CONCEPTS, NOTATIONS, SOFTWARE, ART

Software in the Arts. To date, critics and scholars in the arts and humanities have considered computers primarily as storage and display media, as something which transmits and reformats images, sound and typography. Reflection of the as such invisible layer of software is rare. Likewise, the term “digital art” has been associated primarily with digital images, music or audiovisual installations using digital technology. The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. “Interactive” room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code. This observation all the more applies to works in which it is not obvious at all that their production relied on programmation and computing. John Cage’s 1981 radio play “Roaratorio”, for example, appears to be a tape montage of a spoken text based on James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, environmental sounds recorded in several cities of the world and Irish folk music, edited with analog recording technology. Yet at the same time it is an algorithmic artwork; the spoken text was extracted from the novel using a purely syntactical, formal method (mesostychs of the name “James Joyce”), and the montage was done according to a random score generated on a computer at the Parisian IRCAM studios. While the book-plus-CD set of “Roarotorio” documents the whole composition extensively, containing the audio piece itself, a recording and a reprint of John Cage’s reading, a recording and a reprint of an interview, an inventory of the cities where sound was recorded, it includes the computergenerated score itself only in a one-page excerpt and nothing at all of the computer program code which generated the random score. 1 The history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers. Computer programs get locked into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist’s concepts. Given