At the risk of stating the obvious, perhaps the problem here is that there is no one essence of this performance, or any performance for that matter. While you do say "a single 'essence'", and not "the", to me a major part of the very idea of performance is to create something which is in excess of language and representation, something which the techne of words or photo or video don't capture, much less a few lines of code. While I think the notion of translating a performance into code is interesting, perhaps what this discussion precisely raises is that there are a multiplicity of essences, dirtiness, fantasy, masturbation, soreness, mystery, discomfort, the body, the absence of the body... Your microcodes seem to be a sort of review or remix of another work, based on your personal interpretation. In fact, I think that the reduction of the body to a set of files in your home directory is in itself an abjection and a sadness, a departure from all the rich, sensual complexity of the body and a reduction to a few digital bytes. Perhaps the sadness of the digital is expressed very well here.
>> Pall Thayer wrote:I guess by "the essence" of the work, I'm >> considering the absolute minimum that it takes to bring to mind >> "Seedbed" when looking at the code. Hmm, but here is sounds like you're talking about a simlpe representation, and I think being very reductive! Wouldn't the absolute minimum be something like #!/usr/bin/perl $p = `seedbed`; ? When in fact, the interesting part is to go beyond simply bringing the performance to mind, but as the furtherfield review writes, to bring it to life, to enact it, to redo it, to reperform it, in the form of an actual running program? >>>>>> On 2/7/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>>> Hi Paul, >>>>>>> >>>>>>> The essence it seemed to me wasn't self-referentiality or touch >>>>>>> (good >>>>>>> unix >>>>>>> command too), so much as it was about targeting the ab/use/er, as >>>>>>> well >>>>>>> as >>>>>>> dirtiness. And code's always clean; even dirty code's clean, so >>>>>>> there's >>>>>>> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Hi Alan, >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> One of the primary reasons that I've "redone" a number of known >>>>>>>> pieces >>>>>>>> by other artists in these Microcodes is more to point out the >>>>>>>> difference between code as a medium and other media. So the point >>>>>>>> isn't necessarily to emulate the work as closely as possible but >>>>>>>> rather to capture a single "essence" of it in very compact code. I >>>>>>>> think that trying to work the incline and fantasies into this >>>>>>>> "version" of the work would result in considerably more code which >>>>>>>> would in turn make the work overly complex. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
