A new piece of software has just been put online by Mongrel at
http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Linker

+ + +

The Linker software comes out of a specific need. A key part of what
Mongrel does are workshops, dialogues to produce fast artefacts of
digital culture with other mongrels. A crucial thing about these
workshops is that people want to produce something that looks good, and
means something, but don't want to have to invest months in teaching
themselves up to know something like Photoshop and Director. We don't
particularly want to knock these programs, but they're cultured up to be
useful really only to experts.

The way the workshops run is based around the structure of the Linker.
There's one or more computers running the program and ways of getting
material into it. A video camera and some cheap digital cameras to
produce the still or moving images. Sound comes in from off of the video
or straight into the computer's mic. A simple sound editor program can
be used to edit and add effects. The text is banged out directly on the
machine. Other stuff can come off the net, CDs, wherever. It's quick.

Link to:

"We work with people who others cannot reach. Our own people. Until we
made the Linker software there was a huge technical barrier. We would
get people excited and then they would get hit with all the technical
details. Linker makes all that simple and lets people get on with
exploring ideas." –Mervin Jarman

What Linker does is essentially what Director (pretty much the standard
multimedia authoring tool) the program whose internal language, Lingo,
it is written in does already, but in a more restricted set of ways.
Director is built to process any form of data type and provide a way of
working them together, usually by relatively complicated programming.
Many multimedia programs make giant baroque concatenations. Linker by
comparison is a very slight offering. Basically an opened up versioning
of an editing tool that has been used to make a number of CD-ROM based
artworks, (such as 'Rehearsal of Memory') it is deliberately
constrained. The constraint is what makes it quick. It is also what
pulls things together formally.

Linker is the multimedia equivalent of a throw-away camera. Other
culture technologies it relates to: a page on a photo album; print club;
advent calendar; photo frames for several pictures of family members.
Your Granny might have a dinky set of display shelves full of glass
animals, dreck from the Franklin Mint and souvenirs. You can do the same
thing on a computer, but make it modernlike and multimedia. On the other
hand, you can make something tight, vicious and full of a whole load of
other kinds of memories or new sensations. Kids setting out collections
of stones or little soldiers on a table are at the same time attentive
to their aesthetic detail, how realistic, how variable the faces, as to
how great their ability to inflict real or ideas of damage.

The software feeds into the natural delight that people take in
analytical sorting or in extrapolating from imagined or actual patterns.
The eye-hand strays and picks at this and that, producing connotations
of meaning by the simple fact of linkage, of little tokens, tenderness,
tat. Whilst Linker aligns itself with the delights of opening, of
skimming over, and of fiddling it also presupposes a sense of montage
which, like fiddling, goes nowhere in particular. *It is a machine for
producing a form of montage which is more like a game of dominoes than a
dialectic. That whilst it does not assign the particular to nowhere, in
providing a device for its extrapolation, is not also dependent on cell
a clashing with cell b to progress to cell c.

*link to

Linker allows for one Linker map to be linked to another. A structure
that in itself is fairly limited, particularly in size, becomes with the
possibility of reiteration a far more powerful means of linkage.
Collections become collectivities.

This is not to say that Linker could not be used as a space for the
operation of such procedures. Perhaps we even remain in hope that things
could be that algorithmically simple. The software even explicitly
provides a domain in which such devices, such rule-fantasies can be
played out without harming the public. Constraints, of formal rules, of
available materials, of rhyme and metre, of rythms are familiar tools
for meanings to trick themselves into being made. Adoption of a
constraint paradoxically allows creation to become a process. There is a
sense in which software, something which is often said to be 'open', can
produce similar effects.

Software constructs a sensorium: a set of ways of sensing, knowing and
doing in the world. A few examples: command line interfaces such as UNIX
transposing the 'memory' of the operating system onto the user, what
elements of HTML documents are deemed to be important for crawlers; how
search engines incorporate semantic judgements; the spatialisation of
memory relied upon and reinforced by the WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse,
Pointer) genera of interfaces; the inclusion of unique machine
identifiers within the Pentium III chip, and the wider questions of
value-production in information economies commonly, but in some ways
less than usefully, grouped under the heading of 'privacy' that go with
it; and so on.

link to:

"Just look at how Microsoft Word forces certain restrictions on how you
spell - even underlining in green or red like some teacher." –Harwood

It is utterly lame to suggest, as David Gellernter, a Professor of
Computer Science, does in his extended homily 'The Aesthetics of
Computing' [1], that software as a science is not formulated by currents
other than 'itself'. There is a twin movement. Involving scientific,
that is to say rational, methods in wider fields that may be political,
social, conceptual, aesthetic. At the same time, teasing out those ways
in which the internal configurations of practiced rationalities (such as
software production) already operate within and produce these domains of
influence. They present a possibility for actually enriching rationality
and making it, as a particular kind of knowledge machine, more
productive.

Software that is not socially constructed, not only gets no users (for
it does not hook into or effect any of the involvements they might have
for it), but even as an 'orphan', something that has no preconditions,
something that is solely of itself, it is formed, as an impossible
object, at least in part as a negative imprint of what is already in
existence. The point is not whether software is socially constructed or
not, or put the other way, whether rationality has its uses. This is a
minor argument. Rather, what kind of currents, what kind of machine,
numerical, social and other dynamics it feeds in and out of, and what
others can be brought into being? This is not just a question of,
'putting software at the service of the community' or some other farce
of repurposing but of developing modes of study, innovation, production
and use that acknowledge that, "To be 'technical' simply is to be a
response to a history of conflicts" [2].

fly-note

Each of the nine image cells that form the Linker map are split into a
further 16 'hot areas'. Each of these has a further eight possibilities
of actions: sound; map; scale; text; video; jump; image; chat. The maths
can be expressed as follows: 9 x 16 x 8 = 1152 possibilities for each
map. A graphical representation of Linker's basic algorithm is pasted on
the front of the piece as the software starts up. This map of linkage
forms a direct symmetry between the interface and the algorithms working
below. The lines then shift, according to how the data in that
particular Linker sorts itself. This allows the user to gain a graphical
representation of the links between the elements they have placed in
their Linker. The interface is constructed to represent the code and the
limited possibilities of its use, nothing more. This goes against the
grain of much proprietary software which attempts to acheive the most
narrow kind of practicality, "There's a job to do. Let's just get it
done. Don't think about what it means."* at the same time as subsuming
every possible function or way of treating data within it.

slogan - "Death to screen junk"

*Link to:

We are transfixed by the outcome of our interaction with applications.
We forget the program in order to get on with the task. If we can reach
clarity about what software does, how it offers us a limited range of
objects as a menu of 'creativity' or of process, we can begin to see
what is missing.

There are three by three cells in the first layer of the interface. From
the Three Little Pigs to the Holy Trinity, three has an interesting
position, always beyond duality - here on in things get complex it
promises. The third in a series always suggests the onset of a series,
elaborating a something between the preceding numbers causing things to
move on - a factorial, a function, a game. Constraining the number of
image cells in the Linker allows it to be filled fast at a basic level.
It also forces users to make choices, to discriminate about the use of a
particular graphic in relationship to the others within the fixed number
of cells available. Formalism becomes a machine for affect.

Adding sounds, images, words and video together in a pattern for the
first time is really quite a powerful experience for many people.
Importantly also, viewing a Linker with elements made by or about them,
their peoples, creates a very intimate relation with the process of
using and viewing. This might have something to do with being able to
create a cluster of media with strong presentational authority in terms
of coherence of design and function. Alternately, for instance, when
used as a kind of miniature family album with sound recordings, photos
and so on it might also have something to do with the sense of openess
inherent in the formal system of the database.

Formal constraints repress what is underneath them at the same time as
allowing their articulation in certain ways. A little thing such as
this, the software, whilst it includes constraints, does not allow
access to the Law or a state of numbered grace. Nor does a 'full' Linker
map form a final will and testament, a chance to speak that will only be
given the once. Instead, a spread palm-load of sleights of mind that
people can play upon themselves, upon memory.

Lev Manovich, in his useful essay on the 'Database as a Symbolic Form'
[3], suggests that what is often found in actual usage of databases is
that what has been assembled is, "A collection, not a story". In Linker,
forcing a limited number, but no more, of image cells to be filled
before the thing can be used encourages a certain amount of syntagmatic
relations between data elements in the constellation of many which the
database is composed of. As Manovich suggests, this can be like putting
together a sentence in a natural language. It also suggests what he
calls the conflict between database and narrative, between more or less
open arrays of elements, paths and strata and the timelapsed results of
particular routes through them congealed as a story.

Another difference between narrative and database is between signs, the
base constituent element of narrative, and the digitised elements, cast
members, sprites, objects, whatever that are actuated in a database.
Whilst this is a difference of degree and not of exclusivity, simple
material factors such as the amount of processor cycles needed to call
up an element also have their effect in terms of composition. Linker
makes use of a material factor like this in a determining way in that
each cell changes size according to the dimensions of the image file.
Thus, it allows the overall visual pattern of the first layer of the
database to emerge as a result of the properties of its constituent
elements. This is a small thing, but in the unusual context of artists
producing a system rather than its content, one that presents processed
documents rather than perhaps open up the process of their construction,
the interface is essentially all there is. It has to be thought, and
sensed, through.

+ + +

1. David Gellernter, 'The Aesthetics of Computing', Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, London 1998 (Incongruously, this does not prevent him from
suggesting canonical literature and art history courses for computer
scientists, just that the 'beauty' that these disciplines might provide
access to be as inviolable to questioning and reinvention as the
technocratic instrumentalism he calls into question as the dominant
ideology of computer science).

2. J. Rouse, 'The Narrative Reconstruction of Science', INQUIRY, Vol 33
No 1, pp 179 - 196

3. Lev Manovich, 'Database as Symbolic Form', available at:
http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/ (Search within this archive).