Code, Software and Serious Games

Manovich rather brashly claims that “the software artist makes his/her mark on the world by writing original code.” He seems to insinuate that this “original” act is superior the mere poking of the postmodern media artist’s attempts to break down and interpret “media” itself. In claiming that “an artist who samples/subverts/pokes at a commercial media can never compete with it,” Manovich constructs what seems to be a problematic binary; original code is good, deconstructing commercial media is bad/dated.

Manovich overlooks that fact that software (an interface for or an abstraction on top of hardware) is primarily a commercial media. A few shining examples (Firefox, Linux, etc.) aside, the majority of software is proprietary and developed by large, commercial organizations (Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Facebook…) While the contemporary “software artist” that he celebrates as the new romantic is undoubtedly an important figure the need for critical analysis of the new media of software and interface is still very important and the role of sampling/subverting/poking at media is still paramount. If media art and media artists are fundamentally concerned with breaking down and understanding the media of our lives, it seems that the prevalence of [new] media in our lives demands the attention of [new] media artists. Works like Auto-Illustrator, Carnivore, and Webstalker are all commentaries/deconstructions/subversions of commercial and/or governmental software.

In fact, in many ways the real value of Manovich’s software artist is in examining the very fabric of digital media, code.

Separately, Florian Cramer’s discussion of Composition 1961 No. I, January by La Monte Young and her examination of James Joyce were fascinating to me. The way in which Joyce packs volumes of information into single sentences and even non-words always resonates with me in contrast to Manovich’s claim that the modern artist is “genius who creates from scratch, imposing the phantoms of his imagination on the world,” particularly considering the density of cultural references in Joyce’s work. It often seems that Joyce imposes the phantoms of the world (through references to Shakespeare, Aristotle and thousands more) onto the minds of his characters.

As a final note, the discussion of literature and musical scores as seminal pieces of software art makes me wonder about the role of theatre and scripted action in relation to our discussion of performativity. Like code, a script literally does what it says, when run through the right hardware (a theatre, trained actors who have the script memorized). Just a thought.