------Forwarded message ------

Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 14:26:56 +0200

From: Lorenzo Taiuti <>

To:

Subject: <nettime> Josephine Berry-Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual UnconsciousIII

Dear Josephine

i read your nice essai and i agree on many things.

About "NN/antiorp/integer" i may only disagree.

Neither Adorno or Breton would think that around 2000 people would try

to realize fragile attempts of a web-democracy through contacts,

exchange of informations and attempts of organizations totally free from

society controls.

And i underline "attempts" because what we are tryng to do is extremely

"light" compared to the tremendous weight of the real official

info-structure.

In this moment an interesting list like Syndicate is dyng because the

strategy of "spamming" create by NN&Company breaks the subtle balance of

the "comunication agreement" between members of the list.

There are not cultural excuses to something like that.

Ciao

Lorenzo Taiuti

You wrote

""...... 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.

...... "

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