Coded Secrets: Artistic Interventions Hidden in the Digital Fabric

Introduction

What lies beneath the surface of computational artworks? Online pieces have ‘roots’ that extend much deeper than the flat screen monitors on which we view them – they may even be distributed, occupying multiple sites on the Internet. Nobody has ever been able to see the responsive and connective agency of these works with their own eyes. COSE sets out to reveal the inner workings of code-based artworks, as well as their embeddedness in the various niches of the World Wide Web. Shedding light on this black box will enable us to gain a fuller appreciation of these artworks and empower scholars in the humanities as they begin to confront programmed works, providing analytical instruments and a general understanding of our media-technological condition.

Artistic Pieces Under Analysis

The artistic pieces under analysis are all hidden, concealed, or somehow withdrawn due to the networked situation into which they were inserted. As art historians prefer to dedicate themselves to the surface features, they tend to overlook such works or ignore important aspects of their design, including:

• Codes
• Files
• Software performance

As these interventions operate in non-standard locations, they implicitly highlight the circumstances where artists saw opportunities to critically exploit the specifics of the net in order to post a message. COSE will offer a new view of the Internet through the lens of these artworks that reclaim the right to productively diversify Internet access and usage.

Methodology

In order to uncover these much-neglected aspects, an interdisciplinary team will complement art historical methods with approaches from:

1. Media studies
2. Game studies
3. Code studies
4. Software forensics
5. Visual design

Taking the artworks as the starting point, the Internet will be presented as a complex of activated affordances rather than as yet another node-graph-diagram. COSE will develop an original pictorial language to generate immersive views into the specific ‘machine rooms’ of the artworks and their ecosystems as a processual deep topology.