From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: Re: <nettime> Linux wins Prix Ars due to MICROSOFT INTERVENTION
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 03:29:33 -0400

I just wrote a long reply which got lost. I want to say only briefly:
1. I know a lot of mathematicians, physicists, programmers, who see there
work as art and aesthetics; I don't draw these boundaries at all, which I
think are damaging.
2. Throwing stalinist socialist realism whatever around because I think
linux is an art or artwork/s, or artflux, say, is absurd and damaging to
any discourse, and reflective of more boundaries.
3. I accept and work with programming languages as languages which are
highly performative, with the program as parole-in-transition to a second
parole, which is the output; this is not that different from thinking of
natural languages (which do not imply consciousness, at least human con-
sciousness, unless one assumes animal's can't manipulate signs or are
blindly instinctual) which reference various intermediary (pausological
for instance) structures on the way to parole; I wouldn't say they're meta
at all but doubly or triply encoded.
4. It's unclear that linux is a language per se, but it is certainly an
articulated or linked accumulation of languagings - which are processes -
just like language and speech production and reception are processes -

So I just can't narrow these things down, Microsoft notwithstanding - and
for that matter, we're all under the sign of capital, you, me, nettime,
thing.net, etc., all of whom utilize computers, routers, wires, satellites
which are part of a transnational infrastructure; if anything, the GNU
operative at least brings that to the surface, and without reference to
the old soc-real of the old USSR -

Alan

Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm


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