Concepts, Notations, Software, Art

Computer programs get locked into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist's comcepts. Given that software code is a conceptual notion, this is not without its own irony.

Cramer goes on to discuss the implcations of software as a method of art notion, which I think is fairly accurate. The comparison with Dada works is apt, however instead of thinking of software as strictly an instruction set, I tend to think of it as "potential art" in the sense that an object can have potential energy. The construction of executable code (or even pseudocode in some cases) provides a potentiality that I believe really becomes the crux of many works intentionally or otherwise. Cramer points out that it's possible to "execute" code without a machine at all by simply understanding instructions (and cites coding textbooks as an example), and in that sense it's not necessary to actually execute the code at all in many cases.

Also, I was happy to see the distinction between coding on "bare metal" (sans operating system or any high-level code) versus within a fully-realized development environment. While I don't think either is more valuable than the other, it's important to understand the differences, which I don't believe many people do from a technical standpoint. The fact is that much of what we think of as innovation when it comes to software is really the culmination in a very real way of many programmers who have come before. Software at the highest level (or even the catagory commonly known as "low level", which OpenGL would arguable fit into) is built upon a series of layers of code that feel archeological; They have depth both in relationship to their closeness to the machine but also in their age, as lower-level code tends to not be modified as frequently as high-level code.

Of course even at the machine's most basic level there had to have been someone (or more likely a series of people) who decided the most fundimental instruction set the machine would understand; Literally the "machine language" and those are the decisions that shape our lives more than we probably know.