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Vice Blog

TECHNOLOGY ISSUE EXTRA - XXXXX

Whenever those publications about sculptures made of mozzarella or studies about the growth rate of adolescent Indians' fingernails leave you wishing you were illiterate, something comes bouncing along and blows you away. In this case it was the

XXXXX-Reader

. I found it in one of these shops you visit when it's raining and you've got no umbrella or friends. Amongst the rain-soaked pamphlets and punk anthologies I saw a strangly deplaced pink book. No author. No title. Just five Xs printed on the cover. I assumed it must be some kind of futuristic-cyberporn and opened it up.

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It actually turned out to be a bastard compilation of scientific essays, literature, and above all: codes. Codes picked out by a Berlin collective and released by a university. It had chapters like "Perl Routines to Manipulate London" or "Pornographic Coding," and though it certainly added some irreparable bends to me brain, it was in its founded absurdity the loveliest absurdity I've read for a long time. Later I realized that some world-renowned programmers, scientists like Otto Rössler and avant-garde shitheads like Stewart Home had contributed texts.

Apart from that, there was nothing but a thin splattering of secondary sources that mentioned the existence of

The Reader

. When I found the collective's website, it became clear they obviously didn't give a shit about flash, java, google ads or the outside world's understanding (or existence). Nevertheless, even though the book's a couple years old, I found an address two streets away from our Berlin office. I went there. Swimming in a bunch of old computers' innards two of the five Xes awaited me.

VICE: Who are you?

X:

We are a fairly loose group. Three of us are here in Berlin, the others are living in London. I was born in Boston. Since 2004 we organize events, meetings of programmers, artists, and scientists in London, Germany, and Norway.

What are those meetings about?

Life coding in the broadest sense—we look for interesting people: programmers, hackers, artists, people who do things we think are relevant–and try to organize meetings around their work. Which is not easy at all. Basically it's about the way software describes and changes the world. How software--something you cannot see, something that does not "exist" in a physical way--nevertheless has results you can see and touch. Our world is run by operating systems, by code. No matter how far abstracted they are from our normal way of communicating, if you strain your eyes code looks like poems. Or drawings.

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The Reader

is about these connections.

What do the five Xs in the title stand for? Are they supposed to look mysterious?

Ha ha. Yes, exactly. It's so boring once you know…

Nevermind. Go for it.

There was an earlier book named

CRASH

. In the classic sciences there was a certain lucidity, the illusion of rationality.

CRASH

marks the point where the possibilities expanded, every cognition became the alternative of another. Science perverted, so to say.

XXXXX

is what's after

CRASH

--the

X

s replace the letters in programming code. We are living in the time after the crash.

What's the idea behind the chapter "Programming Pornography"?

Stewart Home and Florian Cramer did that chapter. They are both very different and strange. It's about how porn would look in programming language--it was more of a joke, actually. Stewart Home is known for his pranks--he has written one of the most important studies about neologism, but also wrote reviews about himself and tried permenantly to manipulate the media. Florian Cramer is one of the heads of the Piet-Zwart Institute, where a lot of interesting things are going on. Many people did not take the text seriously, but it's still interesting.

Which chapters do you like the most?

My favorite isn't a modern one, but a text from Thomas de Quincy. You know his

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

?

Honestly, no.

Well, de Quincey led a very interesting life. He came from a wealthy family but lived the life of an early dandy prototype. His style was strong and layered. The printed excerpt is about collapsing, which has a completely different meaning in this context, of course. Apart from that…other authors,

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Otto Rössler

for example, write about their theories, about code, about concepts. The collapse of language, the end of physics.

Those are some very big phrases. "The collapse of language?"

Language connects things, code also. If you strip it down to that fact, both are the same.

But isn't this just a rehashed argument from Post-Structualism? One day codes will replace what we call "language?"

Maybe, but it's not about disappearing into a world of code or a matrix. Dont forget: maybe you can't see software, but nevertheless you need minerals from Africa for its "magic effects." Depending on whether you talk about Closed or Open Code, hardware is almost faster changing than the programs themselves. There is a certain laziness involved with this subject, because it's cheaper to produce new technology than to hire 100 programmers.

There are theories that every new piece of technology saves as much as time as it costs us to learn how to use it, because of the complicated interface, so that the net result is plus or minus zero.

Ha ha, could be true.

As man using the interface has to act in accordance to it, does he change according to the interface?

That's definitely the case, but these interfaces are made by man too. It's a kind of interdependency.

What do you think about the internet and how the permanent interconnection of mankind will change us?

We are not really interested in the internet--in the beginning it was exciting, but in the meantime it exploded and turned into a big shitpile of ads.

I guess you're right.

JULIANE LIEBERT