Scan | Journal of Media Arts Culture
Volume 10 Number 2 2013

CODE: The Exhibition

Dean Keep and Laura Crawford

The CODE exhibition, ran in association with CODE: A Media, Games & Art Conference, held 21-23 November 2013 at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia, represented an offering of contemporary digital works produced by national and international media artists, researchers and academics.

Code breathes beneath the skin of creative gestures, operating as if by stealth in the guise of diverse media forms, including audio/visual performances, code and software art, mobile apps, and online interactive projects. The CODE exhibition is a small sample of the transformative and experimental nature of creative practice and practice-led research that is currently being produced within the contemporary mediascape.

Opening the proceedings, photographer and sound artist Todd Anderson-Kunert’s improvised performance Untitled audiovisual performance (one), transformed the exhibition space into a sonic landscape. Using an array of digital audio devices and audio samples, the artist constructed a wall of sound, each audio signal causing a projected grey-scale image to animate and distort. Pixels were laid bare as the projected image disintegrated before our eyes, taking on the appearance of rubble in a war zone. Anderson-Kunert’s blending of the photographic and experimental sound is raw and physical. Sound waves bombard the auditorium, penetrating our bodies; we too are instruments in this coded performance. And just when you think your body will disintegrate into tiny digital artefacts, the attack subsides then decays. In the aftermath, you are no longer sure of your whereabouts; exactly what the artist had in mind all along. It feels good.

Cool Beats and Timely Accents , an online postmodern cocktail hour conjured up by semiotic swingers Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye, explored the social and cultural codes embedded in classic record covers from the sixties and beyond. With titles like Springtime for Kittler and Notes on Camp, Tofts and Gye perform a ‘semiotic rewiring’, drawing reference from media theorists and popular culture as they remix and reimagine the text and visual cues of these ‘golden oldies’ to create a series of subverted classics for the now generation.

Music is also on the mind of artist Jeff Thompson, who has a particular interest in the transformation of everyday digital assets into diverse media forms. In Thompson’s Every Song I Own Sorted Numerically, the artist uses custom made software and a super-computer to transform his digital music library (taking 23 days) into individual sample data, which is then sorted numerically and re-formatted as .wav files. The result is a type of aural brutalism, whereby the content is rearranged and then reconstituted as a sonic drone, a digital spectre of its prior melodic form. With a 28-day duration, this minimalist signal is anything but pop music. It is a continuous tone that heaves and sways on the periphery of the senses. Yet, once brought to the attention of the listener, it’s a constant reminder of the ways in which code informs and shapes our response to our environment.

Using an essay by Virginia Woolf as the source material for her ficto-critical romance with the command line interface, artist Nancy Mauro-Flude, who discusses her work in an artist commentary in this issue, presented the video installation ism | breath | she | who | with | I. This piece transformed the exhibition space into an alien landscape where video loops of ASCII art flames and rivers of text etch the walls, alongside her documented interactions with the database. Like some techno-Frankenstein, resurrecting the exquisite corpse of Woolf’s prose, Mauro-Flude uses command tools and executable code to reconfigure the classic text, reducing it to a series of categories and lists. Strangely enough, the artist manages to imbue these video screen-captures of her computational adventures with a palpable sense of her own interaction with the machine, perhaps her most glorious achievement.

GUAG , its title from the first and last letters associated with a section of biological code, explored bio-code at the molecular level. Bio-tech artist Andre Brodyk, who reflects on this work below, is a painter of code; his medium a living transgenic bacteria which he applies to a nutrient agar canvas. Like a modern day alchemist, Brodyk fashions biological code into living paintings that are framed in double-sealed perspex vitrines. Situated in a dark room swathed in UV light or displayed as video documentation, Brodyk’s work may be understood as a medi(t)ation, as his bio-paintings materialise over a period of days. Brodyk’s work seamlessly bridges art and technology, but most importantly, as we look on with wonderment, these biological renderings are also potent reminders of the coded nature of our own bodies.

The body became a vehicle for the performing and accessing of narratives in Annie Wan’s locative media project Around the Corner. Using the eponymous mobile app on a smartphone, players can interact with networked maps as a form of place-marking. The smartphone becomes a networked digital looking glass that reveals the city as a hybrid narrative space. As players drift through the streets like some kind of digital flâneur, they are presented with a series of micro-narratives in the form of text, audio and animations that build layers of meaning as their journey progresses. Server-side software enables players to retrieve information related to other users’ locations, which is then mixed with texts that promote further engagement. Players are able to easily share stories of their own adventures via social media or read about the adventures of other players. Around the Corner employs a mash-up of networked digital media applications and data assets to transform city streets into a cartography of narrative possibilities.

From practice to play, theories of code have been embedded in digital games since their inception. Five of the artistic works presented at CODE were based on games, four of which relied on player interaction to lend meaning to the piece. Arguably enmeshed in code on every level, Cosmic Top Secret: How I Made My Father Into A Videogame Character is a game created by residents of the Danish National Film School. This piece involves interaction with an autobiographical animated documentary, born from the creator’s revelation that both her parents worked deep undercover for a Danish intelligence agency during the Cold War. Using a mobile app to communicate with the PC that the game is installed on, the player navigates their way through the author’s interactions with her parents and towards the eventual reveal. Using real audio and video footage, and mixed media animation, this game is entrenched in code and manages to seamlessly merge all the many tiered messages into a cohesive and visually immersive experience.

Baden Pailthorpe approached the topics of code and war from a very different perspective. Formation II is a machinima-style game performance in which a US Military training simulator is hacked and used to execute a visual and aural peaceful protest. This is achieved by setting the avatars of American and Taliban troops to run in formation beside one another, each oblivious to the other’s presence and, therefore, with a complete lack of hostile intentions. The sound of boots crunching on sand and a rhythmic interaction between the troops serves to make this a very harmonious and heavily-coded political statement.

Bullet Hell , a side scrolling platform installation by A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, developed with Anton Hand, also approached traditional themes of violence with unorthodox methods. The term bullet hell usually refers to a game in which the player’s screen is filled with enemy projectiles, the aim in which is to shoot one’s way out of it, inflicting as much carnage as possible. In Liszkiewicz’s work, the intention is for the player to control a single bullet, determining the fate of the projectile and surrounding objects by choosing either to move the bullet and avoid contact or to leave it, resulting in the destruction of the obstacle and the end of the game. Aesthetically, the work is quite simple, but in terms of challenging moral codes and decision-making, the complexity is endless. There is also no score, lives, music or traditional interface in the piece, meaning that, if undisturbed in a gallery setting, it is explorative of its own artistic potential and that of the genre via the removal of conventional feedback mechanisms.

Atypical and coded communication was also at the crux of Aaron Oldenburg’s work, Escape the Cage. This piece is an asynchronous, sound-based game for two players, every round of which is informed and codified by information from previous games. One player is trapped in what bears resemblance to a small motel room, and points, clicks and picks up objects to find their way out of it, making a unique sound array in the process. The other player listens from a separate location and either opens the door or does not. This work is ostensibly collaborative but, in actuality, much of the power lies with the player on the outside of the puzzle. Aesthetically the work is stark, made up of photographic stills from what appears to be a dilapidated motel suite. The sound, however, is the key to the coded gameplay: one player can interrupt the other’s composition at will by freeing them from their bondage and thus ending their unique orchestration.

Sampson Young presented RPG Triptych, a visually pleasing top down Japanese-style RPG with a mid-90s design aesthetic. While being embedded in a particular genre, it is also fragmented and heavily coded, with the player experiencing animal-initiated disturbances, helpful yet fashion-obsessed nuns, and all in game conversation spoken by a joyful cow who quotes from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. The complete work consists of three projections, all of which are separate games, and which are played as parts of a philosophical and narrative whole. Due to space restrictions, only one of the games was playable at CODE, but was nonetheless an enjoyable and reflective experience for many who engaged with the piece.

Code, with its varying interpretations and applications, proved a pertinent theme for a collection of contemporary works at this exhibition, so many of which were born-digital or binary in nature. None of these would have been present and open for discussion were it not for the generosity of the artists involved. Taken together, the diversity of work presented demonstrated not only the multiplicity of artistic approaches to the notion and use of code, but most importantly, the exhibition highlighted the central role of practice-led and practice-based research in the academy.

Biographical Notes

Dean Keep is a researcher/artist who teaches across a range of media disciplines including digital video and audio, digital imaging, convergence cultures and multi-platform narratives. Dean's research has a strong focus on mobile media cultures and practices; photography, place and memory.

Laura Crawford is PhD candidate at Swinburne University of Technology, jointly supervised across the schools of Media, Multimedia and Communications and Psychology. Her research focuses new approaches to investigating attraction to and engagement with forms of screen violence, pertaining in particular to cinema and digital games.