Executable Code and the Cultural Imagination
Public LectureFlorian 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/