Code as an attitude

Code as an attitude
http://www.m9ndfukc.com/

For years I’ve been getting e-mails from a mysterious person. They don’t come to me personally, but to those lists that deal with net.art (all of them), which I am on, too. Several come every day.

This mysterious person is first called =cw4t7abs, then antiorp, after that integer, later typedmess, a9ff, f1f0, and recently Netochka Nezvanova. It is not difficult to realise that this is all the same person, as the form of the e-mails are easily identifiable. They look just like a corrupt file, one that had been ok but now is not. Raw code. Like this:

m9ndfukc.macht.fre!. > > > - | | - - | | - > fr2ktur | | - - | | - > - | | - - | | - > > > >cxxxorrupt!on ov !dent!t! > > > > 3rr0r.h0rr0r \ > > eternal m!sc!ble surfasz > >

Things like this really liberate me, but I know people who are enslaved by it. I respect the original language. Especially if it is organised at a level like Netochka’s: http://195.163.114.73/7-11/cw4t7abs.asp Not to even mention that there are always some thought provoking fragments. Corrupt identity, error-horror. But what is it that liberates me?

More than a thousand e-mails in three years. I’ve got this many because I’m deep into it now. I started to read them. To be more precise, I had a glance at them, clicked at them a bit, I made a folder for them on my hard drive. S/he stole his/her way into my machine. And slowly I learnt a load of things.

First I had a look at his/her site on the net, http://www.m9ndfukc.com/. To be more precise, sites, because there are quite a few besides this one. Brilliant deconstruction, A1 quality. Intelligent, cool coding, a refined reorganisation of the digital landscape. The illusionist face of the World Wide Web is getting scratched, and fragments of code are looking out of the cracks. Cyberpunk de luxe.

A special, nice touch is the geographical deconstruction. You can only guess at the author’s nationality. There is data that suggests Danish, but there are also Serbian and even New Zealand versions in existence. Well the world of dotcom and dotorg does have this advantage. Incognito, identity game. An individual and collective identity. Institution and pseudo institution. Institution art. A complete burst of effort against the “Internet corporate fascism” that floods the net. In a scruffy cloak of code, elegantly articulated, intelligently reasoned.

Then I understood, the cloak of code is just the surface. The operation is much more radical. Netochka develops software under the modular names nebula/m81, and NATO.0+55+3d, on the Macintosh platform, in a Max environment. My interest increased until it turned out: this is just an instrument. S/he composes music with it, industrial music. This is a genre that Giorgo Soós, the Art Deco front man, in the eighties justifiably christened as strict music. Then I listened to the music that is mixed by this self-produced software. Really great. Strict and righteous. Industrial music spiced with dynamic, ethereal harmonics. Its basic material is the net, although I only got to know this through the descriptions. Anyway you can read a lot of exuberant articles about it in specialist spheres. It has been proven, the crown is the operation of the software. nebula/m81 changes any html code you can find on the net into sound and pictures, which the user can change further by changing certain parameters. Net, game, ether, now more than a kilomether.

And the gender deconstruction widens the picture with further dimensions. I still haven’t been able to determine what sex Antiorp is on the basis of the e-mails. But it’s not as if it was supremely important anyway, as one of the sexy things about the net is that a lot of the time you don’t know where you’re at from a gender aspect, but still. For a long time I thought he was a man, as his music, standpoint seems to be a masculine attitude. Sharing thoughts on the technology-specific mailing lists. Errorising different net communities with e-mail bombs (once angrily banned from nettime). Programming your own instrument. Making industrial music from the net. Good sport, Man at Work.

But when s/he started using the name Netochka I became suspicious. Although this doesn’t mean anything, we are used to it now, I thought, á`la rRose Selavy. But now that s/he won the Berlin Transmediale artistic software prize, it turned out that she is a woman. But this still isn’t for sure, as the woman arriving to take the prize was the representative of Netochka Nezvanova. Great incognito, identity corruption. Maybe I’ll follow the example, too. Who’ll be my ambassador?

http://www.god-emil.dk/=cw4t7abs/punkt-||_protokol/punkt-||_protokol.html
http://www.god-emil.dk/=cw4t7abs/krop3rom/krop3rom-||_a9ff.html
http://m9ndfukc.com/b6c98/zekuensz/1.gif.hTmL
http://m9ndfukc.com/dir_seq/aLphanumer1kl/

translation: Iain Coulthard