[Nettime-bold] Josephine Berry-Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual UnconsciousII

"".......It is this precise paralogy
that the anonymous net artist, usually identifiable by the name Antiorp,
Netochka Nezvanova or Integer(26), is attracted to, and which it approaches
particularly through its play with natural languages and computer
programming languages as well as its disruptive interventions in the
text-based social environments of mailing lists.
In 1998, Antiorp started a campaign of 'spamming'(27) on a wide variety of
mailing lists ranging from nettime and 7-11, and those set up to discuss
technical matters such as the MAX programming list.(28) Antiorp has, since
this time, posted to these lists extensively in a specially developed
language termed 'Kroperom' or 'KROP3ROM|A9FF'. This language, in part,
relies on a logic of substitution to reformulate the Roman alphabet's
phonetic system by including all the 256 different characters comprising
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), the lingua
franca of computing. For instance, in the case of a Kroperom word like
'm9nd', the number '9' is incorporated into the word 'mind' such that the
'ine' in 'nine' takes on a phonetic role. But Antiorp's system also extends
beyond purely phonetic substitutions. We can see the broader system of
substitutions more clearly in Antiorp's conversion of the term 'Maschinen
Kunst' into 'm@zk!n3n kunzt' (the term it uses to describe its oeuvre).
Here, for example, the 'a' is substituted for the '@' character, the 'i'
for the exclamation point, the 'sch' or 'shh' sound for a 'zk', the 'e' for
a '3' and so on. Some of these substitutions, which remain fairly constant
within Kroperom, involve finding a key which approximates the inverse of
the original character, so that the 'i' becomes an '!' and the '3' replaces
the 'e' or 'E'. In some cases these substitutions not only involve finding
a close or inverted visual equivalent (e.g. '!' or @) but combine phonetic
and visual substitutions in one (e.g. using '3' in place of 'E'). In these
instances we can see how the naturalness of the - in this case - German
language is infiltrated by ciphers and metaphors of computer code.(29) The
exclamation point - which in its new role as the ubiquitous 'i' can
dominate whole lines of text - lends Kroperom an emphatic quality and
transvalues the whole logic of programming's executable command structure
into the oppressive, if comical, tone of the spoken injunction: "do this!
do that!". In the example 'm@zk!n3n kunzt m2cht . fr3!' not only do
numerals and ASCII characters mix with alphabetic characters within the
space of a word, but the unity of the phonetic system is broken by the
logic of different character systems so that the reader is forced to employ
a combination of strategies to decode the script. This heterogeneous style
of encryption and language use not only destabilises the reading process,
but triggers multiple lines of cultural, semiotic, and computational
association. The act of reading becomes a pointedly self-reflexive and, in
the terms of chaos theory, nonlinear experience with each word representing
a junction of multiple systems. This point about self-reflexivity can
doubtless be made of all textual production and consumption to a greater or
lesser extent, but it is important here to emphasis that through, for
example, the substitution of letters for numerals, the script starts to
mimic the functional potential of a programme. In other words, textual
self-reflexivity refers here especially to the computational environment.
......................"