17 Nov Florian Cramer: Executable Code and the Cultural Imagination

Nov. 13, 2004

Type: discussion

Public Lecture

Florian Cramer
Executable Code and the Cultural Imagination: A Sketch of a History.

date: Wednesday 17th November
time: 19.00-20.30hr
location: Collegezaal, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam
transport: NS/Metro Blaak, Tram 1, halt Blaak
cost: free, all are welcome

Executable Code and the Cultural Imagination: A Sketch of a History.

Algorithmic instruction code can be found, centuries before the
invention of the computer, in Latin poetry, the Kabbalah, Western
composed music and several forms of experimental poetry from the 17th to
the 20th century, thus forming an important, but often neglected
historical pretext of contemporary computer arts. While these examples
are formally simple or even primitive by contemporary standards, they
are linked to a rich technological, artistic, philosophical and
religious imagination. The lecture tries to sketch its rich and very
contradictory history from Pythagorean mathematics to contemporary
digital art and culture, showing how the idea and phantasm of the word
becoming flesh is both written forth and transformed from kabbalistic
spells to computer viruses.

Florian Cramer is a Berlin based writer who has published in the area
of code poetry, comparative studies in the literature and the arts,
modernism, text theory, literature and computing. One of the group
working on the http://www.runme.org/ Software Art repository and an
editor of the Unstable Digest of code poetry, he is currently
Research Fellow at Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute,
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, Rotterdam
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/ Florian Cramer's homepage is at
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/

This event is one of a series of public lectures organised by Media
Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de kooning Academie
Hogeschool Rotterdam http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/ and is part of the
Dutch Electronic Art Festival, organised by V2_organisation,
institute for the unstable media. http://www.deaf04.nl/