Funware
12 November 2010 – 16 January 2011
MU, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Making and using software can be experimental, humorous and aesthetically rich.
The international exhibition Funware deals with this Fun-factor in softwaredevelopment, and the many ways in which artists have run off with it in past and present. For this seventeen very diverse and mostly interactive projects, in which playing with software is the starting point, are being brought together in MU.
Funware proves that the world is partly run by freaks, and that even the most formal and logical domaines of human activity are drenched with humor and experimental fun. Software is one of the realms in which these kinds op practices of geeks and professionals, codeurs and artists meet. Funware offers us a playfull way to re-address software, as an invisible universal culture, in its aesthetics, history, and power.
Curator: Olga Goriunova
Executive producers: aaaan.net
Supported by: VSBfonds, SNS Reaal, London Metropolitan University, BALTAN Laboratories & STRP Festival
Aritsts
Adrian Ward: Auto Illustrator (2002)
Auto Illustrator is a fully functional vector graphic design application satirically modeled after Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, except for the fact that its functions and ways of operation are freaky, funny, experimental and thrilling. The user can make, export and use the design done in the program, but even just to explore it changes one’s view on software as a class of digital phenomena forever: software is not transparent, not seamless and not unbiased, and its normal functions are nothing but conventions that turn to ruins if investigated critically and imaginatively. In addition to this, Auto Illustrator renders authorship with digital tools an illusion: bugs crawling across the image under work and creative fi lters extending the imaginative capabilities of the user are supported by the license agreement itself, with which the user assigns the software the role of being a creator of the work. Auto Illustrator is a monumental work of the late 1990s, whose role in software art, critical understanding of software and of the genesis of creative work in digital media is hard to overestimate.
Amy Alexander: SVEN (2006)
In SVEN, computers and CCTV systems are bored. They have to invent ways to have fun and do something with all the footage they get. Besides that these computer systems having fun also have their own rock-n-roll preferences and display specific music video taste. In SVEN they merge a custom-made computer vision application recognises people on camera and analyses their features; real-time video processing software detects what rock star each person on camera most resembles and generates music video-like visuals from a live video feed. In the installation these moving images come together in a third monitor in which ordinary people become a kind of rockstars in their own videoclip. The three screens show the original feed, the rock star detected, and the improved version of reality with the star features of the person on CCTV uncovered.
Annina Rüst: eRiceCooker (2006-2007)
eRiceCooker is connected to the Internet and operates in relation to news concerning genetically modified rice. When new reports appear, a small portion of rice is added to the cooker until it is enough rice to be cooked. The cooker then switches on automatically, adds water and prepares the rice. Everyone in the gallery is invited to eat it along with those notified by email that is sends out automatically. The more news is produced, the more rice is cooked. The cooking and eating of the rice here relies on news about its own genetically modifi ed strand for its own cooking and consumption Seldom one is so directly confronted with what is being on the menu.
Bob Zimbinski, Jan Hubicka & Greg Alexander: Textmode Quake (1999)
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a protocol for encoding English characters as numbers to be represented on a computer screen (and to make sure they will remain unaltered when sent and received). But what it really stands for is a tradition of using characters to create pictures. Already in the nineteenth century, portraits were made on typewriters and the first competitions of typewriter art were set. ASCII art was born in the 1970s. Since then even comics, designs, films and animations made in ASCII appeared. ASCII was the first graphical language of text-based Internet; and the emoticon is probably the single most widespread outcome of this fascination with ASCII. Textmode Quake is the acne of such nerdy practice, allowing the user to play the once immensely popular first shooter game entirely in ASCII, which since then really went into the masses.
Christoph Haag, Martin Rumori, Franziska Windisch & Ludwig Zeller: OSK – Offener Schaltkreis (Open Circuit) (2006-2010)
Open Circuit is a sound installation resembling a giant circuit board. Open copper tracks trail across the floor and walls carr ying signals of a repositor y of ever yday sounds, most of them recorded in Eindhoven, which become audible when visitors place the por table speaker-cylinders on top of them. The layout of copper wires is not something you normally see unless you peeked into an open grey box of a PC computer to look at old sound or graphic cards. This is now all tucked away inside sleek laptops and gadgets. sLuckily Open Circuit offers one more opportunity to take a final breath of the aesthetic scent of hardware visuality, amateur electronic engineerig, and the dynamics with which this project is able to engage with signals across users, space and time.
Colin Green, Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope: I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker (1997)
Web Stalker is one of the pioneering projects in a current that became known as “alternative web browsers”. It is a software application with which one can navigate WWW, but all the information that is displayed is exactly what a normal browser conceals: a stream of html code, the progress of connection, maps of the links from the website, relations between the URLs within it and automatic records of the site. Web Stalker is a seminal piece of both net art and software art, which brings together at once histories of browser wars (Think of Windows Internet Explorer vs Mozilla Firefox vs Google Chrome). I/O/D questions generations of software aesthetics and poses enquiries into the material of the network and how it is structured. Owners of web pages could also add a few tags and make specific messages visible exclusively to the users of Web Stalker. The project was awarded the Webby Award in 2000, where an I/O/D memener followed in the footsteps of JODI’s act a year earlier using the five word allowance to say ‘technical innovation equals class war’ to get kicked off the stage.
Dave Griffiths: Al Jazari (2008)
Al Jazari is a live coding system that takes the form of a game. Live coding is a current of practice in which musical/video improvisation is being coded as it is being performed. Algorithms run while they are being modified, and normally the audience can witness the code being added, changed and rewritten while listening to the music that it produces. Al Jazari takes a next step. It is a visualisation of live coding, and instead of staring at lines of code, the user is invited to operate robots that trigger sounds when being moved. As the user plays along robots are being programmed live, so this time around everyone can become a live coding musician!
Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux & Marloes de Valk: Naked on Pluto (2010)
“You are 4.3 billion kilometres away from the nearest human, what would you like to do?” Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure Game on Facebook. It is about surviving in and exploring what used to be the entertainment capital of the Solar System, a city on Pluto that is now run by a corrupt artificial intelligence system. The project reflects on and synthesises kinds of techno-culture that are often left outside of the picture: good old dystopian science fiction and old fashioned text-based gaming (popular throughout 1970s-1990s) with the social networking site that seems to be devouring WWW. What happens if Earth becomes such a Pluto with the only thing available being Facebook? In the meantime the game also makes clear to its players how many data they, often unconciously, make available by not protecting them well enough.
Naked on Pluto was produced for this exhibition by Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam, NL), BALTAN Laboratories (Eindhoven, NL) and Piksel (Bergen, Norway) as a shared artist-in-residence.
David Link: LoveLetters redux_1.0 (2010)
LoveLetters is a reconstruction of one of the first text-generating algorithms, originally created by one of the first software programmers Christopher Strachey in Manchester in 1952. The software used the built-in random generator of the Ferranti Mark 1, the fi rst industrially produced computer to generate love letters. But rather than being a straightforwardly hooligan or humorous act, it offers an insight into a history of curious and free exploration, unbound by a sense of ‘appropriateness’. David Link worked from just two archival photographs to reconstruct the machinery LoveLetters_1.0 is modeled on. He also managed to source some of the original working components, like the heavyweight old teleprinter.
Electroboutique: wowPod (2008)
wowPod is a gigantic distorted iPod that is fully functional although the screen is flowng along with the shape of the object. The wowPod criticises how much design influences our use of software: with contemporary electronic gagets like iPods you can download almost nothing else than paid for content. Both hard- and software offer no playgroud and there is not much left to change or understand. Even though the wowPod looks like a laughing mirror at first sight, in fact it truly is a sad work.
Gazira Babeli: LOCUSOLUS (2006-2010)
Gazira Babeli is an avatar in Second Life (a gaming 3D platform), one of the most exciting fabricated personas of recent years: a programmer, a performer, a disruptor, a comic and a maniac. Her island LOCUSOLUS is a carefully arranged artistic environment that is coded, performed and lived, making sense through the actions taken within it. There, you can get stuck in avatarsize Warholian Campbell soup cans that jump at the attempt to escape. Alternatively you can sit down at a chair in the middle of a Francis Bacon-like painting on the wall, which disjoints your avatar so as to produce a fully-functioning Guernica-style, abstract body. Whether Gazira is hurling her body at a speed of 900 km per hour, or scripting a 3D model into a 2D plane, she makes scripted narratives, actions, sculptures and paintings that explore the stuff of which her world is made. Gazira Babeli can be seen as a force of estrangement that, rather than operating at a distance, gets very close, almost too close for the technical system to continue operation.
Joan Leandre: RC_series (1999)
RC_series deconstructs a raw racing game. In a series of steps, gravity and Euclidian space are removed, bitmaps and sound files altered, 3D objects changed and the behavior of the game messed up. However, the erratic, unpredictable and visually intense performance the player gets is generated by rather small changes and the core functionality of the game is untouched. Moreover, all structures altered are often open and accessible to gamers: the software maintains its essential integrity, while producing what appears to be an unprecedented digital mess. Here the question is: What is true? The digital mess or the conventional representation of the ordered world that turns out to be only the surface?
JODI: JET SET WILLY FOREVER (2004-2010)
This project presents ten modifications of the original video game JET SET WILLY, which was immensely popular in the 1980s. JODI used an emulator to change the machine code byte by byte, and transformed the game’s graphics and sound while leaving the basic functions of the game intact. JET SET WILLY was one of the first non-linear games in which the tired miner Willy is ordered to clean all rooms in his immense villa by his housekeeper before he can go to bed. The player moves Willy thrugh all sixty rooms and tries to gather as many objects as possible. The game is written in the now extinct programming language BASIC, which was designed to empower home users of the first computers, here the ZX Spectrum. With childish fascination JODI are able to discuss the aesthetics of early home computing through the roles it played in producing the digital media language of today: the exploration of the material that computers are made of. In JET SET WILLY the inside becomes the outside and vice versa. For instance: the colour bars Willy skips across are from a copy protection card – a par t of a cassette cover, which contained a colour bar access code to the game. To make JET SET WILLY FOREVER, JODI had to think about recovering and archiving a project that was originally about recovering something already lost: how fragile computer culture is!
Jon Satrom & Ben Syverson: Satromiser (2010)17414202
This project is advertised as “the world’s first multi-touch glitch tool”. A glitch is an unexpected and unplanned change in image or sound as a result of a short malfunction in the electronics or software. It is an application for iPhone, iPod and iPad that builds upon a rich tradition of glitch aesthetics to destabilise Apple interfaces: glitches grow and the interface falls apart as you touch the screen. Satromizer provides a link between glitch culture of the 1980s and 1990s on the one hand, which was an expression of genuine, troubled digital aesthetics, and the sleek, absolutely closed gadgets of the new generation on the other. It also reflects on the role that software art played in destabilising the ‘boredom’ of software. Now, software is updated to include various kinds of ‘anti-boredom’ entertainment into its core – available through the iTunes App Store.
Roger Wigger & !Mediengruppe Bitnik: Hardware Orchestra (2004)
Hardware Orchestra turns the user into a conductor of hardware devices, such as CPU, hard and floppy drive, system speaker, and fan. All of these devices can produce sounds: the working sounds of a computer. Here they become instruments for the musical performance they generate by responding to software commands. Nothing is pre-recorded: a user arranges compositions through a sequencer visualised on a green monochrome monitor, which are then performed by the computer parts freed of the computer case. This project builds on the culture of geeky, humorous misuse of technology popular in the 1990s, when motherboard beeps were used to perform cheerful songs. But this culture can also be traced back to the 1980s, with the early home computer Amiga 2000 playing music with a floppy drive, using the sound of the stepper motor.
RTMark: The SimCopter Hack (1996)
Now one of the glorious Yes Men impersonating the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and printing fake New York Times) an RTMark member worked as a programmer for Maxis Inc. back in 1996. There he slipped in a few ‘unauthorised images’ of semi-dressed men walking around and kissing, Elvis impersonators, the Loch Ness monster and a fl ying superhero, into Maxis Inc.’s action game SimCopter. The feature would be activated and become visible on Friday the 13th,as well as on a few other days of the year – a classic Easter Egg (hidden joke) snuck into over 70,000 copies of the game shipped to customers. SimCopter players fly rescue aircrafts through a 3D city. The game is full of semi-dressed ‘buxom babes’, but a few males kissing each other in swim trunks when a level is passed, poses a huge scandal and leads to the programmer being fired. This project is a classic in the history of activist software work.
Runme.org (2003-2010)
Runme.org is a software art repository created by all the people who used and contributed to it since late 2002. It offers an interesting and slightly ironic perspective on software art. It is not only rich in drawing from programmers’ cultures but also poses more ‘artistic’ enquiries. Software art is a set of practices that has it’s focus on software as material as well as medium. Hosting and linking to over 400 projects, along with features and texts, Runme.org is a project of self-organisation of an art current through the ‘fun’ of exploration. Its position of relative success is due, among other reasons, to its humorous perspective.
EDUCATION PROGRAMME
Kunstbalie, Tilburg, Olga Mink
Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Interactieve Media, Irma Driessen
