Fun and Software
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Fun and Software Fun and Software Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing Edited by Olga Goriunova Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Olga Goriunova and contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6094-2 ePub: 978-1-6235-6756-9 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6887-0 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction Olga Goriunova 1 1 Technology, Logistics and Logic: Rethinking the Problem of Fun in Software Andrew Goffey 21 2 Bend Sinister: Monstrosity and Normative Effect in Computational Practice Simon Yuill 41 3 Always One Bit More, Computing and the Experience of Ambiguity Matthew Fuller 91 4 Do Algorithms Have Fun? On Completion, Indeterminacy and Autonomy in Computation Luciana Parisi and M. Beatrice Fazi 109 5 useR!: Aggression, Alterity and Unbound Affects in Statistical Programming Adrian Mackenzie 129 6 Do (not) Repeat Yourself Michael Murtaugh 145 7 Not Just for Fun Geoff Cox and Alex McLean 157 8 Fun is a Battlefield: Software between Enjoyment and Obsession Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison 175 9 Monopoly and the Logic of Sensation in Spacewar! Christian Ulrik Andersen 197 10 Human-computer Interaction, a Sci-fi Discipline? Brigitte Kaltenbacher 213 11 A Fun Aesthetic and Art Annet Dekker 233 12 Material Imagination: On the Avant-gardes, Time and Computation Olga Goriunova 253 Notes on Contributors 275 Index 279 Acknowledgements This book grew out of an eponymous travelling exhibition that took place at Arnolfini, Bristol, UK and MU, Eindhoven, the Netherlands in autumn 2010 – winter 2011. The exhibition had a slightly different composition in each country and was funded, respectively, by Arnolfini and MU (from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science (OCW), City of Eindhoven and the Province of North-Brabant), Baltan Laboratories, SNS Reaal, VSBFonds and Netherlands Media Art Institute. Many thanks to all the artists who took part. I would have never been able to curate these shows were it not for Geoff Cox, who initially suggested doing something at Arnolfini, and Annet Dekker and Annette Wolfsberger (at aaaanet.net) who put so much energy, dedication and fundraising and organizing efforts into the show that they made it happen. Many thanks to them and to the directors and staff at Arnolfini, MU and Baltan. In November 2010, Baltan Laboratories hosted and, together with MU and STRP festival, funded a one-day conference, where many authors of this volume came together and tested their ideas of fun on each other. This helped shape the book. Having taken part in the software art scene, the work of software artists and close colleagues of mine from the times of Runme.org has influenced this project: thank you to Amy Alexander, Alex McLean, Alexei Shulgin and the many other people who made software art and digital art such exciting practices. Readme festivals contributed to the aesthetic exploration of computation, and the project Textension by Joshua Nimoy (1999), which won one of the prizes at the first Readme 2002 in Moscow, served as an inspiration for the cover of this book. Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Graham Harwood and Adrian Mackenzie at Computational Culture journal help make the field of software studies vivid and open. Thanks to them for inspiration and dialogue. I received generous comments and suggestions on this book from Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, Nathaniel Tkacz and numerous now unnamable people that responded wherever I spoke about it. Thanks to all of them. My mother’s admiration of Knuth imbued me with an early sensibility for fun in programming. This is for Nikolai, who has intrinsic understanding that computation is fun. Introduction Olga Goriunova Darling sweetheart You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully M. U. C.1 In 1949, when the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first computers, was manufac- tured for Manchester University, Christopher Strachey was a school teacher. He received the computer’s manual from his former university friend Alan Turing, and began the activity for which he was later proclaimed one of the originators: programming. Strachey created an algorithm that would enable the computer to play draughts (checkers): he wrote the program on paper and was given access to MUC (Manchester University Computer) for one night only, to load the program onto the machine and try running it. In the morning, when staff returned, MUC was playing draughts.2 Strachey sent his programme for punching beforehand. The programme was about 20 pages long (over a thousand instructions), and the naivety of a first- time user attempting a programme of such length caused not a little amusement among the programmers in the laboratory. Anyway, the day came and Strachey loaded his programme into the Mark I. After a couple of errors were fixed, the programme ran straight through and finished by playing ‘God Save the King’ on the ‘hooter’ (loudspeaker). On that day Strachey acquired a formidable reputation as a programmer that he never lost.3 On the basis of this project, he acquired a job in the Computer Department of Manchester University, where he worked alongside Alan Turing, and proceeded, in 1952, to write the Love Letter Generator, an ephemeral, even flippant, poetic 2 Fun and Software program that can be retrospectively seen as one of the first text-generating algorithms.4 When David Link, an artist who reconstructed the Love Letter Generator in an eponymous art project, was giving a talk to the Computer Conservation Society in London about the hurdles of the process, including trying to read the program in faded pencil on the few papers archived in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and locating the remaining original switches from the operation console, a member of the audience stood up. This gentleman said that he had been a student at Manchester University in the period discussed and remem- bered seeing nonsensical love-letters printed out on paper stuck to the walls. He went on to say that he and fellow students would never have thought that their ‘Gods’, such as Turing and Strachey, might have engaged in such a nonsensical activity. This example provides an easy route into one scale of the concept of fun that this book proposes. The fun that most readily comes to the fore here is that which we are most aware of, the fun of ‘geekiness’, wit, the humour and extravagance of mathematical geniuses and their material processes of thinking and making. Humour comes before pragmatic application and, as things are being developed and tried out, it forms a part and serves as material of thought. Such fun, programmers’ humour, can be seen as related to the culture of the humour of the exact sciences, where, for instance, in the Russian and Soviet reverence for mathematics and physics, books such as Physicists Joke became national bestsellers in the 1960s.5 Humour here is indicative of the pleasure of breakthrough, of thought experimentation, of unconstrained and purposeless but intense and curious and materially specific enquiry.6 Many a Soviet child, including me, from as early as they could remember, heard tales about their parents’ attempts to pass Mathematical Analysis and had their bookshelves lined with the volumes of Mathematics Can Be Fun and Physics for Entertainment. Yakov Perelman, a great Russian popularizer of the sciences, published the latter in 1913. Perhaps the first thing to do to advance the idea of fun discussed here is to imagine that fun of physics, algebra, geometry, of a pre-World-Wars era. Fun is a problematic word, requiring qualification or defence as soon as it is introduced, as it readily connects both to the complex machinery of exploitation through creative enjoyment and to stupefaction through consumption. But it is also a word that cannot be avoided, which unites pleasure and wit with affective engagement, conceptual, social and cultural practices and vivid, disturbing and inventive modes of thinking and making. Introduction 3 When manifest in particular hacker performances and objects, fun may come in the guise of wit, becoming a game of intellect where it can be operative as an ‘intelligence test’. The ways in which humour and technical ability are deeply interconnected in hacker cultures can be interpreted as almost a struc- tural similarity between a mode of thought imbued with a good sense of wit and technical or mathematical proficiency. Expressions of wit are judged on the economic scale: Freud in particular used economic thinking to judge wit, where the most successful joke relies on scarce means to achieve the richest outcome. There is a direct connection here to ‘coding elegance’7 and ‘the art of computer programming’.8 Wit can become a skill, a training program and a grading tool to teach, learn, progress in and evaluate hacking.9 It is important that clever tricks and elegance are not the same: Dijkstra especially warned against a culture of ‘clever tricks’, asking for discipline and humbleness.10 Fun does not equate to intellectual superiority and perfection.