CodeChat - a system for open discussion of art-related code

Hi Rhizomers,
I've been working on something for a while now and am ready to
release a prototype. This is something that requires the
participation of people to be successful. Here's the background and a
little info on what it is:

Recently, an interview appeared here on Rhizome in connection with an
exhibition in Spain. Amongst the people interviewed was Christiane
Paul. In the interview she mentioned something along the lines of
understanding the language of new media. I replied to this interview
posting with a posting asking, what exactly is the language of new
media? In my response I suggested that it was somewhere within an
understanding of code. And it makes sense as far as "coded" artwork
goes. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. What we
need is more open discussion between artists regarding the value and
importance of code and coding methods and the conceptual/aesthetic
implications of such practice. We, the arist-coders, need to openly
discuss our methods so that others, not versed in code, can pick up
on some of the issues and discuss them in less technical terms.
That's the whole idea behind the project I call "CodeChat". A side-
effect of this whole thing is that artists will have to open-source
their code or at least portions of it to allow people to discuss it.
The system is very simple to use. It consists of a single Perl script
that you feed your text-based code file through and it automatically
generates an html file with comment sections for each line of code.
The commenting system is AJAX based, driven by Javascript, PHP and
MySQL. For now, I want to test the system and hope that as many
people as possible will join in and generate some discussion. After
the testing, I will release the system under the General Public
License and hopefully others will help in making it more dependable
and secure.

The whole idea of this kind of discussion was sparked by another
project, also from Christiane Paul, the CODeDOC exhibition on the
Whitney website:

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/

Where the code was put on center stage and artists involved were
asked to publicly comment on each others code.

The CodeChat prototype is running at:

http://pallit.lhi.is/~palli/codechat


–
Pall Thayer
[email protected]

http://www.this.is/pallit