Tuesday, November 07, 2006
And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked
In print writing, the text is eminently there. Whether clear or ambiguous, literary or profane, original or derivative, explicative or self-conscious, the text is perfectly and completely accessible. The reader and other artists are free (within legal constraints) to do with it as they see fit. They can adopt its stylistic conventions. (Shortly after Giacomo da Lentini wrote the first Italian sonnet, someone else advantaged themselves of the form. It skipped across the English Channel, eventually making its way to America to reach its expressive pinnacle in John Peale Bishop.) They can quote it. They can allude to it. They can parody it. They can extract new essentials from it and parlay those into new, entirely different texts. They can usurp its accidents, welding them to their own forms and message. They can ignore it.
The point is that in legacy writing, the text is always there, which is often not so with e-writing. Of the 60 pieces included in the Electronic Literature Organization’s recent Electronic Literature Collection: Volume I, only a very few include source code, and several of those are Java Script files, client-side scripts that must be available to the browser. This is the proprietary-code mindset that seeks to increase developer value via secrecy, in effect a declaration that I know how to write a program that will do this, but you don’t. Showing you my code, means that you will. Since my worth is wrapped up in the ingenuity and cunning cleverness of my code—giving you access to it would diminish my value relative to yours—something I dare not allow. All of which is a vain attempt to hold on to what software makes impossible: The presence of the original.
Jim Andrews gets it. In his ELC artist statement regarding his contribution Nio, he says, “I decided to release the Nio source code for various reasons. It furthers the art of interactive audio more to release it than not to release it, and if people use the code, it increases my value as a programmer and artist, as long as I am credited in your project publicly, which I request of you, and as long as your project works really well and people like it. So please make your project really good.”
Indeed.
# posted by Jim @ 11:31 AM 
