0xm0t0k0's RE & Cryptography lab

What remains of the creative process?

1.1 “The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!” — Mikhail Bakunin. Wrongly attributed to one sexist Pablo Picasso, this saying has had a life of its own in the minds of creatives such as myself for the past few modern and postmodern decades. Let us not dwell on that particular prophetenzitat any more, as we will approach a fundamentally new way of seeing things later in this text.

1.2 Rational refers to the quality of being based on reason or clear thought, often implying that decisions or explanations are logical and reasonable. Let us externalize our rationality then, into a logical set of instructions, namely an algorithm, that we will employ to destroy (create) [in the form of malware] the scientific approach to art, through the digital control of its host [any device], without the lens of reappropriation and pastiche. What’s more, we will find a way to insert ourselves into the biopolitics of the cyberspace and recreate a revolutionary subjectivity inside the “cyber”-sphere (cyber as in the greek “κυβερνώ” = to govern).

1.3 Let’s talk ideas. The idea, then, is an artwork, with no inherent aesthetic qualities other than predetermined mathematical abstraction of its hosts way to produce human visuals (e.g graphics), a “benign” malware (a be-ware?). The idea is then, not inherently one predetermined set of rules, but a dynamic “polymorphic” set of rules recursively created through interaction with other hosts. We will dive into this later.

1.4 “Algorithmic transparency is less about www and more about DNA: always simple instructions boiled down to their most bare-bones skeletal frame. An algorithm has an anatomy that is hidden and composed and ordered and structured and pure so pure so damn pure that when I see one, I want to etch it into my skin and bones and type it into the mus1cles and registers of the cache.” https://ic3qu33n.fyi/about/artistStatement/ Never in my life have I related more to an abstraction of feelings, organised by rational thought, and explaining my own relation to algorithms. I too like to see the anatomy of the algorithms, disassembling them into pieces until i understand why everything works the way it does in that digital mathematical universe we have created where lambda calculus and particles live in and talk in a highly organised way that we have created. Where everything stems from boolean arithmetic, where a NAND and a XOR and other logic gates rule, where everything stems from and to a pointer and when everything goes well as all returns to 0;

1.5 In this information era, what can be thought of Art is more of a logical system of interconnected works, all producing value for the art market, rather than a set of aesthetic rules. We then have a network of artists, hence a network of works. Long after the “banal”, the modernity and its successor post-modernity, we now reside in a complex array of networks, a new kind of banal, as in everything is predictable but at the same time everything is boring. Choose your network(s), expand it indefinitely ((what is the ideology of a cancer cell?)we’ll circle back later), and reap the rewards. In the vast world of networks, nothing can be perceived outside of them, as well as, nothing can be thought of as existing outside a network. Let us introduce then argument 1.1 , and lets create the data packet called “a work of art” inside the network that is in transit, namely the small network of the art institution it is housed in and the vast array of networks that constitute the art market. As new generations exist in this sterilised state, let us try to infect them, one last time, trying to leave our digital remnant behind, in hope of a “better” future.

2.2 While “uselessness” in art has become an increasingly important signifier of art-value, cultural-value and so on, our aim is to subvert this construct by following its logical endpoint in making the host of the art work inherently hyper-productive, overflowing it’s own artistic “excess”, becoming the cancerous DNA. Either way, what if the long-lost “avant garde” that everyone reminisces of, resides in some perverse over-functioning and overproduction of the signifiers-artworks produced for the institutions of art and their respective markets-networks, producing new data-packets as malicious post-ideological factories of human psychological constructs turning them into speakers-facilitators and activating passive receivers of this vast network mediated by increasingly fictitious “artistic” non-value values.

2.3 In making people think of art as a complex phenomenon, we get the same result as if it were a complex phenomenon. Simulating a network of art is as simple as infecting its hosts, which are of course the viewers. A theory of contemporary art thought is its mapping of the network of art. The network of art has its tools borrowed by economics, hence by mathematics, hence by logic so there must be a logic that one can corrupt/exploit. The essence of hacking is, of course, understanding a system so well one can basically manipulate it to do whatever one likes.

3.4 “Art has become quotation, reappropriation, and gives the impression of an indefinite resuscitation of its own forms.” (Baudrillard J., The Conspiracy of Art,)

“As the system perfects itself, it promotes integration and exclusion. In the computer field, for example, the more the system is perfected the more people are left out.” (Baudrillard J., The Conspiracy of Art,)

3.5 What Baudrillard foresaw is that when a system tries to reach perfect conditions, that’s where it breaks. To propose a “misunderstanding” of the famous Incompleteness Theorem by Kurt Gödel, the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency because it always will be based on things it doesn’t even understand, an ever expanding complexity of networks that maintain the system smooth, and when a network is externalized, or better, when a system is observed, then it loses its predetermined path, given that its predetermined path is one that we haven’t yet observed or formulated. What quantum physicists call “The observer effect”.

4.0 How does this all add up? With Donald Knuth, we understood that programming is one of the many art forms that our species has created, in his book “The Art of Programming”. What’s more, with Baudrillard, we got a crash course on Networks that not even the most sophisticated theoretical networking courses could give us. Foucault’s concepts also offers us a good basis on how huge masses of people are controlled and gives us some fundamental notion of power. Cyber is the future, the war is already being fought, and we are losing it. Let us create malware in all forms in every host, human or not. What’s left now is to let out our elegant set of instructions to any host and create a recursive destruction of the digital networks that host resides in.

4.1 Recursion, often, creates elegant algorithms. What we mean by elegant is rather a way of solving a problem, by means of algorithmic instructions, in both an interesting way and in a way that’s easy for our human brain to visualize. One technique we will implement is called recursion, a very common way to implement so called “elegant” solutions. The definition of a recursive function is one that, as part of its execution calls itself, until it reaches its base case; in our case, total control of the host. The technique is similar to the mise-en-abyme term used in art. In every human aspect you can find it as demonstrated by D. Hofstadter in Godel, Bach, Escher. What’s more its behaviour will be anti-social, like the author, making the artwork a living breathing piece of its mind. Get close and it’s destroyed. Stay away.