Michael Murtaugh is a computer programmer who researches community databases, interactive documentaries and tools for new forms of online reading and writing. He contributes to projects such as the Institute for Computational Vandalism and Active Archives, is a member of Constant and involved in Piet Zwart Media Design where he teaches at the Experimental Publishing Masters course. http://automatist.org
@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ Processing commands typically address the canvas using x,y (Cartesian) coordinat
Input functions allow access to the mouse and keyboard to produce dynamic graphics that respond to the user. Processing sketches consists of (at least) two functions: *setup* which is invoked once and *draw* which is invoked continuously; the default frequency being the refresh rate of the computer’s display (typically 60 times per second). By using variables, and changing their values, graphics can be made dynamic. In addition, graphics are rendered using a technique known as “anti-aliasing” to appear “pixelated”. This default behavior can be modified by using the noSmooth command.
Earlier in the day I had bought another technical book "ImageMagick Tricks: Web Image Effects from the Command line and PHP" by Sohail Salehi (Pakt, 2006). While waiting for the presentation to begin, I crossed paths with Casey Reas at the back of the room. He was curious about the book I had with me and looked briefly at it. He had never heard of ImageMagick.[^salehi]
Earlier in the day I had bought another technical book "ImageMagick Tricks: Web Image Effects from the Command line and PHP" by Sohail Salehi[^salehi]. While waiting for the presentation to begin, I crossed paths with Casey Reas at the back of the room. He was curious about the book I had with me and looked briefly at it. He had never heard of ImageMagick.
@ -110,15 +110,19 @@ In Belgium, where I currently live "bricolage" is the French language equivalent
## tearing at the seams
Initially I came to the writing of this essay as part of a proposed dialog with the artist Winnie Soon. Unfortunately because of time constraints it wasn't able to happen. Together with Geoff Cox, Soon has recently published "Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies". The book itself, designed by Open Source Publishing, makes promiscuous use of different tools and techniques, such as the diagramming tool graphviz, HTML, Pelican (a CMS), and paged.js, and showcases an expressive use of typography (including a reinterpretion of a font originally drawn by Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger).
Initially I came to the writing of this essay as part of a proposed dialog with the artist Winnie Soon. Unfortunately because of time constraints it wasn't able to happen. Together with Geoff Cox, Soon has recently published "Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies"[^aestheticprogramming]. The book itself, designed by Open Source Publishing, makes promiscuous use of different tools and techniques, such as the diagramming tool graphviz, HTML, Pelican (a CMS), and paged.js, and showcases an expressive use of typography (including a reinterpretion of a font originally drawn by Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger).
Where Reas and Fry's Handbook is demure, Soon and Cox's is generous, voluptuous even, richly mixing programming exercises with diagrams, flowcharts, and illustrations. The discussions are explicit about the sociality of code and intersections with software art and software studies. The text is densely annotated with theoretical references and links to related critical artistic projects. Directly addressing the "dark sides" of technology such as the extractive and aggregative corporate practices of big data, this handbook explicitly positions coding as an act of activism to critic and explore alternatives. Most of the code examples are written using p5.js. As they describe in the first section:
[^aestheticprogramming]: Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox, *Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies* (Open Humanities Press, 2020)
> This book will use p5.js, a Javascript library which was created by artist Lauren McCarthy in 2014 for the purpose of what we call "aethetic programming." ... Importantly, the core idea of p5.js is not just to deploy Processing as a web-based platform, but to address diversity and inclusivity explicitly, and take these issues seriously in software development and communication"
[^app5]: Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox, 31.
Where Reas and Fry's Handbook is demure, Soon and Cox's is generous, voluptuous even, richly mixing programming exercises with diagrams, flowcharts, and illustrations. The discussions are explicit about the sociality of code and intersections with software art and software studies. The text is densely annotated with theoretical references and links to related critical artistic projects. Directly addressing the "dark sides" of technology such as the extractive and aggregative corporate practices of big data, this handbook explicitly positions coding as an act of activism. Most of the code examples are written using p5.js. As they describe in the first section:
> This book will use p5.js, a Javascript library which was created by artist Lauren McCarthy in 2014 for the purpose of what we call "aethetic programming." ... Importantly, the core idea of p5.js is not just to deploy Processing as a web-based platform, but to address diversity and inclusivity explicitly, and take these issues seriously in software development and communication"[^app5]
In 2016, the Whitney published a “restored” version of Software Structures.[^ssreloaded] As technologies like Java and Flash had then for reasons both technical and commercial fallen out of popular use on the web, the new version featured many of the processing sketches adapted by Reas to use p5.js.
Despite the project's earlier stated interest in exploring diverse "materialities", it’s telling that rather than considering the older processing implementations as a different material and presenting screenshots of them as was done for the Flash and C++ examples, the "restoration" maintains the illusion of a certain "permanence" to the processing sketches, making them thus appear closer to those imagined "software structures" than to "retrograde" technologies like Java or an out dated browser version. In addition this "adaptation" hides the quite significant work that has gone into (1) the development and subsequent implementation in different browsers of the newly standardized canvas element[^canvas], and (2) McCarthy's work creating the p5.js library to bridge from the legacy processing code to this new standard.[^javascript]
Despite the project's earlier stated interest in exploring diverse "materialities", it’s telling that rather than considering the older processing implementations as a different material and presenting screenshots of them as was done for the Flash and C++ examples, the "restoration" maintains the illusion of a certain "permanence" to the processing sketches, making them thus appear closer to those imagined "software structures" than to "retrograde" technologies like Java or an out-dated browser version. In addition this "adaptation" hides the quite significant work that has gone into (1) the development and subsequent implementation in different browsers of the newly standardized canvas element[^canvas], and (2) McCarthy's work creating the p5.js library to bridge from the legacy processing code to this new standard.[^javascript]
[^javascript]: Despite the seeming similarity of names, Java and Javascript are two completely independent and quite different programming languages. Adapting software from one to the other is thus not trivial.
@ -126,17 +130,21 @@ Despite the project's earlier stated interest in exploring diverse "materialitie
Alfred North Whitehead, writing on the sciences, established an influential idea of a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". The idea is that making abstractions, such as what happens when a particular phenomenon is named, is a simplification that works by suppressing "what appear to be irrelevant details".[^whitehead] In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller extends this thinking to consider technical standards as "a material instantiation"[^fuller_p?] of Whitehead's misplaced concreteness, and considers how technical devices through a process of *objectification* "expect in advance the results that they obtain".[^fuller_p104] Fuller cites the example of Laurence Lessig, who makes an argument for regulation of the Internet based on the assertion of standard objects (such as networking protocols) being layered and reconfigurable.
Alfred North Whitehead, writing on the sciences, established an influential idea of a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". The idea is that making abstractions, such as what happens when a particular phenomenon is named, is a simplification that works by suppressing "what appear to be irrelevant details".[^whitehead] In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller extends this thinking to consider technical standards as "a material instantiation"[^fuller_p127] of Whitehead's misplaced concreteness, and considers how technical devices through a process of *objectification* "expect in advance the results that they obtain".[^fuller_p104] Fuller cites the example of Laurence Lessig, who makes an argument for regulation of the Internet based on the assertion of standard objects (such as networking protocols) being layered and reconfigurable.
[^whitehead]: Alfred North Whitehead, *Science and the modern world* (New York: Free Press, 1967), retrieved from the Internet archive Oct 28, 2021 <https://archive.org/details/sciencemodernwor00alfr/page/52/mode/2up>
> [Lessig's argument] allows us to recognize another characteristic of the standard object: that, while it may be simultaneously embedded within multiple compositions wherein it may be involved in many, separate, disjunctive, contiguous, or contradictory processes, it does provide a threshold, either side of which is differentiated enough for significant political, technical, aesthetic, and social conjunctions or conflicts to occur.[^fuller_p129]
[^fuller_p129]: Matthew Fuller, *Media Ecologies* (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 129.
[^fuller_p127]: Matthew Fuller, *Media Ecologies* (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 127.
[^fuller_p129]: Matthew Fuller, 129.
[^fuller_p104]: Matthew Fuller, 104.
Susan Leigh Star takes Whitehead's "misplaced concretism" and proposes a feminist methodology specific to information technology.[^star] Her essay develops the idea of "standards" as one type of "Boundary object", which she describes as:
> [...] those scientific objects which both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the information requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are thus objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local need and common identity across sites.[p. 157]
> [...] those scientific objects which both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the information requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are thus objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local need and common identity across sites.[^star_p157]
Star cites Donna Haraway, who wonders in *A Manifesto for Cyborgs*:
@ -152,13 +160,16 @@ Star draws on a tradition of diverse feminist thinking through the "articulation
[^star]: Susan Leigh Star, "Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology" (1994), *Boundary Objects and Beyond* (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015)
[^star_p157]: Susan Leigh Star, 157.
[^star_method]: Susan Leigh Star, 148-149.
For me tools like ImageMagick embody *collectivity* from it's origins as a way to "give back" to a community sharing code over usenet, through to its continued development by multiple authors and relation to the larger free software community as an invaluable toolbox for extremely diverse pratices. I find the *experiential* in the highly flexible commandline interface, itself also an example of honoring contradiction and partialness, with often more than one way to express the same transformations. The *processual* is implicit in its construction as a tool of transformation, encouraging an exploratory iterative approach to composing transformations to arrive at a desired outcome, often leading to missteps and errors that can be happy accidents and lead one to reconsider one's goals. Finally, in its extreme support of hundreds of different formats, ImageMagick use often leads to the discovery and exploration of diverse image formats, each with related practices, and contexts.
In contrast, behind a seemingly "neutral" aesthetic, Processing I think embodies very particular set of values and assumptions. The “visual minimalism” claimed in the Processing handbook, belies the project's expansive claims on representing a pedagogic approach to a broad intersection of programming and visual arts. The projects "neutral" aesthetics while dimly echoing a once-radical Bauhaus aesthetic, ignores the larger pedagogic program of the historical Bauhaus' experimentation with the materials of their (contemporary) technical production. The system valorizesg smoothness and fluidity, that leads one to prioritize interactivity as that which happens on the surface of a sketch, rather than say in the network, or among collaborators. As a pedagogic project, has historically seemed uninterested in its own underlying materiality, encouraging students to explore the "world at large" by adding additional layers of technology in the form of sensors, rather than considering all the ways the technologies they use are *already engaged* and impacting the world.
For me tools like ImageMagick embody *collectivity* from it's origins as a way to "give back" to a community sharing code over usenet, through to its continued development by multiple authors and relation to the larger free software community as an invaluable toolbox for extremely diverse pratices. I find the *experiential* in the highly flexible commandline interface, itself also an example of honoring *contradiction* and *partialness*, with often more than one way to express the same transformation. The *processual* is implicit in its construction as a tool of transformation, encouraging an exploratory iterative approach to composing transformations to arrive at a desired outcome, often leading to missteps and errors that can be happy accidents and lead one to reconsider one's goals. Finally, in its extreme support of hundreds of different formats, ImageMagick use often leads to the discovery and exploration of diverse image formats, each with related practices, and contexts.
In contrast, behind a seemingly "neutral" aesthetic, Processing I think embodies a very particular set of values and assumptions. The “visual minimalism” claimed in the Processing handbook, belies the project's expansive claims on representing a pedagogic approach to a broad intersection of programming and the visual arts. The project's "neutral" aesthetics while dimly echoing a once-radical Bauhaus aesthetic, ignores the larger pedagogic program of the historical Bauhaus' experimentation with the materials of their (contemporary) technical production. The framework valorizes smoothness and fluidity, that leads one to prioritize interactivity as that which happens on the surface of a sketch, rather than say in the network, or among collaborators. As a pedagogic project, Processing has historically seemed uninterested in its own underlying materiality, preferring its students to explore the "world at large" by adding additional layers of technology in the form of sensors, rather than considering all the ways the technologies they use are *already engaged* and impacting the world.
> A concatenation of operations of misplaced concreteness thus allow the gaps, overlaps, and voids in the interrelated capacities of such systems to construct a more "accurate" account of its own operations.[^fuller_p104]
Fuller thus articulates a tactical engagement with standards to tear as it were at the seams between systems to create revealing compositions. Vernacular rejects the "false neutrality" of the seamless universal design solution, embracing instead the tips and tricks of specific tools, used in specific contexts. A vernacular composition proudly displays the seams between systems and glitches in the gaps as a badge of honoring views of truth that are multi-threaded, incomplete, sometimes uncomfortable, engaged with the world and not afraid to be freaky.
Vernacular rejects the "false neutrality" of the seamless universal design solution, embracing instead the tips and tricks of specific tools, in specific contexts. A vernacular composition tears open its seams proudly displaying the glitches and gaps as a badge of honor of a world view of truth as multi-threaded, incomplete, and sometimes uncomfortable, and is engaged with the world and not afraid to be seen as a monster.
