THE SOFTWARE

LANGUAGE

JANEZ STREHOVEC

Even though authors of new media theories do not pay much attention

to the digital textuality and digital literatures (they find more

new media specificity in web sites, digital cinema, computer

games, and in virtual reality installations) we can consider this

domain to be explicitly a new media one. First of all we mean the

digital literatures after the hypertext —as well as simultaneously to

it —that can be called second order digital literatures, software

poetry and (software) language art. These designations refer to the

expanded concept of digital textuality meant for artistic spaces and

artistic interventions; this textual practice is by no means a continuation

of the literature-as-we-know-it, it is a textual praxis, close to

the new media specificity. Among its readers-users may take place

those who are keen on neither Dostojevski nor Oscar Wilde nor

Charles Baudelaire, but are computer game geeks and participants

in the DJ and VJ culture. In this paper, we focus on the expanded

field of digital poetry, which in technical terms can be called the

software language art, and which we believe belongs primarily to

the field of software art as one of the most characteristic forms of

new media art. We will therefore first describe the main cultural

turns and the paradigm changes that come with the new media art.

From Work of Art to Service of Art

The shift of the emphasis from the (industrial) production and

manufacturing artefacts to the services sector in the economy of

post-industrial societies also affects the contemporary art; its

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social position benefits also from other shifts in contemporary

(postindustrial, information, software) societies —an example

would be the increasing stress placed on knowledge, innovation,

education, use of new technologies, communications and spectacle.

We are entering a world, in which data and intangible, abstract

entities, immaterial products and services, mobility, flexibility,

decentralization, rhizom-like order of organization, and highlevel

professionalism are gaining importance. The role of the

national state is at stake in the globalized networking based politics,

more and more affected by the multinational capital and

international institutions, and similar shifts can be observed in science

(destabilization and relativization of the concept of subject

independent nature, i.e. objective nature, natural laws and objective

truth) and in new economy (the shift from the tangible wealth

towards services and information).

By taking a look at the different movements of the contemporary art,

especially the new media art, we can find out that material, stable

artefact is under similar pressure as the national state is in the contemporary

politics, material, tangible wealth and production of

artefacts in the new economy and the so-called objective nature in

techno-sciences. The art is also less and less about producing completed

products that are “kunstwerks” by nature, and more and

more about processes, immaterial entities, relations, performaces,

software and services. This shift does not occur only with the contemporary

art projects that are no longer works of art in the traditional

sense, but “would-be-works-of art,”1 it is also documented

in theory (“the end of art” issue as it was discussed in Heidegger’s,

Benjamin’s, Danto’s, Groys’s and Kuspit’s theories) and in the

poetics of contemporary artists. We then encounter art that increasingly

exceeds the manufacturing of artefacts and is crossing over to

a domain that can be called a service of art —meaning a part of contemporary

art (especially the new media one) is crossing into the

service sector of (new) economy in the postindustrial, information,

spectacle and software societies. Its services are equal to those in the

domain of education, management, counselling, finances, politics

264 code, text

etc.; they are then equal to the activities based on knowledge and

professionalism and are as flexible as possible.

Contemporary, especially new media art as a service of art directs us to

the question “what is a service?” It is by no means an artefact,

a completed product, it is essentially an activity, a praxis, a process,

an exploration, an intervention (inside things, states or processes).

The service is not so much the manufacturing of things as it is

a process of reshaping the thing, moving it, connecting it and

incorporating it into new relations, (re)combinations and (re)con-

textualizations. The service presupposes a problem, a challenge or

an order to be solved or executed. The performer of the service is

always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence

of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore

ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not the

manufacturing of an object.

The service, understood in the sense of professionalism demanded by

the information society, always presupposes a procedure that has to

be as rational as possible, economical, divided into phases, steps,

operation commands needed for it to be carried through. This kind

of procedure —an exactly defined, planned procedure, executed

through an economical sequence of steps —is called an algorithm.

The algorithm has for quite some time no longer been an exclusive

domain of the mathematical operations, it is the core of all sophisticatedly

defined processes intended for performing certain tasks,

solving problems, researching the state of things etc. It would not

be an exaggeration to say that artistic services are algorithmic by

nature; by the moment art begins to position itself beyond the aesthetical

and becomes oriented towards tasks, research and problem

solving, it is forced to carefully elaborate the procedures and to

define the instructions to be carried out in order to get to the solution

quickly and through economical phases. Those artistic services

based on the use of computer technologies, intended for algorithmic

functions, are especially and explicitly algorithmic.

A lot of new media art projects can thus be understood as interventions

and services within different states of things, they have an

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algorithmic nature and are often stimulated by non-artistic

motives —for example with regard to political, research and communication

needs and interests. The work done by such an intervention

is adequately articulated solely in its documenting —

as Boris Groys has pointed out in his text Art in the Age of

Biopolitics / From Artwork to Art Documentation. After having

mentioned different forms of artistic intverventions in the everyday

life through the attempts to form unusual life circumstances,

he wrote: “None of these artistic activities can be presented except

by means of art documentation, since from the very beginning

these activities do not serve to produce an artwork in which art as

such could manifest itself.” 2

The service, connected to the executing of the task, constitutes the

artist as the performer or executer of the service, but at the same

time often includes also the person who had placed the order for

the service or at least the person who had initiated it. An example

of this are the contemporary curators and art directors of big festivals

and exhibitions, who —along with the “Call for Entries”—

often also define a theme to which the artists are supposed to

respond with their practices. As an example of such an order we

can mention the CODeDOC project (2002) of the Whitney

museum in USA (the project went on in the Ars electronica festival

in Linz next year): the curator Chistiane Paul issued a call for

software tenders, dependent upon an exactly defined order. The

participating artists were prescribed the choice of programming

and scripting languages, the code had to move and had to connect

three points in space, could not exceed 8 KB and had to be interpretative.

The transfer from the artefact to the service of art and

the artist as the one who executes the service (the service depends

on certain instructions, software, algorithmic approach) is also on

its way to abandon the metaphysichs of artistic creativity and

genius. The artist as the one who executes service, performs certain

tasks, solves problems, does research, defines commands, executes

algorithms and does not wait for the divine inspiration to

come upon her.

266 code, text

The artistic service actually moves art closer to the new economy, that

has customization as adaptation of the service to the user’s preferences

as one of its key concepts. The power to control, to navigate,

to form and to finalize that in the traditional paradigm belonged

exclusively to the author, is now being transferred also to the user;

the term “user friendly”, although worn out and trivialized, does

have a certain content. It is by no means solely the artefact that is

customized —it can apply to the service as well: a software artist

can, for example, create a program as an open —as much as possible

—scheme to be concretized in finalized by the users, according

to their personal preferences.

Texts intended for experiencing the cyberverbal

In this paper, we will focus on text projects, generated with the

state-of-the-art software, that can be treated as a part of software

art. Nowadays the latter is the main field of Internet art —it is its

second phase if we consider the following classification by

Alexander Galloway: “Early Internet art —the highly conceptual

phase known as “net.art”—is concerned primarily with the network,

while later Internet art —what can be called the corporate or

commercial phase —has been concerned primarily with software.”3

This differenciation is close to the one Lev Manovich makes when

he distinguishes the Internet art of the 1990s from the software art

of the beginning of the 21st century, typically defined by a generation

of artists who are also active in the field of Flash programming.

“This generation is no longer interested in “media critique”

which preoccupied media artists of the last two decades; instead it

is engaged in software critique. This generation writes its own

software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using

samples of commercial media.” 4

Software art is explicitly a service profiled art, using algorhitmic procedures,

intended for solving problems. The question that needs to

be asked is what happens to the text in the moment we enter the

world of services and agony of completed stable artefacts, and tangible

works. By no means, it is no longer the great text such as the

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“textwerk”, it is a fragment, a patch, a (short) program or its modification,

textual sequence as a moving target in a computer game

(e.g. The Trigger Happy), a digital poem, a poetic generator or

simply a software controlled scheme, meant for the user’s concretizations

or customizations. The question of genre and form is

becoming more and more secondary; we encounter hybrid and

temporary forms, texts as textscapes. As a rule, their function is no

longer storytelling, instead they serve as a demonstration of a new

way of experiencing the verbal in the world of on-line communication

and inside the sofware paradigm. It seems a series of software

and digital poetry (especially animated, kinetic) pieces

answer the question of the role of a word and text in the information

and software societies. Why (still) a word and not simply

attractive images and sounds? The software language art as a service

is therefore meant for a new definition and demonstration of

cyberword and cybertext (this may also happen in a form enableing

customization).

Projects (and textual services) of software language art are nowadays

often Flash generated; it seems a paralel, similar to the one

Galloway and Manovich establish in Internet art can be found in

the field of digital textuality. In Internet art we have first the net

art with the reference to the networking, followed by software art,

whereas in the digital texts there is a gap between the hypertext

with a reference to the links and the sofware language art, which is

often the work of authors of the Flash generation. What is characteristic

for the Flash generated software language art that enables

a truly special textual visuality and aesthetics?

The issue here are by all means no longer hypertextual texts with links

and lexias, and with the suspense accompanying the clicking of the

underlined words (“words that yield”) as hyperlinks. Neither is at

issue the enjoyment of uncertainty and the feeling of being lost in

a labyrinth that accompanies the works of hyperfiction (for example

works of Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson) which are often

intentionally designed as actual labyrinths demanding a sophisticated

search for passages and really risky solutions. In Flash gener268

code, text

ated language art most of the action is focused on the word-image-

body-movement as the basic unit of such textuality, which is as

a rule kinetic —meaning that it foregrounds a signifier, as visualized

and as animated as possible, in the role of a software controlled

“parola in liberta.”

One of the crucial demands accompanying this sort of texts is connected

to the nature of the film way of showing or demonstrating

things in the present, to what Lev Manovich has expressed as

“a general trend in modern society toward presenting more and

more information in the form of time-based audiovisual moving

image sequences”5. It is important that the text-film (in the Flash,

modified by the author-programmer) is short, not unlike a music

video its duration is for example 2’45”, but it is defined by an

extreme density of information, action, it is a world, compressed

into the attractive textual “music video”. As examples of such texts

we may mention the Flash generated poem of Claire Dinsmore

The Dazzle as a Question6 and Brian Kim Stefan’s animated poem

The Dreamlife of Letters.7

In the traditional as well as in the modern and contemporary printbased

poetry, the definition and criteria judging over literary forms

are connected with those aspects of the texts concerning the content,

motif, syntax and organization. We come across lyric and epic

poetry, free verse and verse with rhymes and assonaces, there are

also forms such as the sonnet, triolet etc. However, in digital (software)

poetry the instance that generates the forms and judges

them, is connected with the programs used. Digital poetry is actually

software poetry, that is to say it is poetry generated by very

special programming and scripting languages and their modifications

(“poetry patches”), for example Perl, Java script, Flash,

Shockwave, Director etc. In the present some poets themselves

define their poems as poems of the Flash or Shockwave Poetry (for

example Komninos Zervos and Giselle Beiguelman); there are also

online courses in Flash Poetry which means that this sort of textual

practice is already established as a genre of its own. And in

a moment we are beginning to talk about specific software based

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poetry all the software concepts and devices are to be considered

also as literary devices; rather than issues of style and metaphor the

functioning of mouse(over) event is being crucial in Flash poetry.

When we are mentioning the digital poetry that presupposes the

destabilization of verse by applications of non-linearly distributed

verbal and non-verbal components, and frequent reduction of

poetic language just to nouns, one needs to emphasize that the

“poetic” is now beyond the lyric as understood by the movements

of modern and contemporary poetry. In digital poetry, too, we

can sometimes still discover the making of pure “poetic atmospheres”,

the tension between the said and the unsaid, the written

and the whiteness (in kinetic and animated poetry, for example),

now revealed through the loops between the text that is already

in our field of vision, that is, displayed, and the text that is yet to

appear, however one of the striking features of this poetry is first

of all its inventive work in the field of broadening of concept of

poetic language (or even language at all). With the latter we refer

to a language suited to post-lyrical sensations and attitudes of the

post-lyrical subject and the subjectivity of the “mix, cuts &

scratches mind”. If we want to define a reference framework for

the postlyrical kinetic digital poetry , and even so called software

language art on the level of contemporary popular culture and its

audience then this is mainly the club, DJ, and VJ culture, the online

Internet culture and the verbal, netspeak based culture

emerging from the on-line and mobile communications. Rather

than reading Baudelaire’s, Whitman’s and Rilke’s lyrics the

authentic audience of kinetic digital poetry is familiar with net

art, software art and electronic installation art as well as the genre

of moving images.

Flash language art also enables the reader, in the role of the user, to

have a very creative, intensive, even an intimate contact with the

text —Deena Larsen, in her digital text Carving in possibilities8

expressed this characteristic with the demand to “sculpt again”

and not “read again”. Devices such as scroll-bar, mouse and stylus

(when using a palm pilot) enable the reader to handle the written

270 code, text

in a very specific, intimate way and to interfere with the text

through an interface, such as a screen covering the text like a curtain,

which responds to the click of the mouse (within mouseover

event). In Larsen’s Carving in possibilities words are hidden

behind the surface — like the objects, provisory wrapped by the

artist Christo in his land art projects. The reader is asked to find

—by the means of her “mouse event” procedure —the

covered/”wrapped” words and make them appear on the screen.

By “mouseovering” an image of shapeless stone is being transformed

into Michelangelo’s David. User’s action is individualized,

the sequence of textual components adapts to her interventions

(this is “customization” as a procedure known from the new

economy) and it always produces or sculpts a different succession

of the written, that is to say, accomplishes a different textual

event. Larsen’s opening line “I saw precisely what the stone was

meant to be” is a starting point for various textual continuations/

derivatives caused by random repositioning of the mouse-touch

on the screen.

We say event (also in Flash vector-based art is talked about mouse

event), and digital poetry really is about the event, it is about making

the text with a stressed temporal feature, based on two levels —

on the internal “unwrapping” of the textual hidden layers as well as

on the reader’s/user’s reading in the form of interactive intervention

into the texts (which is often the case). Text as an event implicates

a textual life, which is a form of an artificial life (also in the

meaning of replicating certain textual components in the textual

postproduction, reproduction and interactive reading). It is essential

that the components of a text are not based solely on words but

above all on relations among words and on special atmospheres connected

with these relations. The author-programmer of digital

poetry is therefore the one who is able to insert word materials into

very special relations that are highly shifted from the known relations

(from the everyday language or the profane marketing and

advertising verbal communication). Her role is not merely the saying

of the “poetic words”, it is above all arranging the stage of relajanez

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tions among words and even within one single word. Therefore the

digital poetry text (designed as an object, browser, textual ambient,

project, piece of software...) appears to be an eminent linguistic work

of art, to which the demands of the new media aesthetics and poetics

—such as digitality, software, logic of database, mosaic nature, networking,

customization, aesthetics of flatness and nearness, sense

of the game mode, kinetics and multi media —are crucial.

A part of software language art are also texts based on the code language,

or perhaps those are hybrid products in which the letters

from natural languages are mixed with characters from scripting and

programming languages. Such example are the texts of the

Australian author Mez and partly also the works of Alain Sondheim

and Talan Memmoth. It is obvious that their “written form” can be

very provocative as well; it is not just the computer execution of the

text that is worth our attention but also the text itself.

This kind of code texts are a big challenge also for the readers/users

who are forced to develop a sophisticated “mental interface”, needed

to decode such texts not suitable for the quick linear reading —

on the contrary, they require an effort, a sense for associations, paying

attention to the divided/broken words and their units, recombining

fragments etc. In the scheme author —text —reader the

emphasis is now undoubtedly moving toward the reader as a user,

stimulated by such texts to take an attitude —not unlike the DJs

and VJs in their production procedures. It seems authors of software

language art are with their texts indeed simply providing

material and tracing schemes; a lot of work is left up to their readers

—in a certain way this challenges and stimulates the present

“mix, cuts & scratches mind”. It is therefore not only the author

who faces the task demanding the ability of algorithmic thinking,

the same task awaits the reader who can also be rejected when she

encounters such texts —like in a computer game. To be successful,

she has to perceive the text in a very complex manner, to decode it

she has to generate an actual algorithm, she often has to read even

with a pencil or a stylus in hand, to sketch and write down the

steps she has already taken during her encounter with the text.

272 code, text

It is also of importance that the software nature of such texts —i.e.

the code language, by no means a mere instrument on the way to the

meaning or machine-based execution, but with its own value —is also

emphasised. What do we mean by that? “In poetry, says Jacobson,

words are not simply strung together for the sake of the thoughts they

convey, as in ordinary speech, but with extraordinary attention to patterns

of similarity, opposition and parallelism created by their sound,

rhythm and semantic connotations. Literary language, that of the

poetic text, proclaims its material being, inviting attention to itself as

an acoustic and graphic substance, rather than functioning as an

invisible glass passage to meaning.”9 When talking about programmable

medium, attention similar to that paid to the “patterns

of similarity, opposition and parallelism” should be paid to the

software used —meaning the reader is faced with the task

of reading through a double optic; she reads the text as

a text generated by executing certain commands,

but at the same times she turns to its code.

A successful reader of texts belonging to the

software language art is above all the reader

who sees (recognises, deciphers) a lot also

in the field of the code; in a certain

sense a reader-programmer reads

over more than the one who

does not possess

such skills

Strehovec, J. “The Atmospheres of Extraordinary in the Installation

Art”, A-r-c, Issue 3, (November 2000),

http://a-r-c.gold.ac.uk/a-r-c_Three/texts/3_janez05.html.

Groys, B. “Art in the Age of Biopolitics. From Artwork to Art

Documentition”.Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition. Catalogue.

Ostfildern -Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002,p.108

Galloway, A. “Protocol”-Excerpt from Chapter 7 “Internet Art”.

Rhizome.org. http://www.rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=

12700&text=24436#24436 , 2004

Manovich, L. “Generation_Flash”. http://www.manovich.net/, 2002

Manovich, L. The Language of New Media. Cambridge. Mass.:

The MIT Press, 2001,p.78

Dinsmore, C.The Dazzle as a Question.

http://www.studiocleo.com/projects/dazzle/index.html

Stefans, B.K. The Dreamlife of Letters. http://www.ubu.com/con-

temp/stefans/dream/index.html.

Larsen, D. Carving in Possibilities. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/, 2001

Wyman, S. “The poem in the painting: Roman Jacobson and the pictorial

language of Paul Klee”, Word & Image, Vol. 20,No.2 (April-June

2004), p. 139