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Reprint of essay published in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performanceedited by Judith Rugg, Michèle Sedgwick (Bristol: Intellect, 2007)

The world machine is a new archetype for a socio-technical system drawing together a group of tools that combine computational powers with a social agenda of cross-world collaboration in resistance to dominant market rhetoric. Specifically, we look at how powers to connect, sense and infer can be combined and turned to crowd-sourcing public engagement with shared world issues - as an alternative to business-as-usual in the context of developing and deploying networked technology. We combine theoretical aspects of world machines, such as what a political entity of this kind might seek to do, and practical exercises that focus on design, with a view to exploring viability and examining what a related research agenda might involve.

Speaking Code begins by invoking the “Hello World” convention used by programmers when learning a new language, helping to establish the interplay of text and code that runs through the book. Interweaving the voice of critical writing from the humanities with the tradition of computing and software development, Speaking Code unfolds an argument to undermine the distinctions between criticism and practice, and to emphasize the aesthetic and political aspects of software studies.Not reducible to its functional aspects, program code mirrors the instability inherent in the relationship of speech to language; only interpretable in the context of its distribution and network of operations. Code is understood as both script and performance, it is argued, and is in this sense like spoken language – always ready for action.Speaking Code examines the expressive and performative aspects of programming; alternatives to mainstream development, from performances of the live-coding scene to the organizational forms of commons-based peer production; the democratic promise of social media and their paradoxical role in suppressing political expression; and the market’s emptying out of possibilities for free expression in the public realm. The book’s line of argument defends language against its invasion by economics, arguing that speech continues to underscore the human condition, however paradoxical this may seem in an era of pervasive computing.

This paper examines a digital art performance by Ubermorgen.com called Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI.org) as an example of the tensions between Capital and the public commons. Using notions of transparency and knowledge as a form of innovation rooted in Nonaka’s Knowledge Management theory, it examines the ways in which knowledge about how Google uses the Internet is made explicit through the art performance. Finally, it discusses the implications for transparency in Internet business through both the act of GWEI expanding audiences for understanding Internet based revenue generation models and using artifacts rooted cultural contexts in order to challenge the assumptions inherent in the current configuration of Capital and the public commons. It ends with calling into question the role of Google as a form of “Cultureware,” dependent on the public commons, yet profiting from it in the realm of the Capital.

If platform applications have become the primary mode of accessing online information and communication, it should come as no surprise that the political motivations for doing so emerge from an antagonism inherent in the Object Oriented paradigm of encapsulation.Following ‘Platform Studies’ (Bogost and Montfort), the paper will assume that 'platforms' are the foundational hardware or software system environments where programs are executed. However, what constitutes the increasingly proprietary level of privatised service platforms are the forced removals of complexity implemented through the logic of encapsulation. As a rule, encapsulation reduces system complexity between the user and the platform's influence mediated by the formal behaviour of code and the representative interface. In turn, this has led to the constraint of expression within the public realm by suppressing the political practice of platform modification, and the privileging of private property. We claim that the ‘App’ paradigm promotes private, proprietary software through ‘clean’ interfaces. In turn, this can be theorised as a symptom of a wider political stance towards the purification of code. In a strictly ideological manner, a ‘clean’ interface can make sense ofwhat does not make sense. It aims to mask or supplement the ‘shitty’ complexity of code and the underlying platform structure, concealed through layers of operational function and benign interface. Such statements evoke the intervention of Dominique Laporte, in the History of Shit (first published in 1978), who verified how the suppressed agency of citizen-subjects undermodern power is coded through the conditions of managing human waste. Parallel to the cleansing of the streets, Laporte argues that the French language had also been similarly purged of its "lingering stink" so that it became purer and closer to authority.The paper will further link the purification of code to the structure of ideology inherent in Zizek’s psychoanalytical model between Symbolic reality, the antagonistic Real and ideological concealment. The purification is technical in so far as it is political and indeed we argue that code is, in itself, subject to the same excremental foundations as the subject. We claim that platform politics is not just the study between the technical limitations of platforms, software, code, hardware and representation, but also the heightened political strategy of masking, cleansing and purifying those antagonistic limitations.

In ‘reconsidering the aesthetics of code’, we hope to reflect upon an earlier essay, and to extend its remit in understanding code as performative: that which both performs and is performed.