[ox-en] Nancy Mauro-Flude: Linux for Theatre Makers
- From: Geert Lovink <geert xs4all.nl>
- Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 15:30:24 +0200
Linux for Theatre Makers: Embodiment and *nix modus operandi
by Nancy Mauro-Flude
http://www.networkcultures.org/weblog/archives/2007/04/
linux_for_theat.html#more
This is a text I wrote during my MA Media Design at Piet Zwart
Institute, in response the Thematic Project *Command Line Culture*
September-December 2006 led by Florian Cramer, (the course director).
From the perspective of a performing artist, and as a developer of the
/eclectic tech carnival http://eclectictechcarnival.org/ I discuss my
observations on how using the command line interface may be seen to
possibly co-constitute one another in everyday life, operating as
fields of embodied reflection.
* Introduction *
My central thread in this text is the Linux computer operating
system(OS)#1 and more specifically the use of the command-line
interface within this OS and its relationship to embodiment. Since
bodies and machines are often seen in opposition, I suggest that they
are better perceived complementary in nature rather than antagonistic.
For people who have never worked with command line computing on a
standard *nix machine#2, - especially for people who are already
conditioned to point and click methods cultivated by Graphical User
Interfaces or (GUIs) such as Windows OS or Mac OS #3 - this involves
sensitising procedures, (i.e. like one may endure with any new
instrumental skill acquisition) for the operation of code as a series
of interrelated programs. I will discuss how using the command line
interface may be seen to possibly co-constitute one another in everyday
life, operating as fields of embodied reflection.
I propose that body, like any organism, is a protean reality in
constant flux and in this sense I'd like to consider some of the OS
applications from GNU/Linux#4 community, I specifically am referring to
the non-proprietary tools that are developed to use in a command line
interface. I position myself along the same vain as Martin Hardie who
reads 'Unix as consistent with more philosophical descriptions of
thinking or of living life itself.'#5 Indeed the spreading development
and use of Linux operating systems and free software has political
implications, as Alan Sondheim (writes 'linux is, if not art, at least
fashion, wearable, at problematic variance with capital (punk for
example), useful for intruders, the mouth and tongue for some'. I hope
to elucidate about how the regular use of a computational interface,
command line or GUI, has deep physiological effects. I question why it
is mostly the case that the GUI is presented as a *given* to the
regular computer user. Since information feudalism affects not only
information society and subsequent issues of ownership, privacy,
sharing - clearly seen in the overabundance of patents and agreements
to _harness the user_, which in my view, is an attempt to strip
humanity of all civil freedoms; what products to use, what plants to
grow and consume, what seeds to cultivate, and to an extent our how
ability to even engage with molecular living matter is being
restricted.#6
*Long live the amateur and eclectic hacker!*
Custom, that obscure crossroads where the constructed and the habitual
coalesce, is indeed mysterious.
-Michael Taussig
In light of Merleau Ponty's method of phenomenological description and
dealing with experiences in raw reality, I choose to write this paper
in a personal register, because general divides between practice,
theory and the self-referential, replicates harmful objectifying, and
empirical models.#7 I'll also acknowledge my own corporeal complicity
in the way in which I view the subject, as Kathy Acker so aptly stated
'Politics don't disappear they take place inside my body'#8,
_political_ for me always comes through the personal. It is my belief
that this perspective has authority, because I talk from my direct
experience. A critique I have is that a large majority of people who
contribute to the discourse about *nix have a desire to produce
totalising accounts without any regard to cultural difference. As in
all situations, I believe there are varying ways or modes of
participation. In the following section I shall trace out some of the
more salient benefits in relation to approaching learning in the spirit
of an amateur.
I consider if Linux tools can instigate, as well as create, represent
and respond to intuitive working methods for a broader community -
outside the field of free software developers and end-users and not as
a way of living or being separate. I also will to propose that
engagement in thought, as in any repeated action where the body is
foregrounded, the regular use of technology both hardware and software,
has physical effects on who we are, on our sense of self. I focus upon
the intercorporeal and sociological aspect of user rather than the
cybernetic debate.#9 My basic premise is, if we consider that genuine
and meaningful communication with other humans is a necessary and
gratifying part of life, as computers begin to take the centre stage of
many of our daily lives (for those of us the metropoles), I emphasise
we may want to be aware of the consequences of the decisions that we
are (perhaps not) making, in our choice of OS as communication
apparatus.
If this combination is insupportable to some readers, pray let him/her
stick with my explanation, rather then we should part company here, as
I explain how the infusion of different fields of discourse can create
new ones. Opening up normally closed circuits can create a myriad of
new parameters, which may presage an emergent paradigm shift...
I write here as a *nix machine neophyte or _ newbie _ although for at
least a decade I have been involved with human machine interaction, for
example, inter-mixing dance theatre pieces with software for live
and/or online telematic performance situations, or circuit bending#10
electronic toys in punk bands to push the instruments into other
dimensions.#11 This could be called _hacking_ because I feel the need
to extend materials (and situations) beyond their particular given
limitations.#12 Usually this action is an improvised reaction that
unfolds itself as a sensual process and spontaneous desire rather than
a reverend discipline, so therefore I am not a geek#13. Probably, I do
not deserve define myself with the term _hacker_ since I did not
discover circuit logic in a sophisticated way, nor do I look for how
connections complete their loops in order to then break them or think
in terms of 'problems' that need to be solved. I usually just start
playing wasting a lot of time dreaming and aimless wandering, until
someone with that knowledge points out the fundamentals to me and then
I try and absorb the information whilst continuing in my own
idiosyncratic experiential manner.
I am enchanted when I look inside machines and I like to touch their
inner parts, I guess this stems from my childhood, as when someone
would turn the T.V off, I'd run to see if I could catch the people
leaving from behind, curious and mystified. According to Baudelaire
'This is the first metaphysical tendency', who in the 'Philosophy of
Toys' suggests 'In their games children give evidence of their great
capacity for abstraction and their high imaginative power.' I come from
a cultural tradition where personal creative practice is done for the
eventual benefit of society to maintain the prosperity and health of
all of the people, not just the atomised individual (your profession
here...) artist#14, or movement, so it is mainly in meaningful
collaborative contexts I find such acts profoundly thrilling.
Apart from the black box in the theatre, I did not ever expect there to
be another vessel deep enough to hold all these moments and
abstractions of experience and potential until I experienced the dark
magic space of the shell. However, first and foremost, I must claim I
find much of Linux geek rhetoric far from affable, my own conviction is
that such a revision in attitude carries concrete and far-reaching
implications beyond our understanding of the *nix operating system.
Calum Selkirk in a concise and elegant description of 'shell basics'
admits that 'These concepts are often difficult to grasp for someone
completely unfamiliar with programming.' He continues 'It is for this
reason I spend probably more time than is perhaps necessary explaining
them, often with the most simplistic of examples.'#15 Does this
explanation ensures to the reader they must be a moron if he/she should
not understand his detailed simple explanations of the command line
interface? No, apparently these are regular humorous antics of the
field, as hacker Eric Raymond reminds us, 'To do the unix philosophy
right, you have to value your own time never to waste it'.#16 A most
extreme case of tech-humor (or is that megalomania?) we can witness
here in an interview with Radia Perlman, an expert at networking
protocols and distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, tells us of
her stringent desire to abolish an intimate social custom that extends
back to 6th century BC; Frauenheim recounts
"Thinking about smart communication strategies is something that comes
naturally to Perlman. She even sees room for improvement in the way
people clink glasses during dinner toasts. 'That actually drives me
crazy', Perlman said, 'because it's an inefficient protocol'."#17
Steeped in superstition and self-preservation, a toast for many people
is a spontaneous and congenial tradition, which binds us to each other.
It is outrageous to overplay the intellectual aspect of collective
human experience, and define knowing as strictly a function of the
rules and categories appealing to the cognitive mind, to the exclusion
of sensory factors. The body is not a programmed machine but an active
and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and the
world. Moreover, Matthew Fuller states 'Free Software is too
internalist. The relation between its users and its developers is so
isomorphic that there is extreme difficulty in breaking out of that
productive but constricted circle.'#18 I advocate that geeks should
leave these structures of discourse behind them! Otherwise by now all
of the experiences with command line tools and all their responses in
the shell would already have been anticipated from the beginning,
already programmed, as it were into the initial Unix kernel.
What fascinates me is that for a significant amount of us, which is a
massive majority of world population who actually use computers, do not
even know there a spectrum of OS choices are even available! Let alone
about the GNU/Linux or free software foundation (FSF), which exists to
insist people should have the freedom to choose and modify the
technology they use in the way they see fit and not be restricted by
economics or reductive proprietary laws. If people are talking about
greatly enhancing our communication models, I suggest that users and/or
creators of free software, or *nix developers, who until now habitually
operate in isolation, need to appreciate different modes of being, in
order to share the potential of human development in regard to
embodiment, language, information and communication technologies. The
teleological attitude, conventions and the allocation of roles, of some
hardcore technocrats is intimidating and in regard to optimizing smart
communication strategies it seems rather disingenuous (and also a total
come down).
*The shell vs. terrestrial gravity, and inertia*
The rubric of GNU/Linux is a vista of permissive, open-ended medium as
the source code is free to be used, developed and extended.
Specifically, users of command line tools have endless variables,
executed by programmers, inhibited and impatient with the limitation of
the GUI. Martin Howse suggests
"Alternatively living coding at the command line; that horizontal
prompt proving a horizon for contemplation...And thus to the
application of a new discipline, expanded software; endophysical
interface and Alice in Wonderland. (another beginning marked)".#19
When I first discovered the power to delete the file in my OpenBSD
terminal that the OSX finder could not trash I felt was no longer a
prisoner inside my machine, only possessing knowledge of a GUI, I was
formerly stuck in a holding pattern. Using *nix you keep moving all the
time, discovering always new executable codes sensitive to commands.
In the shell I find a marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae,
interstellar gaps, awesome gullies, that provokes in me an
indescribable sense of vertigo, as if I am hanging from earth upside
down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still
holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment. An example
is /dev/null - a special *nix file where you pipe your unwanted data
flow through this output. When I first experienced viewing data
disappearing into this file, I immediately had an epiphany about the
black hole and how the theory of the event horizon might function in an
every day context.#20
Sondheim has a similar perspective on the abyss like nature of the
shell,
"2. The graphic interface opens to shells as well, and since the inter-
face devolves from a _blank screen,_ there is simultaneously
_potential_ (click anywhere on it) and absence (nothing visible),
reflecting upon the human operator / monitor interface as well"
The experiential in the *nix world is truly an unvalidated mode. I
believe that the meaning of life is to be uplifted, to be in a euphoric
state and make art that reflects this experience of traveling through
the manifold of time. All you need is humility and imagination for the
'baroque protocol' as Howse suggests;
"All patches, software encodings, algorithmic elaborations for either
space should prove readily extensible (in the codified realm, heavily
abstracted and based on message passing, in the social realm driven by
baroque protocol) and concerned with an extreme escalating overmapping
of expanded and reduced software domains. The problem states itself as
that of the practical and the experiment. Substance."
In the *spirit* of the awe inspired or amateur, a very particular
experiential learning aspect, and protocol is set in motion, especially
in the mode and register of collaborative communication when you
working at this level you have a massive advantage, not only do you
enjoy a certain level of freedom - when you don't *really* know what
you are doing - but you do things with tools that other people would
not do, whereas a professional attitude has all these constraints.
Ironically *nix experts or in general technocrats who have certain
defined methods and formulas, end up becoming completely unintelligible
to people in outside the Information *Communication* Technology
culture.
*Vessels of infinite veracity*
You seek for knowledge and wisdom as I once did; and I ardently hope
that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting
you, as mine has been.
- Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
Perception is precisely about this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange
between the body and the entities that surround it, and can be seen as
a form of 'expanded software script (human)' (Howse). Therefore, I am
curious in the development of the human form in regard to long-term
computer usage. Since we experience our world as fabric woven together
out of inextricable sensory threads, not as individual sensory media,
nor as individual data. Whatever account we give of experience not only
must take this synaesthetic motif into consideration, but also begin
with and from it. As Howse explains,
"On the other side, the human, and within a narrow context the meta,
the xxxxx/PLENUM experiment attempts a simultaneous overmapping of both
realms using operatic, logical and holographic technique dressed up in
the emperor's new clothes; the expanded software script (human)
translated into machine and meta-human-machine operation. We would
rather view interface in terms of a Gunter Brus incision than a
question of design and GUI."#21
When operating a computer we are connected to the machine by means of
our human body, including its movement and skills as well as the senses
and linguistic activity. As a Linux user we are a creator, engaged in a
dynamic, symbiotic dance with the computer. In _Matter and Memory_
Bergson confirms the process of affect with all that we encounter, he
writes,
“...we have to take into account the fact that our body is not a
mathematical point in space, that its virtual actions are complicated
by, and impregnated with real actions, or, in other words, that there
is no perception without affection. Affection is, then that part of
aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of
external bodies.”
From the perspective of the actual machine, Sondheim affirms the
uncanny nature of Linux referring to its physical like form,
"Beyond the traditional division of graphic user interface (GUI) and
text-based interface, the unix and linux system/s create a unique
environment problematising machine, boundary, surface, and structure."
Linux engages in a dimensional model, it leaks, each program is bound
up within the other. The vast amount of command line tools and *nix
concepts filenames, paths, wild cards, input and output redirection,
regular expressions apply to many different commands. The recurring
concepts seem to transcend most kinds of simple breakdown. As my
command line experience grows, I find myself returning to these. Slowly
I delve deeper into the possibilities, specific tasks and commands seem
more like membranes, because they define a surface of metamorphosis and
exchange. The entire system can be controlled and tweaked by the user,
in this sense; the OS has a subjective aesthetic by its very substance,
which blurs line between two self-contained realms of human and
machine.
This is why I advocate that the GNU/Linux shell is an OS in flux
responding to the output and needs of a living community, for the user
awareness is not locked up with in the density of a closed and bounded
object, the ability for the machine to extend itself to a network are
also open and indeterminate. Since change and transformation in every
aspect of human life is imminent, to such extent that life itself is
being transformed, as Loss Peque–o Glazier has remarked, 'The language
you are breathing becomes the language you think'.#22 As Howse expands
"The domain maps over the idea. The real. The idea of. Mapped by
multiple domains. A holographic style transform across domains/of
terms. Transform of idea/real/feedback."
This is the inter-corporeal level of using a networked computer, since
I even begin to experience myself in an expansive networked or
socio-centric sense rather than an individual egocentric sense. If the
human intellect rooted in, and borne by our contact with the multiple
shapes that surround us, what is the impact of the computer, that is
becoming more embedded in the daily lives, (at least for those of us
living in the metropolis), having upon our bodily membrane?
You need to approach the Linux OS as a continual learning process#23,
as such, (for the command line *nix user), you need to initiate the
system maintenance operations, it requires the constant need to monitor
and intimately understand the functioning of the machine. Under the
surface of the computer's interface, processes seethe with undiscovered
activity. Since an OS runs many daemons and services, many of these
processes merely wait for actions to occur - one example is a cupsd
process, which is a background daemon of the CUPS printing system. This
process waits for you to call it to work, it lies back stage in the
wings#24 just watching to see if it is needed, and this passive
activity that uses very little processor time or memory. But only the
linux command line will show you the actual parsing of these processes
and at least with my experience with the Gentoo distribution it will
not spoon feed the user informing them when updating their world needs
to be done.
Therefore I believe that the constant need to monitor and intimately
understand the functioning of the Linux machine also deepens our
kinesthetic awareness about our own anatomy, physiological and
kinesiology systems. Further, Hofstadter in _Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Brain_ recounts a moment when he was showing some
friends the PARRY program, when some of the OS information came up in
the terminal after a mistyped mistake, they asked 'why are you
overtyping what's on the screen?' in which he explains;
"The idea that ‘you’ know all about 'yourself' is so familiar from
interaction with people that is was natural to extend it to the
computer - after all, it was intelligent enough that it could 'talk' to
them in English! Their question was not unlike asking a person, “why
are you making so few red blood cells today? People do not know about
that level - the 'operating system level' - of their bodies.”
I propose that after prolonged use of Linux, people will begin to
develop more of sensitivity for their own need for inner maintenance
because of its labyrinthine architecture; this is “expanded software, a
timed response.” (Hawse) This information can be experienced as
dwelling within the body apparatus. Having awareness of our
inter-cellular processes leads to a change in physical experience, a
change in sensation.#25 No doubt from my experience experiential
movement techniques I am more open to this.#26 But what I am implying
is this is the sort of silent conversation that we carry on with things
with our proprioceptive facilities, a continuous dialogue that is a
proto-linguistic state, for instance, when the hand readily navigates
the space between the fingers and the keys on the computer.
With Linux I begin understand the processes and have an idea of the
most important processes and how to manage them, for example, with
"top" command I can get information on my system and its operations.
When Sondheim writes in point 4 in his tenants: ---
"Phenomenology of Linux / Unix -; --- 4. It is easy to assume that
source code is equivalent to bones and oper- able binaries to flesh; or
the kernel as fundament, and file structure as slough. I would rather
argue for a system of cubist plateaus of intersecting information
regimes, with vectors / commands operating among them. In this sense it
is information that is immanent within the operating system, not any
particular plateau-architecture."
An understanding of these processes will no doubt help me to
practically manage my Linux OS, but perhaps it also may help me relate
to my own physicality. After a while, I suspect I may find potential
problems that vampire my machines processing speed, run away processes,
broken sessions which never properly terminated and simultaneously
detect blockages in cell movement in my body - which slows down my
nervous systems ability to provoke or control the release of hormones
and in turn may diminish nerve impulses.
Understanding the internal micro choices and actions our automated
nervous system performs every moment of our living existence, is the
same as the instrumental process of learning tools, writing scripts for
managing programs and processes; getting information on process and
shutting down processes, just as there are kinetic techniques that are
often used for longevity. Neil Stephenson observes this complexity;
"Many Hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations
of the Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments...Thus Unix
has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind
complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a
tree, or the branching of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more
like anatomy than physics."
Delving deeply into the myriad tools available in Linux and exploring
possibilities of the entire file system, this concentration and
imagination can actually stimulate facilitate material, physical change
in the human body. I advocate this may have more benefits then just
powerful processor speed, script automation and multitasking. As it
seems at the moment, prevalent is a strange sort of vanity based on
identity, form and high end graphics, which is becoming more and more
removed from actual living human organism.#27
Perhaps over the years the long-term use of GUI's may see its end-users
becoming like the pathetic monster's of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein',
their walk staggering and jerky, their reach clumsy and inaccurate,
reflexes spasmodic; unaware of his labyrinthine space of the middle
ear, careening about the environment, every movement a source of danger
to himself and others. As regular computer users I fear we are losing
our ability to sense our own inner communication and physiological
processes and conject, using Linux OS might be a way to return to this.
So early in history Mary Shelley recognized this danger and predicted
the perils of the technological society and the GUI!
Perhaps her fiction was not about the easy Hollywood version of the
uncontrollable man made monster, I have a hunch that this great work
was about the horror of a human who didn't have the capacity for
imagine realms of abstraction or even their very own inner veracity.
The body I here speak of is very different from the objectified body
where the emphasis is on the Skeletal-muscular system, that complex
machine whose broken parts or stuck systems diagnosed by westernized
medical doctors. Underneath the anatomised and mechanical body that we
have learned to conceive, dwells the subjective body as it actually
experiences things, this poised vessel that initiates our projects and
suffers our passions.
*Protect me from what I want...?*
You said it, my good Knight! There ought to be laws to protect the body
of acquired knowledge. Take one of our good pupils, for example: modest
and diligent, from his earliest grammar classes he has kept a little
notebook full of phrases. After hanging on the lips of his teachers for
twenty years, he's managed to build up an intellectual stock in trade;
doesn't it belong to him as if it were a house, or money?
-Paul Claudel, Le soulier de satin, Day III, Scene II
If bodies are complex systems embedded in the environment, what does
this mean when we experience a saturation of media images on a dally
basis? In fact I often feel my communication has been so corrupted, to
that extent that I hardly ever watch television, yet its sound bites
have infiltrated my own speech. Here Stephenson makes a connection
between the mass media and the GUI;
"Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless
illusion -- a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it
really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not
just creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at:
and just as the command-line interface opens a much more direct and
explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with
words, writer, and reader."#28
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the most commonly used OS and for
most people perceived as an efficient and effective tool because of its
point and click interface. However according to Nielsen & Gentner if
people opt for the GUI it ultimately limits human communication and
even our ability to imagine the intangible,
"The see and point principal states that users interact with the
computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as
if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility
with expressive language, and have been reduced to point at objects in
the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a
vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the
power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not
immediately visible..."
Internalising enough of what seems inscrutable and cryptic commands
that can be used quickly at appropriate times, is indeed an arduous
initiation process; especially from the seemingly decadent but limiting
life of the GUI. In due time as in any learnt routine, working with the
command line, or so I am told, the keystrokes will become hardwired in
my fingers and I will learn to automate maintenance and do backup
commands with cron, or combine commands in hundreds of shell scripts.
The material limitations one faces in any instrumental process and
indeed when using the notoriously powerful *nix core, is certainly
unapproachable for most of us, especially when one encounters a black
hole when syncing and updating or then having to unemerge blocked
packages.#29
After about three years of listening to the multiple and vexed opinions
about what Linux distribution to actually use, in general most people
tried to protect me from installing Gentoo Linux, which arguably,
brings one closer to understanding the OS intimately, than most other
distributions (that is, apart from Linux-from-Scratch).#30 Eventually
the installation, even with experienced support people guiding me, felt
similar to that of a rite-of-passage. However, no learning is easy and
in fact it should be frustrating, as when things are frustrating, that
means we are learning - frustration is a necessary part of the learning
curve. As I have said, the operation of Linux is a continual process,
which, like most developmental patterns give rise to new situations
with each new stage of sensory information and language integration.
Although it is common that people now want things to be neatly packaged
with a snazzy logo and even we see that now education is catering to
the terms of economic rationalism than a deep pedagogical function,
Nielsen Gentner suggests the inevitability of computers in our daily
lives; ---
"Today's children will spend a large fraction of their lives
communicating with computers. We should think about the trade-offs
between ease of learning and power in computer-human interfaces. If
there were a compensating return in increased power, it would not be
unreasonable to expect a person to spend several years learning to
communicate with computers, just as now we expect children to spend 20
years mastering their native language."#31
What skills are OS users prepared to learn what contexts are they
prepared to situate themselves in, really? Indeed end-user alternatives
are easy to propose, but difficult to put in to practice, especially
when they are presented as natural but exist by forces of habit. Jef
Raskin writes
"GUIs have become so pervasive (or is it perversive?) that many
computer users can't even think about anything else as a human-computer
interface...But GUIs are modal from the get- go. Now that you've read
this you know that interfaces which are far less modal are possible,
but you should be warned they are habit-forming, even addictive. Start
to use them and you are hooked forever..."#32
The actual shifting of inertia that is entailed in asking people to
make perceptual shift, is first something we have to come to fully
understand and work through, Weber describes this resistance, “because
such fixed habits become, by virtue of their very fixity and hence
inflexibility, incapable of dealing with changing and infinitely
variable circumstances.” #33 I find it remarkable that there has been
hardly any research to the changes wrought by the massive use of
particular computer OS's, nor there has been consideration of the long
term impact and benefits for everyday usage.
In the wake of increased computational usage, it is important moment
for people to want to continue to actively reinvent language. Yet even
in spite of their severity, computer languages have caused a tremendous
creativity because there was, so far, no power to discipline them, as
Sondheim has noticed 'for some of us, linux _has_ changed the
language'. If I consider the paranoia and the will to fix forms by
software patent acts and extend this to the people who make their
source code protected by copyright laws and international treaty
provisions, it's clear that the compulsion for this finds its origin in
a very particular and limiting view of the world.
It is among other things, also handing over control to a fixed
conceptual discourse of the Law. However, language & code is not a
fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a
vast topological matrix in which our bodies are generative sites for
it. While individual speech acts are guided by the structured lattice
of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented
result of all previous acts of speech, and here we can see how Linux
code itself is altered by the very expressive activity it now guides.
As Harwood comments 'It seems software exists in some form of invisible
shadow world of procedure...Software is establishing models by which
things are done yet, like believing the objectivity of maps, we forget
that software is derived from certain cultural, historical and economic
trajectories.'#34 In _Code as Executable Text: Software Art and its
Focus on Program Code as Performative Text_, Inke Arns specifically
attributes code work to an economic class, 'These works use the poor
man's medium, text which also appears performative or executable in the
context of the command line.'#35 Language and implied rules and
protocols have always been principal instruments of the control process
and unrestricted creativity is considered to dangerous. According to
Clive Phillpot it is preventing any major social revolution and he
reminds us,
"There is no need to ban books since a significant percentage of the
population - usually the most deprived, who have the most to gain from
reading and changing the status quo- cannot read them. Instead we have
to try to ban pictures and music because even the illiterate people can
read pictures and
understand lyrics."#36
If we are to take real-life social stratification into consideration,
although it costs nothing, for the moment, code work and understanding
Linux is definitely not a _poor mans_ tool or _modus operandi_. *If you
make a mistake with a wildcard the consequences are serious...* The
embodiment process in Linux as relational and interactive Howse writes
'Code leaks both ways across a broken-world interface.' I hope it is
clear why I advocate for a revision of the discourse, since I believe
this knowledge is necessary to understand in order to extricate the
discussion of cognitive from the limitations inherent within this
presupposition of simply asking everyone to switch to command line
computing.
To have a noticeably wider participation in the new developments in
language influenced by Linux, is to be fully aware of the current
problems of this language and convinced of its extreme importance.
Ultimately the human capacity for reflection, planning and manipulation
of our environment brings the responsibility of choice, but first and
foremost we need to be open and inform people there is a choice. Above
all, it seems important to recognise differences within, as well as
beyond the borders of the Linux community or people will continue in
falling into corporate traps of people like Bill Gates' idea of what a
personal computer is, and Disney's limiting idea of the what
constitutes entertainment.
Furthermore, when source code is made available I think of it more as
having reverence for other people's work. To be able to acknowledge,
then copy that work or code and then try to understand how that person
thought and felt - but always bringing in my own idiosyncrasies and
vision to that, in the understanding that all these efforts are
related, and have a larger common purpose. We are always faced with the
problem of getting on with our own necessary process of self-discovery,
which for regular users of computers, this should also entail finding
out how their operating systems work discovering their internal system,
language and power.
Our ability to create, plan and code our environment makes us
responsible for what we create and for how we chose to live in that
creation. Since all of us are, always-already, living on the edge of
our own destruction, as Howse writes
"too much knowledge of programming we can see this clearly in
programming terms such as continuations, stack and, of course, memory.
Yet such simple facts bear repetition; past and future are inherent
within computation. The Turing tape moves backwards and forwards,
according to specific instructions on that tape. Aside from crash the
future of a computation is determined, even with human input within a
wider cybernetic equation explored under the rubric of the interface.
And finally, it's not for nothing that Turing and indeed the entire
field of computation is obsessed with the halting problem. When will it
end?"
Because I keep wondering what happens if these entire systems continue
to process even though basic human understanding has broken down?
*END NOTES*:
--- 1# Hereafter, I will refer to the computer operating system as OS.
--- 2# For the rest of the essay I specifically refer to Linux, one of
the many Unix operating systems. I also am a user of the terminal on
the Mac OSX based on Open BSD, so I talk from both perspectives.
Although both of these operating systems are different from Linux,
which is a kernel wrapped in one of the many distributions, there are
numerous similarities between Unix and Linux systems. For an account of
the genealogy of the Unix machine and its off springs of *nix
derivatives i.e. Linux, BSD 'An alternative history of *nix -
machine(s) = person(s) | dev/*nix' by Martin Hardie,
http://www.openflows.org/~auskadi/nix1.pdf
Linux is specific because it is not proprietary i.e. the source code is
made available for users to modify and extend upon. Finally, I am
required by Law to write *nix, instead of UNIX as Calum A. Selkirk
(2004) writes '...I used the term "*nix" to denote Unix, or more
precisely Unix-like operating systems, this is due to the fact that
"Unix" is a trademark, and as such can not be used in this way.
However, as the operating systems we are discussing owe their
historical roots to AT&T's "Unix", we will describe them generically as
"*nix".'
--- 3# Hereafter, I will refer Graphical User Interface/s as GUI/s.
--- 4# A description on the "GNU's Not Unix! - Free Software" GNU
General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.ht.ml
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0506/msg00042.html ---
For an example of some the FSF see: Free Software, the definition:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html and philosophy,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html;
"Free software is a matter of liberty not price...Free Software
Foundation, established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer
users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer
programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software,
particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux
variant. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues surrounding freedom
in the use of software". http://www.fsf.org
--- 5# Hardie, Martin (2005) _Time Machines and the Constitution of the
Globe_
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0506/msg00042.html
--- 6# A local example is when I went to the dentist and got my wisdom
tooth taken out, I wanted to keep it, since it had a large curl on the
root of the bone, like my curly hair, that I was curious about, but the
dental institute would not let me keep it due to sterilization laws. I
felt it was an infringement on my private body since I cultivated the
raw material myself who were they to keep and inscribe a law regarding
my own flesh!?...A more broader example of how artists (especially in
the USA) are vulnerable the PATRIOT Act which has made freedom of
speech questionable is discussed. For instance seen in the ongoing
debate about _Critical Art Ensemble_ who by simply communicating
corporeal experience in a performance installation settings, are
persecuted to be involved Bio-terrorist acts.
--- 7# The idea behind this is to safeguard the phenomenological moment
of
analysis whilst juxtaposing a Foucauldian genealogical perspective, for
a discussion of this in relation to Merleau-Ponty's work read
_Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture_,
G. Weiss and H.F. Haber (eds), Routledge, New York, 1999.
--- 8# Brennan, Karen (1994) The Geography of Enunciation: Hysterical
Pastiche in Kathy Ackers’s Fiction, in _Boundary 2; an international
Journal of Literature and Culture_. Summer 21:2, 243-68.
--- 9# For writings in this area see Hayles, N. Katherine, 2005. _My
Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts._ Chicago:
University of
Chicago Press.
--- 10# Circuit Bending is the creative implementation of audio
short-circuits.
--- 11# Most obvious way in Toydeath where I performed under the name
of s.g.ballerina, 'Picture a hyper band of aliens channeling through a
broken AM radio, and someone's playing with the speed control. But the
Hendrix-worthy feedback wails are actually the sirens of toy fire
engines. The spastic beats courtesy of model helicopters. Toydeath
proves that punk ain't
dead, it's just moved into the toy box.'
http://minorkeys.tripod.com/reviews.html
--- 12# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy
--- 13# I am involved in various projects that ascertain that when
women-centred activities are foregrounded, people usually expect me to
subscribe to the rules or often identify me with a geek, because some
of these focus on Free Software based workshops. However for me in
these projects I take visceral pleasure in exposing women to computers,
my desire is driven by sharing information to people who
don't get access to it or cannot afford it, and to those women do not
have the confidence or even think they deserve to learn anything
because
they were brought up in extra ordinary, challenging environments. See:
http://eclectictechcarnival.org; http://genderchangers.org;
http://sistero.sysx.org;
To see if you are a geek you need to take 'The Geek Test'
http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html---
--- 14# As opposed to physical conditioning disciplines that became
techniques to generate rules and exercises in order to produce
functional escalation in the army and finally in civil society.
--- 15# Calum A Selkirk, (2004) _Shell Basics.v1.1_
https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdma/staff/cselkirk/Documents/shell_basics.
pdf;
I want to confess that it has taken me 1.5 years to fully understand
this text. However, should my confession prove me low in intellect? I
am a graduate of the University of Sydney obtaining first class 1:1
honours, which placed me in the top 5% mark of Australian University
for the year 2000. I could not possibly have destroyed all my brain
cells since then, so this might then perhaps give some kind of
legitimate proof that I am considered, by not only by myself to possess
adequate mental ability. *The point I am trying to make is* -if I give
this text to a person who has never even heard of *nix, and only grew
up thinking Windows machines are available and was to be introduced to
the world of free software rhetoric they have no way to enter such
discourse.
--- 16# Eric S. Raymond (2003) 'The Art of Unix Programming'
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/
--- 17# Frauenheim, Ed and Gilbert, Alorie (2005) _Opening doors for
women in computing: Harvard president's comments re-ignite debate over
women in computer science, with reformers trying to reverse guy-centric
patterns_
http://news.com.com/Opening+doors+for+women+in+computing+-+page+2/2100
-1022_3-5557311-2.html?tag=st.num
--- 18# Matthew Fuller (2004) 'Behind the Blip, Essays on the Culture
of Software', Autonomedia: New York.
--- 19# Howse, Martin (2006) 'Version Control 1.6' in _[the] xxxxx
[reader]xxxxx_ OpenMute Print-on-demand services at http://openmute.org
--- 20# In response I made a /dev/null Doll see:
http://sistero.syx.org/dev/null/index.html
--- 21# PLENUM was a project in March 2006 as audience you are also
apart of an emerging expanded exchanged where the interaction via the
software is reflected during the dialogue itself.
http://kop.kein.org/plenum/html/documentation.html---
The software used was Pure Data, as Howse (2006) writes, 'We could begin
to unravel expanded software (the realm of PLENUM) using the example of
a network to be mapped within our software; mapping the connections of
Alice (in Wonderland, through the Looking Glass)...'
--- 22 #Glazier, Loss Peque–o (1997) 'Jumping to Occlusions' in_
Digital Poetics_
http:// epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/essays/occlusions/
--- 23# I first heard the concept 'operating system as process' in the
2006 Thematic Project Command line Culture at Piet Zwart Institute lead
by Florian Cramer.
--- 24# The Wings, an area of the stage not visible to the audience.
--- 25# The feeling of such change is then reported back to the central
nervous system by the proprioceptive apparatus. Nancy Udow (1977)
refers to psychological research studies by Washburn (1916) and
Schilder (1950) which, through "the use of electromagyograms and
electro encephelograms have shown the presence of muscular activity and
brain waves during a mental motor image which are similar to those
activities and waves during overt
movement". THEATRE PAPERS ARCHIVE (1977 - 1984) Dartington College of
Arts, UK.
http://www.spa.ex.ac.uk/drama/research/exeterdigitalarchives/main.html
--- 26# After much experimental research and training in a touch and
repatterning techniques learnt at the Institute for Somatic Movement
Studies I can access mine and other bodily cellular tone. The tone can
be explained in how the intercellular and extra cellular fluid is
flowing in and out of the cells membrane; this can be reflected at many
levels e.g. low (not enough intercellular fluid) high tone (too much
fluid inside the cell) of the organ.
http://www.somaticmovementstudies.org/
--- 27# Laurie Anderson also questions this strange phenomena.
http://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/media/list/commercial.page#media_65
--- 28# http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
--- 29# People may be familiar with other installation terms, this
description is specific to the Gentoo distribution.
http://www.gentoo.org/ Linux, which is a kernel wrapped in one of the
many distributions.
--- 30# http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
--- 31# Jakob Nielsen Gentner, The Anti-Mac Interface
http://www.acm.org/
pubs/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm
--- 32# Raskin, Jef (1993) _Down with GUIs!_
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_guis.htm
--- 33# Weber, Samuel. 1987. 'Texts/Contexts', in Institution and
Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 3-17.
--- 34# Harwood, Graham. Cartography and the Technologies of Location
http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?CartoTech (cited online at 12
December 2006)---
--- 35# http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/generative-tools/read_me/
--- 36# Phillpot, Clive (1991) Art, Anarchy and the Open Library, in
_Art Libraries Journal_ 4: 10. p.9
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