# Code Dreams are Made of This



## somnambulist (Jan 29, 2009)

By M. Beatrice Fazi

This year’s Piksel festival celebrating ‘Code Dreams’ saw the boundaries between artists, audience, hardware and software blur in the collective pursuit of a machinic unconscious, as well as a highly conscious celebration of FLOSS culture. Review by M. Beatrice Fazi


What does code dream? Asking this question presupposes not only machinic consciousness but, above all, agency. What are our dreams of code? Answering this involves collective propositions for cultural techniques and models of production. Piksel08 festival investigates both – in between logics of source code, quests for artistic freedom and the beautiful scenario of a cold Norwegian winter.

Piksel (http://www.piksel.no ) is an annual event for practitioners and theoreticians working with free/libre and open source software [FLOSS] and hardware. Artists, developers and programmers meet annually in Bergen, Norway, to exchange opinions, bits of code, and to present their latest projects. Born in 2003 as a meeting space around the collaborative work of Gisle Froysland and Carlo Prelz on the real-time video-processing application MoB, across its six editions Piksel festival has evolved from a small workshop environment into a diverse international gathering, which includes live events, exhibitions, seminars, performances and discussions on the aesthetic and ethical implications of FLOSS culture and production.

While for the last couple of years the programme had focused on the politics of hardware – both in terms of hackability and potential for independent artistic expression – in 2008 Piksel went back to its ‘roots’ and chose as its main narrative thread the oneiric agency of coding, with the title ‘Code Dreams’. Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the festival it seemed evident that this decision did not mean looking back or returning to positions that might have lost part of their momentum today, due to the ever evolving nature of technical and social contingencies. Rather, this renewed attention to code – as a methodology of investigation, an operational perspective and a fundamental key to digital art – proved to have been a carefully considered and mature decision. ‘Code’ is not understood as pure syntax but as a necessary continuum between material consistency and semantic notation, in both cases politically and aesthetically charged. Piksel08 showed a conceptual coherence that is surely the fruit of experience and has benefited from shifts in themes and issues during the years.

Arguably, dreams have played a dominant role in nearly any cultural history of the 20th century, from Freudian discourses of subconscious analysis to surrealist practices of ‘dream incorporations’, via Disney sing along songs. Today, though, at Piksel, ‘code dreams’ are the everyday magic of encrypting systems, the utopian display of mainstream technology, the promises of declining economies – hardware and software both flattened within ‘the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella’, as the festival website reads. Computation acts at many scales and degrees of description. Its ‘unconscious’ – if we still want to use psychoanalytic categories – is ‘virtual’: not the unintentional action of a notational central subjectivity but, rather, the abstract yet real processing, actualising singular, structural, semantic and physical characters. Code agency – its ‘dreams’, to return to the theme of the festival – is not articulated through dialects of consciousness and interpretation but through a new set of concepts involving relationality, dissemination, creativity. All of which affect the material models and ecologies they are made of or born within. Similarly, yet from a human perspective, any engagement with software art is then understood as a technical and social statement embedded in the contingency of cultural production, artistic research and actual hardware manipulation. 

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