TITLE: Strange Loop 3: David Schmüdde and the Art of Misuse
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 30, 2018 6:40 PM
DESC:
-----
BODY:
This talk, the first of the afternoon on Day 1, opened with a
familiar image: René Magritte's
"this is not a pipe" painting,
next to a picture of an actual pipe from some e-commerce site.
Throughout the talk, speaker David Schmüdde returned to the
distinction between thing and referent as he looked at the
phenomenon of software users who used -- misused --
software to do something other than intended by the designer.
The things they did were, or became, art.
First, a disclaimer: David is a former student of mine, now a friend,
and one of my favorite people in the world. I still have in my music
carousel a CD labeled "Schmudde Music!!" that he made for me just
before he graduated and headed off to a master's program in music at
Northwestern.
I often say in my conference reports that I can't do a talk justice
in a blog entry, but it's even more true of a talk such as this one.
Schmüdde demonstrated multiple works of art, both static and
dynamic, which created a vibe that loses most of its zing when
linearized in text. So I'll limit myself here to a few stray
observations and impressions from the talk, hoping that you'll be
intrigued enough to watch the video when it's posted.
Art is a technological endeavor. Rembrandt and hip hop don't
exist without advances in art-making technology.
Misuse can be a form of creative experimentation. Check out
Jodi,
a website created in 1995 and still available. In the browser,
it seems to be a work of ASCII art, but show the page source...
(That's a lot harder these days than it was in 1995.) Now that
is ASCII art.
Schmüdde talked about another work of from the same era,
entitled Rain. It used slowness -- of the network, of the browser
-- as a feature. Old HTML (or was it a bug in an old version of
Netscape Navigator?) allowed one HEAD tag in a file with multiple
BODY tags. The artist created such a document that, when loaded
in sequence, gave the appearance of rain falling in the browser.
Misusing the tools under the conditions of the day enabled the
artist to create an animation before animated GIFs, Flash, and
other forms of animation existed.
The talk followed with examples and demos of other forms of software
misuse, which could:
- find bugs in a system
- lead to new system features
- illuminate a system in ways not anticipated by the software's
creator
Schmüdde wondered, when we fix bugs in this way, do we make
the resulting system, or the resulting interaction, less human?
Accidental misuse is life. We expect it. Intentional misuse is,
or can be, art. It can surprise us.
What does art preservation look like for these works? The original
hardware and software systems often are obsolete or, more likely,
gone. To me, this is one of the great things about computers: we
can simulate just about anything. Digital art preservation becomes
a matter of simulating the systems or interactions that existed at
the time the art was created. We are back to Magritte's pipe...
This is not a work of art; it is a pointer to a work of art.
It is, of course, harder to recreate the experience of the art
from the time it was created, but isn't this true of all art?
Each of us experiences a work of art anew each time we encounter
it. Our experience is never the same as the experience of those
who were present when the work was first unveiled. It's often
not even the same experience we ourselves had yesterday.
Schmüdde closed with a gentle plea to the technologists in
the room to allow more art into their process. This is a new
talk, and he was a little concerned about his ending. He may
find a less abrupt way to end in the future, but to be honest,
I though what he did this time worked well enough for the day.
Even taking my friendship with the speaker into account, this was
the talk of the conference for me. It blended software, users,
technology, ideas, programming, art, the making of things, and
exploring software at its margins. These ideas may appear at the
margin, but they often lie at the core of the work. And even
when they don't, they surprise us or delight us or make us think.
This talk was a solid example of what makes Strange Loop a great
conference every year. There were a couple of other talks this
year that gave me a similar vibe, for example, Hannah Davis's
"Generating Music..." talk on
Day 1
and Ashley Williams's "A Tale of Two asyncs" talk on
Day 2.
The conference delivers top-notch technical content but also
invites speakers who use technology, and explore its development,
in ways that go beyond what you find in most CS classrooms.
For me, Day One of the conference ended better than most: over a
beer with David at
Flannery's
with good conversation, both about ideas from his talk and about
old times, families, and the future. A good day.
-----