In branch/ing, the twining of electronic text around a limb displays an uneasy melding of nature and machine. The dense circuitry on the branch simultaneously suggests overgrowth and symbiosis. Glowing characters flow along the branch, following its contours and bifurcating where the branch itself splits. The text flowing along the branch shows a language that is both human and machine – the programming code that is running the piece itself. Technological evolution influences language itself: compound pseudo-words propagate, typography becomes deliberately fractured, instant messaging breeds compulsive abbreviations. As the viewer moves closer, however, the text deconstructs and disintegrates itself, further complicating our efforts of comprehension.
Technology as a medium is exposed here by showing the technical underpinnings of the work – microcontroller, circuitry, sensors, wiring – and the viewer will eventually figure out that these all are asssembled in the service of revealing the other crucial underpinning, one that is usually hidden: the programming code that drives the entire piece. The code literally displays itself. In this way the whole piece seems to be a self-reflexive celebration of its own technology – which it is, in one sense, but it is also about something more uncertain, almost uneasy. For one, there’s the tautology of that self-reflexive loop and the our fascination with technology for its own sake; secondly, the organic nature of the tree, its power and primacy as a symbol of nature, and the dense circuitry on the branches suggests a future of hybrid nature-machine forms, and could be viewed here as (intertwined) symbiosis or (invasive) overgrowth. With co-evolution it’s hard to say which is which.
Technological evolution influences language itself: compound pseudo-words propagate, typography becomes deliberately fractured, instant messaging breeds compulsive abbreviations. Programming elements, like non-standard capitalization, or the HTML tag <ALT>, cross-over into popular culture. Code is a hybrid language, both human and machine, an overlooked fulfillment of cyborg theory: but this is not a fusion both human and machinic, but something else that, although it has traces of both, is really neither. By displaying its code, this piece displays the form, and the process, through which a programmer, an artist — a human — communicates with a computer in its native tongue. The language, in this case BasicX, is fairly “human-readable” (as the expression goes), but still mostly opaque to a non-programmer. If one reads the code for a bit, something else appears — commented statements made by the artist/programmer, that is, normal language used in programming to explain obtuse code. But it also the residue of the strange conversations most programmers have with themselves — notes about things to improve, questions to research later, sometimes entire blocks of old versions of code, abandoned strategies, what is called “commented out” code – like layers covered over in an oil painting. Normally this is cleaned up and never seen in a finished work, even in software art that explicitly reveals its code. So this piece asks us to consider the grammar, the rhythm, the formal structure of programming, and thus besides exposing code as a hidden medium behind new media art, and suggesting that — or asking if — the code can be considered aesthetically, it also lets the true nature of the process of creating with computers show through.
Interacting with this piece is not a satisfying action in the conventional sense. Because the act of viewing is destructive, the viewer enters into an uncertain dialogue with it, complicating the instinctive act to comprehend. And so viewers are usually unable to choose between the satisfaction of a visible response, the pixels disintegrating as one moves closer, and the need to decode the meaning of the text which requires standing away from it so the characters are legible. But if you stand far enough away that the text is perfectly displayed, the letters are almost too small to see! So this a deliberate inversion of the normal mode of interactive art, where the viewer’s engagement causes the piece to perform, to fully become itself.
While some viewers try to read the meaning of the text, others find that its trace, the deconstructed pixels, are more beautiful or more interesting. Many go back and forth; not sure whether to stand in one place or to move around to get the piece to do something. This tension is part of the point: our relationship to our own technology is still murky, confusing, and unstable. This piece attempts to present a mature use of interactivity in installation art, where the responsiveness of the piece is one element used judiciously in balance with its other constituent parts, as opposed to being an element used for it own sake, i.e. its “newness.” Ultimately branch/ing presents an engagement with technology that aspires to be both aesthetic and intellectual, as well as uncertain and mysterious – and asks us to consider how the evolution of technology, nature, and language will intertwine in the future.
