Catalog essay for SoftSide: a selection of projects from runme.org Exhibition at Sonar a la Carte, Sonar 2004, Barcelona http://www.sonar.es/2004/eng/sonarcarta.cfm ---------------------------------------------- The field known as "software art" has been around under this name for a few years now. And it seems that each time someone introduces an exhibition of software art, there's some expectation to provide a definition. So the definitions by now are many, and maybe none are completely satisfactory. That's probably a good thing, since software art tends to be characterized by a questioning of software: its position in contemporary culture, its relationship to humans, and the rigid infallibility with which it often tries to push us around. So maybe a rigid, infallible definition just isn't appropriate. That said, the projects in this exhibition question software in a variety of ways. Some of the projects were intended as art projects by their authors from the outset; others were made by hackers and other computer aficianados as an amusing way to get the computer to behave in ways it "shouldn't." In some cases, software is the focus of the project; in others, software is used in an unconventional way to address another topic. Discomus reveals a simple surpise - that a computer's seemingly utilitarian floppy disk drive can play a Russian folk song. Tempest for Eliza also reveals a computer's musical talents - this time by using a radio to "observe" electromagnetic waves emitted by the monitor as music, in an amusing reference to US government programs concerned with espionage through similar methods of observation. iSee's confrontation with Big Brother is more concrete: modelled after commercial mapping software such as MapQuest, it allows you to map a route through Manhattan with the fewest surveillance cameras. Retroyou NostalG twists the idea of control in video games literally and figuratively - the navigation devices and aerodynamic controls on an existing flight simulator are corrupted as you try to fly the plane anyway. Pixel Computer confronts the process of software programming, blurring the line between user and programmer and demonstrating that instead of typing lines of text, programming could also be a matter of playing with colorful images. Movie Mincer plays with our relationship to technologies - old and new - by using an old Soviet-era mincer to hand crank through digital versions of early films. And Visual Poetry looks at our collective visual imagination as ranked and filtered through Google - poetically illustrating what happens when human and computer minds try to negotiate an accord on mental imagery. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but which thousand they should be remains open to speculation. Have fun with your computer. -Amy Alexander June '04