Emergence,
Ontologies, and Codework:
Art ‘Materials’ that Cross Disciplines
- Faculty Scholarship Dinner
- Nebraska Wesleyan University
- April 29, 2003
The following was a handout on Codework that supplemented the presentation.
Codework:
Talan Memmott
Lexia to Perplexia: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/lexia/index.htm
Ted Warnell
Viru2: http://warnell.com/syntac/viru2.htm
Berlioz: http://warnell.com/syntac/berlioz.htm
"Ted Warnell's "Berlioz" is also comprised of a collection
of email messages mish-mashed together and made dynamic. Over what appears
to be a greenish over-compressed digital image, units of text appear and
disappear from the screen through User interaction. What is interesting
about this work is that the appropriated email dialog is rendered unreadable
by the design. "Berlioz" hides its own textuality beneath a
sfumato of painterly, or musical intent. Areas of clustered unreadable
text occupy the screen, functioning more as color mass than as literary
units. In painterly terms, the alphanumeric, diacritical and encoded characters
carry the pigment and Warnell has applied them aptly—with a painter/composer's
hand. The musicality of the work is rendered in a de-sonified sense—through
User interaction, harmonies are struck between the various masses of text.
The User controls, conducts the emergence of the text. More rigid than
Berlioz, Warnell's "VIRU2" also demonstrates the use of text
as 'mass'. Areas of red, black and blue text mark a stark white screen,
drip, and flood the screen in strokes reminiscent of paintings by Clifford
Still. In the lower right of the screen there is a gray, barely visible
genetic sequence—GGTCAA—and the only directly readable text
is a fictitious JavaScript that lists the functions tumor(), and mutant()."
Talan Memmott, "CodeWork://serration in practice." Inter/Disciplinary Models, Disciplinary Boundaries: Humanities Computing and Emerging Mind Technologies, COCH/COSH 2002 Meeting. < http://web.mala.bc.ca/siemensr/C-C/2002/abstracts.htm>
About Viru2 ". . . with NS 4.08 and IE 4 and IE 6—the above
work center link (large 6 digit DNA code) causes the page to reload and
generate a new random 6 digit code. Top-left link returns to syntacticalerror
and top-right link makes a pop-up screen with 'about' information. That's
how this piece is intended to work.
It is true, too, that this work is _designed_ to appear differently from browser to browser, version to version, and browser-version-per-monitor—and all of this is perfectly in keeping with actual intended and _designed_ purpose and function of the Web and Network itself. All of my works explore this network reality.
One of the best reasons
I can think of to stay away from programs such as Flash, for instance,
is that said programs work _against_ the reality of decentralized networking,
to harken back to older times (media) of centralized control and power.
This just is NOT the way of new media, and does nothing to investigate
and expose the real potential for new media."
Ted Warnell. "Re: 12 artists/12 pages" E-mail to Starla Stensaas. 4/24/03.