Fix My Code
Breaking points between code and culture – exemplified by the net.art generator. Starting with a broken tool two artists engage in a thrilling dialogue about code, the aesthetics of the dysfunctional and the female coder as the lasting exception
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The net.art generator is a computer program that collects and recombines material from the internet to create new images. In the course of the 20 years of its existence, it not only became a classic of net.art, but alongside the images, also generated a number of discourses – not the least in the context of copyright and open source. Its most recent disruption has been related to a change in search engine politics. Relying on a Google interface, the program cannot do its job properly anymore and has to permanently frustrate its users, since the giant requires payment for its services.
The inventor of the net.art generator, Cornelia Sollfrank, engages in a dialogue with the programmer, artist and researcher Winnie Soon to discuss the question of “What is to be done?”. They take us on a journey into the eventful past of the project, they descend into the level of computer code exploring the value of the breaking points, and speculate on a less evil future.
Once more, the net.art generator lives up to its reputation! It is a playful tool to create fancy images, but, beyond that, it remains a conceptual tool that helps to comprehend the complexity of post-digital culture by revealing some of the hidden and invisible structures that make our daily lives work, especially when they break down.
Published with the support of Aarhus University Research Foundation
Winnie Soon
Winnie Soon (PhD) is an artist-researcher-coder-educator who was born and raised in Hong Kong. She/They is/are interested in queering the intersections of technical and artistic practices as a critical/feminist/queer praxis, with works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books.
Winnie is co-initiator of code & share [], and a core member of Critical Software Thing Collective. Researching in the areas of software studies and computational practices, she/they is/are currently based in Denmark and working as Associate Professor at Aarhus University. More info at: siusoon.net
Cornelia Sollfrank
Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD) is an artist, researcher and university lecturer who is based in Berlin. Recurring subjects in her artistic work in and about digital media and network culture are new forms of (political) organization, authorship and intellectual property, gender and techno-feminism.
She was co-founder of the collectives frauen•und•technik (women and technology), -Innen and Old Boys Network and currently does research at Zürich University of the Arts in the field of art&commons. More info at: artwarez.org
Text: Cornelia Sollfrank, Winnie Soon
Infographic: Camila Coutinho
Design: Janine Sack
English
Approx. 180 pages, 60 illustrations, code snippets, 2 videos
epub (35 MB)
January 2021
ISBN 978-3-947295-49-4
0 Euro
Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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