Codework Resource Kit

Codework Resource Kit // Release 1.0

This is a CD-ROM of tools for codework, for writers and artists engaged with the medium. These tools operate at the intersection of artistic work and technological process. It is too easy for artists to lose grasp of the material of their work, as if what you see is what you get. Nothing could be less true. Art isn't a solitary process but occurs in coded environments configured by protocols. In fact, writing matters. Codework means dealing with inescapable materiality, with the plasmic transfers that become text. Writing matters politically, as Lawrence Lessig’s recent emphasis on “code as law” underlines. Everyday political and social selves are structured by complex intersections of regulation and action resulting from the transformed textual and legal environment of cyberspace. Codes works on us, works us over.

Codework is a useful term because it labels a tendency. “Tendency” may seem like nothing much. In fact, codework opens a transverse view across an enormous range of domains, illuminating a singular encounter where human action and consciousness meets formal systems. It illuminates this encounter with great intensity: nothing but a moment of translation but felt with the force of an event. Writing matters because it breaks: code work means a focus on the production of the work. Finally, writing matters for what it presents beyond all codes, for the real that remains despite all coding. These tools return to art as an encounter.

All these tools are filters. What they filter may be disparate - images, sounds, texts - but the point is not the tools but what they enable. If a society is “defined by its amalgamates, not its tools,” as Deleuze and Guattari had it, then the tools on this CD-ROM are amalgamation-machines. This CD-ROM is the first part of a growing project to bring tools to writers and artists. Even more: the Project is no simple focus on the tools of invention but a reinvention of art in light of its quality as tool-based amalgamate.

The CD-ROM's contents are a starter kit. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the Codework Resource Kit are a suite of commands bringing powerful UNIX-like text processing to Windows and MAC system. UNIX and its LINUX derivatives remain exemplary for this work. Far from Microsoft's monopolization of interface and occlusion of hardware, UNIX requires an encounter with the imbrication of code and environment. The CD-ROM also offers image and sound tools. Taking code seriously means the interoperability of all media forms. Finally, online software extends and supplements the resource kit. Codework is a possible future of art, a renewed emphasis on the materiality of invention that returns to what was always at the heart of writing.