Linux for Artists: Embodiment & nix modus operandi by Nancy Mauro-Flude (Part 1)
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 on-line telematic performance situations, or circuit bending (1) electronic toys in punk bands to push the instruments into other dimensions. (2) This could be called ‘hacking’ because I feel the need to extend materials (and situations) beyond their particular given limitations. (3) 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 (4). 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 (1853) '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 artist (5), 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 (2004) 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.’ (6) Does this explanation suggest to the reader that they are morons if they should not understand his detailed simple explanations of the command line interface? No - these are regular humorous antics of the field, as hacker Eric Raymond (2003) reminds us, 'To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to value your own time never to waste it.'(7)
A most extreme case of tech-humour (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 (2005) 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.''(8)
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 (2003) 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.' (9) 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. Why are users and/or developers of ‘nix etc, involved in totalising accounts of human interaction? - whereas we might have expected them to be more open-minded. 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 (2006) 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).’ (10)
When I first discovered the power to delete the file in my Open BSD 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. (11) Sondheim (1999) has a similar perspective on the abyss like nature of the shell: ‘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 a non-validated 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 (2006) 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 over-mapping 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 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, 1818)
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, 2006). 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 (2006) explains: ‘On the other side, the human, and within a narrow context the meta, the xxxxx/PLENUM experiment attempts a simultaneous over-mapping 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.’ (12)
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 or aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies' (1911: 38). From the perspective of the actual machine, Sondheim (1997) 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 file names, 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 should be approached an OS in flux responding to the output and needs of a living community, for if the user awareness is not locked up in the density of a closed and bounded object, the ability for the machine to extend itself to a network is also open and indeterminate. Hence, change and transformation in every aspect of human life is imminent, to such extent that life itself is being transformed. As Loss Pequeno Glazier (1997) has remarked, ‘The language you are breathing becomes the language you think.’ (13) 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 is 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 our daily lives, having upon our bodily membrane?
Delving deeply into the myriad tools available in Linux and exploring possibilities of the entire file system, this concentration and imagination can actually stimulate and 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 more and more removed from actual living human organism. (14)
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 speculation; 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 to 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 westernised medical doctors. Underneath the anatomized 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.
Notes
1. Circuit Bending is the creative implementation of audio short-circuits.
2. Most obvious way in through Toydeath where I performed under the name of s.g.ballerina, 'Picture a hyper band of aliens channelling 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
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy
4. I am involved in various projects that ascertain that when women centred activities are fore-grounded, 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. 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; To see if you are a geek you need to take 'The Geek Test' http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html---
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Eric S. Raymond (2003) 'The Art of Unix Programming' http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/
8. 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
9. Matthew Fuller (2004) 'Behind the Blip, Essays on the Culture of Software', Autonomedia:New York.
10. Howse, Martin (2006) 'Version Control 1.6' in _[the] xxxxx [reader]xxxxx_ OpenMute Print-on-demand services at http://openmute.org
11. In response I made a /dev/null Doll see: http://sistero.org/devnull/doll/
12. 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)...'
13. Glazier, Loss Pequeo (1997) 'Jumping to Occlusions' in ‘Digital Poetics’ http:// epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/essays/occlusions/
14. Laurie Anderson also questions this strange phenomenon. http://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/media/list/commercial.page#media_65
Nancy Mauro-Flude is an artist working with experimental media. Her practice revolves around the combinations of performance, bricolage, metaphysics and GNU/Linux. To view her art go to http://www.sistero.org/