Short Big Drama highlights the theatricality of the artist’s practice. This comprehensive exhibition presents a wide selection of existing works together with specially commissioned new pieces. The spotlight falls on three types of works — monumental wall paintings, colorful Pixel Box installations and interactive Drawing Machines.

In the installation of the works, contradiction takes center-stage. Playing with the nature of drama — be this epic or mundane, short or big, or perhaps all of these at once — the project adapts exhibition space to draw out the tensions and attractions between the distinct impulses that animate Bulloch’s practice. For Witte de With, the artist interprets and manipulates earlier, potentially clashing installations into a seemingly harmonious whole, revealing a particular beauty which lies at the heart of complexity.

Bulloch’s approach is interdisciplinary, incorporating references from a wide array of sources, amongst them modern history, vanguard film, punk and electronic music. In her wall paintings, specific references to aesthetic, political or social developments are deconstructed and graphically re-assembled. Through this process of détournement, the artist questions the informational status of an artwork, as well as the possibility of narrating history. Bulloch’s Drawing Machines are interactive pieces, triggered or altered by the movements of visitors. In this way, her works explore the dialectic between technology and labor, making us conscious of our place, and that of others, within the gallery space. With her Pixel Boxes, Bulloch ‘programs’ our experience of art by encoding her signature modular light and sound installations with data from a vast array of cultural sources. Though these sources and the workings behind the installations remain invisible, a viewer may sense the imposition of a predefined code, even if unconsciously.

The manipulation of codes and a sense of control pervade Bulloch’s artistic practice. Whether that code is music- or text-based, the artist plays with and orchestrates our perception and experience of art. In proposing that this experience can be ’subliminal’ her work aims to stage that which is beyond our grasp.

Curated by Amira Gad & Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Canada) is a Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist. She is recognized as one of the Young British Artists and was included in the 1988 Freeze Exhibition. In 1997, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks…, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2011); Discrete Manifold Whatsoever, Simon Lee Gallery, London; Redux, Esther Schipper, Berlin (both 2010); and The space that time forgot, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus & Kunstbau, Munich (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Art Parcours, Art Basel 41, Münster Cathedral, Basel; A Roll Of The Dice, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon; Drawing Time, Galeries Poirels, Frac Lorraine, Metz; High ideals and crazy dreams, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg; and Open light in private spaces, Biennale for international Light Art, Unna (all 2010); Universal Code, The Power Plant, Toronto; and Yellow and Green, MMK Frankfurt, Frankfurt (both 2009). Bulloch teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION
Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch
ISBN: 978-94-91435-00-3

To accompany the exhibition, Witte de With Publishers will release Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch in March 2012. In addition to visual documentation of the exhibition, this publication will include critical texts by Nav Haq and John Miller as well as a script by Christine Lang and Christoph Dreher. It will also feature a special selection from Angela Bulloch’s Rules series under the title of “Rules of this Century.”

Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch is the 10th and final publication of Witte de With Publishers’ Source Book series, monographic publications providing an in-depth look into one artist’s practice.

Visit Witte de With’s online shop: www.wdw.nl/shop

Supported by: Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Den Haag, and The Canada Council for the Arts.

We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

The show opened this last Friday and would go on until mid-March, by that time we expect the Decoder of the Day to lead with just a few minutes share…”

The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.

The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat. The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision.

The Critical Engineer raises awareness that with each technological advance our techno-political literacy is challenged.

The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.

The Critical Engineer looks beyond the ‘awe of implementation’ to determine methods of influence and their specific effects.

The Critical Engineer recognises that each work of engineering engineers its user, proportional to that user’s dependency upon it.

The Critical Engineer expands ‘machine’ to describe interrelationships encompassing devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks.

The Critical Engineer observes the space between the production and consumption of technology. Acting rapidly on changes in this space, the Critical Engineer serves to expose moments of imbalance and deception.

The Critical Engineer looks to the history of art, architecture, activism, philosophy and invention and finds exemplary works of Critical Engineering. Strategies, ideas and agendas from these disciplines will be adopted, re-purposed and deployed.

The Critical Engineer notes that written code expands into social and psychological realms, regulating behaviour between people and the machines they interact with. By understanding this, the Critical Engineer seeks to reconstruct user-constraints and social action through means of digital excavation.

The Critical Engineer considers the exploit to be the most desirable form of exposure.

J. Oliver, G. Savičić, D. Vasiliev

Berlin, October 2011

The Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab opened this summer at the University of Southern California with the specific goal of developing the field and fostering discussion between the Humanities and Computer Science. Current members include USC faculty and students and a host of affiliated scholars from other institutions, including and international advisory board. The HaCCS Lab sponsored its first conference this summer and will be sponsoring other get togethers both on campus and online. Central to its mission is to develop common vocabularies, methodologies, and case-studies of CCS, while promoting publications in the field.

Mark Marino, who teaches in the USC Writing Program, is the Director of the new center. He was nice enough to agree to an interview during which he explains what he means by Critical Code Studies, how it relates to other humanistic approaches to studying digital culture, and what he thinks it contributes to our understanding of Code as a cultural practice and as a critical artifact.


What do you mean by critical code studies?

The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is “the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code.” However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning.

Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but “as a text,” an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities. I should note that Critical Code Studies also looks at code separated from functioning software as in the case of some codework poetry, such as Mez’s work or Zach Blas’ trasnCoder anti-programming language. To that extent, Critical Code Studies is also interested in the culture of code, the art of code, and code in culture more broadly…” More >> Also see >>

“Probably no one who reads Leonardo publications needs to be convinced of the centrality of software for modern art, culture, or academia. Yet, outside these circles, I think there is demand for such books as David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. At times, software studies still gets some of the crowd squirming in their seats in academic conferences, and either slightly worried or bemused reactions from representatives of more established academic disciplines. Surely code cannot be read and written like Shakespeare, appreciated the way you do Milton or object of such cult as Austen – or the cinephilic attachment in film studies to certain genres and films?” Continue >>

Also see Furtherfield’s review.

Julian Oliver, born in New Zealand (anyone who has seen him give a talk will know not to mistake him for an Australian) is not only an extremely well versed programmer but is increasingly as equally knowledgeable with computer hardware. His background is as diverse as the places he has lived and the journeys it has taken him on. Julian started out with architecture, moved on to Australia to work in the field of virtual reality and as Stelarc’s assistant. He continued on to Gotland to work on the artistic game-development collective Select Parks before moving to Madrid and finally to Berlin, a city he continuously speaks enthusiastically about. Julian is also an outspoken advocate of free software and thinks of his artistic practice not so much as art but more in terms of being a ‘critical engineer’, a term that he applies particularly to his collaborations with his studio partner Danja Vasiliev…” Continue reading >>

The Philosophy of Software is a critical introduction to the subject of code and software, and develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. The book has been written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background and provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms. Software is a tangle, a knot, which ties together the physical and the ephemeral, the material and the ethereal, into a complete system that can be controlled and directed. However, software exceeds our ability to place limits on its entanglement, for it has in the past decade entered the everyday home through electronic augmentation that has replaced the mechanical world of the twentieth century. From washing machines to central heating systems, children’s toys to television and video; the old electro-magnetic and servo-mechanical world is being revolutionised by the silent logic of virtual devices. It is time, therefore, to examine our virtual situation.

DAVID BERRY Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at the University of Swansea, UK. His research is particularly focused on theories of digital code and software, computational creativity, and cultural political economy. He is the author of Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008) and co-editor of Libre Culture (2008). He has also published in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, Critical Discourse Studies and The Journal of Internet Research.

Through the transformations of creative cultures, enabled by digital media and global communication networks, new practices and ability profiles of artistic delineations and explorations are gaining grounds. New global codes and cultures are emerging out of diverse, intercultural abstractions and inventions, connected through new ways of exchanging ideas and sharing knowledge. At the present day it is difficult to predict which catalysts and draft programs can be put into effect for the development of near future playgrounds in this domain. By offering several perspective shifts on developments in digital realm and mediated reality, exemplary theories and projects on the intersection of different codes and cultures have been collected for this book. Presenting essays, reviews and interviews from international artists, theorists, researchers and curators, gives the reader an overview on new vectors of creative and artistic projects departed from digital media related art and cultures. Introduces new and critical models of observations on the intersection of disciplines like art, science, technology and design.

in cooperation with: angewandte@project space mittwochs