SOFTWARE AND FUN SYMPOSIUM
27 November, 10:00 – 15:30
Location: Baltan Laboratories
Torenallee 45, SWA Building, 8th floor
5617 BA Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Contrary to the belief that software is a very serious issue, a battlefield of big business interest and freedom fighters, and a field guided by rationality and formalisation, it is actually an area of practice and thinking that often advances through random acts, absurd use, jokes and curiosity.
International speakers will argue that art, and in particular software art, can play a crucial role in the production of the world, undermining the seeming solidity of the infrastructural backbone of our society and opening it up for intervention and reinvention. The symposium will also explore the issue of fun and the potential of the humour in software art. What is humour after all? Is it in fact an artistic and critical attitude to reality?
PROGRAMME
10:00 Olga Goriunova, Introduction, ‘Fun and Software’
10.20 Matthew Fuller, ‘Always One Bit More, Computing and the Experience of Ambiguity’
10.50 Michael Murtaugh, ‘Do Repeat Yourself’
11.20-11.50 coffee break
11.50 Simon Yuill, ‘Bend Sinister: Détournement and Normative Effect in Notational Production’
12.20 Wilfried Hou Je Bek, ‘Software Is Fun & Programmers Are Clowns‘
12.50-14.00 Lunch
14.00 Wendy Chun and Andrew Lison, ‘So Fun It’s Not…’
14.30 Andrew Goffey, ‘A Little Play, a Little Humour: Escaping From the Unreasonable Exactness of Algorithms’
15.00-16.00 Drinks, Baltan Laboratories
18.00-18.30 Funware exhibition tour
REVIEWS
Funware: Michael Murtaugh – Do (Not) Repeat Yourself
12.01.2010 by Anne Helmond
This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.
The Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories is part of a larger series of activities. The symposium was organized to present papers in progress on the topic of software and fun, which will eventually be published in a book on Funware. The papers explore the theme of software and fun through theoretical approaches, while the accompanying exhibition in MU explores the topic of funware through artworks.
Michael Murtaugh – Do (Not) Repeat Yourself
Murtaugh provides an ethnographical account of the world of programming with witty examples from the Wiki pages hosted by Ward Cunningham. The Informal History Of Programming Ideas wiki page was created in 1996 and provides “an incomplete and casually written history of programming ideas.” The title of Murtaugh’s talk ‘Do (Not) Repeat Yourself’ refers to the idea that almost all programmers hate duplication because it “can lead to maintenance nightmares, poor factoring, and logical contradictions.” Thus, it is strongly advised to avoid duplication and repetition which is echoed in the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle which states that “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” Duplication can occur in architecture, requirements, code, or documentation. Duplication or repetition is considered a bad practice that produces bad code. Such code can inflict Code Smell: “a hint that something might be wrong.”
The DRY software design principle is one of the coding standards in a book titled Extreme Programming on rethinking programming practices for managers, customers and programmers. DRY is revived in the idea that ”the standard should call for the least amount of work possible, consistent with the Once and Only Once rule (no duplicate code).” ((Beck, Kent. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. US ed. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999.)) Extreme programming clearly invokes the image of extreme sports and repetition can also be experienced as a tiring physical exercise because coding is physically exhausting work.
Repetition is the root of all software evil for many programmers. It is no wonder then that the DRY principle is adhered by many popular frameworks such as Django: “Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.” The principle is also reflected in Django’s tagline: “Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with less code.”
There is an undervalue of the repetition in a framework which contains a community across its practicioners (in contrary to software that is experienced individually). Repetition may provide a way of learning as described by Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman where he describes the process of learning through repetition:
“Skill development depends on how repetition is organised. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than an individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are ‘Eureka moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine”. (Sennett 2008: 38)1
This may be seen in recursion/abstraction, a miraculous transformation of code through one’s repetitive work on it. The miraculous transformation through repetitive work may also provide the joy and fun in programming: “This is repetition for its own sake: like a swimmer’s strokes, sheer movement repeated becomes a pleasure in itself.” (Sennet 2008:175)
The art of repetition can be found in William S Burroughs Essay The art of ‘Do Easy’ which was made into a short film by Gus van Sant. The essay describes the art and strength of repetition and internalizing repetition into your brain as it were a computer.
Discipline of Do Easy — Gus Van Sant, 1982 (William S. Burroughs)
According to Murtaugh, William Burroughs provides a useful alternative to DRY with a system where the mundane and the repetitive become key to unlocking a unknown knowledge in your subconscious. With this, Murtaugh concludes with the final part of William S Burroughs essay The art of ‘Do Easy:’
Take the inverse skill of the ID back into your own hands. These skills belong to you. Make them yours. You know where the wastebasket is. You can land objects in that wastebasket over you shoulder. You know how to touch and move and pick up things. Regaining these physical skills is of course simply a prelude to regaining other skills and knowledge that you have and cannot make available for your use. You know your entire past history just what year month and hour everything happened. If you have heard a language for any length of time you know that language. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that is another chapter.
“Take the inverse skill of the IT back into your own hands. These skills belong to you. Make them yours. You know where the wastebasket is. You can land objects in that wastebasket over your shoulder. You know how to touch and move and pick up things. Regaining these physical skills is of course simply a prelude to regaining other skills and knowledge that you have and cannot make available for your use. You know your entire past history just what year month and hour everything happened. If you have heard a language for any length of time you know that language. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that is another chapter”.
During the Q&A Wendy Chun notes that the mantra of “Don’t repeat yourself” only works by repeating.
Funware: Wendy Chun and Andrew Lison – So Fun It’s Not
12.02.2010 by Anne Helmond.
This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.
Wendy Chun. Photo Anne Helmond.
Part 2 in a short series on the Software and Fun (Funware) symposium at Baltan Labs. Wendy Chun and Andrew Lison talked about the slippery boundary between fun and obsession in programming. The boundary is crossed when it’s so fun that it’s not fun anymore. Fun is a battlefield, a (pleasurable) struggle that has everything to do with Tiziana Terranova’s notion of Free Labor. The difference between programmers and users is gradually eroding: programmers have become more empowered and disempowered. It has become fun. Making programming more democratic has led to the dissemination of programmers.
Joseph Weizenbaum described the programmer as God: “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.” Source code is doing as it says as the computer programmer is a creator of universes. Programming cannot know the final path of its program. Chun describes hackers as compulsive gamblers. Both hackers and gamblers entail megalomania and do it for a pleasurable drive of reassurance. Programmers strive for power instead of truth: knowledge is never enough because bugs always appear. Weizenbaum describes the work of these highly driven or “compulsive” programmers in Science and the Compulsive Programmer
“bright, young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours—then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers”. (Weizenbaum 1976)1
It is a battle between programmer and computer: It’s so fun, it’s not.
In Linux Thorvald’s autobiography Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary he tries to explain his fascination with programming which seems like a tedious/boring act to the outsider:
“Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint. And that’s interesting in itself. But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how”. (Torvalds 2002: 73) 2
It is the experience of limitation of one’s power in the system. Fun is very bad programming. This may be seen in The International Obfuscated C Code Contest which arose out of trying to fix some very broken code (see FAQ). The contest disempowers while insisting on a greater degree of knowledge. It is a refusal of good programming but it also embraces the rules. To write the most obfuscated piece of code one must adhere to the rules which emphasize good programing.
BIOGRAPHIES
Wendy Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (forthcoming MIT 2010), and she is currently working on a monograph entitled Imagined Networks. Most generally, her scholarly work investigates the relationship between cultural formations and technological artifacts, between theoretical concepts in the humanistic and technological disciplines, and between popular perceptions of technology and technological protocols. Situated mainly in the field of new media studies, her larger projects have been driven by questions such as: What is the impact of control technologies on mass media? What made the Internet, a communications network that had existed for years, a “new” or “exceptional” medium in the mid-1990s? How does the concept of “memory” cut across computational, biological and humanistic fields?
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of various books, including Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Autonomedia, 2003) and the forthcoming Elephant & Castle. With Usman Haque, he is co-author of Urban Versioning System v1.0 and with Andrew Goffey, co-author of the forthcoming Evil Media. Editor of Software Studies, a lexicon (MIT Press, 2008), and co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press. Fuller is also involved in a number of projects in art, media and software, among others with: I/O/D, Mongrel, Mediashed and Runme.org.
Andrew Goffey is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communications at Middlesex University. He writes about issues crossing the domains of philosophy, science and culture. He is the co-author (with Matthew Fuller) of Evil Media (forthcoming) and is currently working on a monograph on the politics of software. He has published essays on a range of topics, including immunology and sophistry, and has also translated work by Eric Alliez, Barbara Cassin and Isabelle Stengers.
Olga Goriunova is a Senior Lecturer in Media Practice at London Metropolitan University, where she is Programme Leader for the BA “Digital Media” in the Department of Applied Social Sciences. She has been involved in the field of software art, organizing a series of festivals, conferences and online projects that profoundly contributed to the shaping of the field. Dr. Goriunova has edited four volumes on software art and cultures related to the Runme.org repository and Readme Festivals, such as Software art plays (ROSIZO, Moscow, 2002), Readme Reader. About Software Art (NIFCA Publication 25, Helsinki, 2003), Readme Edition 2004. Software Art and Cultures (University of Aarhus, Aarhus, 2004), Readme 100 Temporary Software Art Factory (Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, 2006). She is an author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2011) and the curator of Funware exhibition (Arnolfini, Bristol, UK September-November 2010; MU and Baltan, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 2010–January 2011 and Hartware MedienKunstVerein, spring 2011).
Wilfried Hou Je Bek uses algorithms to design psycho-geographic walks through cities and other areas. The geographic and psychological output is visualized with the help of simple software. Wilfried is a ‘culture hacker’ who develops generative psychogeography. Inspired by concepts of drift (dérive) from Romanticism and, later, the Situationists around Guy Debord, Wilfried uses algorithmic routes to explore a city in non-intuitive ways. Houkebek organizes dérives, where people walk through a city by taking computer code as a guideline, using the body as a means to perform software. Recent commissions include work for the city of Dordrecht, Psy Geo Conflux (New York), the PixelACHEfestival (Helsinki), RAM5 (Riga), Urban Festival (Zagreb), Urban Drift (Berlin), Impakt (Utrecht), Stedelijk Museem (Amsterdam), V2_ (Rotterdam). In 2004 he won the Transmediale software art prize for .walk, a futuristic project for open space that transforms cities into computers.
Andrew Lison is an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His work is situated around the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and politics, with an emphasis on digital media, popular music and subcultures, and avant-garde cinema. His articles include, “Postmodern Protest? Minimal Techno and Multitude.” Forthcoming in Timothy S. Brown and Lorena Anton, eds., Between the Avant Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe 1958-2008. Series on Social Protest and Cultures of Dissent in the 20th Century (2010, Berghahn Books). He is currently co-editing a collected volume with Timothy S. Brown entitled “Sounds and Visions: Music, Counterculture and the Global 1968″.
Michael Murtaugh is instructor for the technical course of the Networked Media Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1994). And was part of the Interactive Cinema group, led by Glorianna Davenport at the MIT Media Lab where he received his masters degree (1996). His media lab research focused on designing systems that guide viewers through collections of inter-related material. Applied to a specific story’s content, these “storytelling systems” act as “editors in software,” making sequencing decisions on the fly based on viewer preferences or activity. In addition to teaching, Murtaugh writes occasionally on the topic of software and he is also a member of the Brussels collective Constant.
Simon Yuill
Simon Yuill is an artist and programmer based in Glasgow, Scotland. His work explores aspects of social process and formation in projects, which draw on a variety of approaches ranging from those of Free Open Source Software and hacker culture, to public workshops and discussion events. He has written on aspects of Free Software, ‘notational production’ and cultural praxis and has contributed to publications such as Software Studies (MIT Press, 2008), the FLOSS and Art Reader (GOTO10 and Folly, 2008) and MUTE magazine. He is project director of Spring_Alpha (2004) and Social Versioning System (SVS) projects. He has helped setup and run a number of hacklab and free media labs in Scotland including the Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT) and Electron Club, as well as the Glasgow branch of OpenLab. His current projects are focused around relationships between land, law and social structures.
Curator: Olga Goriunova
Production: aaaan.net
Supported by: VSBfonds, SNS Reaal, London Metropolitan University & STRP Festival
In addition the international touring exhibition Funware is on view in MU from 12 November till 16 January.
www.baltanlaboratories.org
www.mu.nl
