.
For example, the struggle for authorial control with Photoshop
is less visible. Photoshop hides that struggle in a hugely complex,
slick interface where the designer is offered a million options
in a million pull down menus to give the illusion that they are
making choices and are in total control of what they are doing.
In both Auto-illustrator and b1257+12, the subjective presence
of the author is always felt. The user is never allowed the comforting
illusion of control.
As Adrian Ward says "When someone uses my software, it's
me!". Artistic subjectivity, so often hidden by the dry,
fleshless aesthetics of computer based art, is a vital and visible
part of both these projects. The humorous and dysfunctional human-computer
interfaces become interfaces between the viewer and the artist.
The software takes on the programmers artistic subjectivity and
engages the user in dialogue, organising and interrupting their
process and final product. It is this process of negotiation and
compromise between the artist-programmer and the media producer
that makes the product interesting.
In both cases, the persona of the artist/programmer is pushed
beyond the limits of the software. Netochka Nezavanova (or one
of her many selves as integer, antiorp or m9ndfuck) is notorious
for asserting her persona into mailing lists. She writes copiously,
posting provocative, sometimes callous, sometimes poetic texts
to many lists, often creating mayhem and discord by appealing
to some and antagonising other members of the list, dividing them
on the issue of whether she should be banned or not. The content
of her posts is usually infused with belligerent views about authorship
and intellectual property (she will often claim authorship and
threaten to sue people she considers to have stolen her ideas),
or she'll make back-stabbing personal tirades against people in
the net art scene who she has taken a dislike to. In other contexts
(the support mailing list for one of her software tools for example)
she is very helpful and always responds to intelligent queries
within a few hours. A friend of mine who has purchased her most
popular software " Nato+55" and is on the mailing list
tells me that whenever he emails her he is in constant fear that
the question might have been answered already in the support forum,
and he'll get flamed.
The texture of her email exchanges also seems to have been algorithmically
processed, re-purposing old BBS traditions such as ASCII art and
"hack-speak" certain roman characters are replaced with
unpronounceable punctuation marks or numbers. This language-game
(which she calls KROP3ROM||A9FF) mixes and remixes Russian, English,
French, and German vocabulary in the same post which may contain
varied cultural references. The rules of this language-game are
inconsistent and constantly mutate, forcing a constant re-evaluation
of the text and it's author, "a collapse of unification through
multiplicity" (iii) as
Nezavanova puts it. Remaining an anonymous, multiple and antagonistic
persona allows Nezavanova to avoid becoming too cosy in the art
world, making alliances and friends there who might limit the
definition of what she is doing by grounding it in the specific
cultural context of art.
Auto-illustrator's support mailing list performs a similar function.
From reading the traffic on the list it seems that many people
using it are ignorant of the fact that it is art programmed by
an artist. The pseudo-corporate identity of the software company
"Sinewave" maintains this ignorance with the use of
more generative code. When someone emails the support list, a
Perl script written by Adrian Ward generates a random identity,
name and job title that he then uses to answer the query.
For example, a recent query to the list asked if there was going
to be a Mac OS X port of the software. A fictional character called
"Jon Tippecanoe" in the "Os X port development
department" gave a short, rude answer and signed off "I
suppose I'm going to get fired now".
In both these "software support" projects the tone
switches constantly from helpful to playful to insulting, mirroring
the unpredictable, conflicting processes of trying to make something
with the software.
By constantly switching between collaborative and antagonistic
attitudes towards the user, these pieces of software shift fluidly
between being useful and useless, gratifying and frustrating,
funny and scary.
This ambiguity also extends to media that is produced using the
software. On the one had it is often aesthetically horrible, a
partly random product made without clear intention, but on the
other hand it is the result of a fascinating and unique collaborative
process between the artist-programmer and the software user.
Perhaps the most challenging uncertainty for users of Auto-illustrator
and b1257+12 is that while the software is not definitely useful,
it does definitely cost money. The piracy protection on both pieces
of software is far more sophisticated than many large commercial
software packages, requiring server-based registration keys that
are verified each time the software is installed on a new computer.
A full version of b1257+12 costs $96.69 and Auto-illustrator costs
about $50 to register (unregistered copies eventually expire and
according to Adrian Ward, will start behaving very badly, imposing
algorithmic authorship more assertively).
The behaviour of software companies, jealously guarding copyright
of their expensive products is not usually associated with artistic
approaches to making software, but in these cases it does work
both conceptually (forcing the user to pay clearly defines this
as "not just art"), and economically, allowing them
to maintain financial independence from corporate, art-world or
state funding.
Using these tools, and certainly programming them does address
problems of authorship and intellectual property that many artists
have struggled with when using software and digital media, by
making the struggle for authorial control very explicit.
By maintaining a delicate ambiguity these projects avoid definition
as conceptual artistic interventions or as straight forward efficiency
enhancing software tools.
Notes
(i) A comprehensive list of art browsers with
links would be useful so please email saul@twenteenthcentury.com
with any I miss out and I'll add them. This list includes interfaces
to the web as a whole, not to a single web site or database (e.g.
Rhizome's alt.browser series). [back]
I/O/D's Webstalker: www.backspace.org/iod
Jodi's Wrongbrowser: www.wrongbrowser.com
Nullpointer's Web Tracer: http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/-/webtracer/
Mark Napier's Shredder: www.potatoland.org/shredder
Tom Corby and Gavin Baily's Reconnoitre: http://www.reconnoitre.net
Andi Freeman's Earshot (feat. Jason Skeet), Funksolegrind and
notScape:
http://www.deepdisc.com/ns/,
http://www.deepdisc.com/earshot/
Mark Dagett's Browser Gestures:
http://www.flavoredthunder.com/dev/browser-gestures/
Many examples generated by the International Browserday competition:
www.waag.org/browser
(ii) Later projects and collaborations by the
makers of the Web Stalker with Mongrel have resulted in projects
like the Linker (http://www.linker.org.uk/) and it's use in training
workshops (www.mongrelx.org) that fulfil this definition of "not
just art" far more successfully. However an analysis of the
tactics employed by Mongrel in using the Linker for "arts
education" and their methods of avoiding that institutional
dead-end go far beyond the scope of this text. [back]
(iii) http://www.m9ndfukc.org/korporat/04.html
[back]
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