Singing Website Wallpaper (2007) — A Web Driven Installation with Wallpaper and Sound by Ursula Endlicher — gives voice to html by re-interpreting code as a musical score and by visualizing the musical scales as printed patterns on wallpaper. While the sound component of the installation is influenced by the actual “flow” of activity on yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com, the wallpaper pattern is inspired by the “frozen” source code from each site translated into a visual set of functionality-related symbols.

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“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance :: 29 January - 2 February 2008 :: Club Transmediale ::Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin.

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance presents a series of constructivist workshops specially programmed for the ClubTransmediale 2008 festival, emphasising making and connection within the field of the existent. Workshops are led by international, field-expert practitioners, extending over realms of environmental code, noise, signal transmission, reception, and electromysticism. The workshops will utilise household materials and chemistry, readily-available electronics components, free software and the GNU toolbase. Continue reading