Hocus Pocus

Martin Howse (GB)

Code becomes a sub-title for multiple questions of visibility within the world (paranoia, and conspiracy). Code is less than visible within contemporary networked systems, extending spider-like from interface to embrace the world; a vanishing point in all senses. At the same time, code references a secret use of language, as encryption, as that which is literally under cover in the early taxonomies of steganography.

Code visibility will be explored within the frame of promiscuOS, a speculative software project which attempts to actively investigate how code literally embodies a military ontology of both enclosure (containment as abstraction) and of revelation.

The presentation examines the impact of necessary [in]-visibility on the study of software, and on experimental practices informed by both the free software and open hardware movements, exploring topics including paranoia and gnosticism, the executable, virus culture, pornographic protocol, and language as life coding under erasure.

Martin Howse operates within the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions).