Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COSE (Coded Secrets: Artistic Interventions Hidden in the Digital Fabric)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2025-02-28
COSE studies one of the most fragile and ephemeral sets of art forms to date: internet art. While such programmed digital artworks might have been created by artists embracing their quick passing, for many this is happening unintentionally to their oeuvre due to the harsh environment in which it is placed. Because of hardware and software obsolescence, and changes in access or services, these highly networked art pieces ‘break’. As they often reside in spots of the internet where most people won’t go looking, they often vanish before they are even detected by cultural institutions. COSE wants to make a difference and is dedicated especially to retrieving, analysing, documenting, and publishing internet art that can be hidden, withdrawn, or unrecognised in many ways. One objective is to conduct a survey to broaden the base of what forms of expression are known to the art world, to art historians, media scholars, conservators, curators, and all interested in consciously keeping at least part of our digital cultural heritage alive or in good memory. Part of the retrieved works become COSE’s case studies. With a variety of methods from forensics (software-assisted analyses), computer science (code reading), sociology (interviews), humanities (close reading, hermeneutics), and the arts (depiction of complex connections) we ‘x-ray’ the artworks to understand better how they are built, ways of how they can be compared beyond the monitor output, and how they are situated in the World Wide Web. Nobody has ever ‘seen’ that. This is why COSE’s interdisciplinary team evaluates existing software visualisation tools and elaborates its means to qualitatively analyse, depict and model these features from a predominantly humanistic point of view. Unearthing and visualising this sophisticated construct in its ecosystem will help add further appreciation to these art forms. COSE offers a novel view of the Internet through the lens of these artworks that reclaim the right to productively diversify Internet access and usage. This way it is also possible to shed light on the remarkable dynamics and changes happening in the Internet over time and discuss the repercussions for the artists.
The joint close reading of a first case study (JODI: .com, 2001, a seminal artistic web browser) focused on the inner workings of the computational artefact including components, relations, assets, dynamics, and impressions. COSE advanced what (often omitted) dimensions the humanities can have a critical look at and showed that some observations and surprising conclusions cannot be reached without digging that deep. Moreover, COSE shows what model building can look like in the humanities and how that can open multiple venues for different types of publications to disseminate one’s knowledge. The visualisations created, as well as their nesting in visualisation clusters or strings, are employed to support the argumentation of the study. COSE took several steps towards exploring metaphor-based pictorial language to exploit everyday intuitions for fostering understanding.
A narrowly defined, yet heterogeneous corpus – online graffiti – was studied to analyse and reveal their embeddedness in the specific online platforms. COSE is interested in how the online works are locally or regionally entangled with their ecosystem. The team explored topics like artistic browser extensions as graffiti, hacking as artistic interventions, works that bridge online and offline graffiti, and how digital graffiti on platforms like VR Chat relates to broader ecosystems of cultural production. This further solidified the project's contributions to understanding affordances and hidden behaviours in digital spaces.
On the methodological and technical side, another major achievement is the creation of COSE’s software tool Net Art Detector (NAD). This tool links the algorithmic behaviour of digital works with their phenomenological aspects, offering a new method for understanding how these artworks function both on a technical and experiential level. By visually mapping interaction flows, identifying hidden elements, and highlighting deprecated code, Net Art Detector equips researchers with the ability to study the complexities of net-based art in greater detail than ever before. Moreover, it helps track how their behaviour might change over time due to software updates or browser changes. This makes it a vital resource for qualitatively analysing the progression of the decay and for eventually preserving the integrity of these works.
A narrowly defined, yet heterogeneous corpus – online graffiti – was studied to analyse and reveal their embeddedness in the specific online platforms. COSE is interested in how the online works are locally or regionally entangled with their ecosystem. The team explored topics like artistic browser extensions as graffiti, hacking as artistic interventions, works that bridge online and offline graffiti, and how digital graffiti on platforms like VR Chat relates to broader ecosystems of cultural production. This further solidified the project's contributions to understanding affordances and hidden behaviours in digital spaces.
On the methodological and technical side, another major achievement is the creation of COSE’s software tool Net Art Detector (NAD). This tool links the algorithmic behaviour of digital works with their phenomenological aspects, offering a new method for understanding how these artworks function both on a technical and experiential level. By visually mapping interaction flows, identifying hidden elements, and highlighting deprecated code, Net Art Detector equips researchers with the ability to study the complexities of net-based art in greater detail than ever before. Moreover, it helps track how their behaviour might change over time due to software updates or browser changes. This makes it a vital resource for qualitatively analysing the progression of the decay and for eventually preserving the integrity of these works.
Most groundbreaking on many fronts is COSE’s case study on the .com browser. It resulted in a triple publication endeavour and took the form of a) a book with four chapters each featuring different aspects of the artwork, b) an interactive computer game with four rooms that involved compressing text and expanding modelling (Fig. 1), and c) a diagrammatic rendering of the game (Fig. 2) in a printed book which involved compressing the game impressions but keeping an exploratory pathway. Transforming a rigorous scholarly argumentation into an explorable multimedia environment is new territory in terms of academic knowledge transfer. By combining textual analysis with visual clusters and explorable components, the ‘walk-through book’ offers a dynamic and engaging way to document net-based art. It sets a new standard for how digital art can be documented and studied, ensuring that even intricate and fragile works remain accessible for future research. Here, and with further models built, COSE shakes publication standards. Broadening the dissemination, COSE is one of the few research groups that started venturing into exhibitions with their models. In February 2024, COSE curated a show featuring original ‘haptic’ research results with hands-on exploration opportunities to spread the fascination and make a point regarding the relevance of the studied phenomena (Fig. 3).
Having analysed software visualisation software (mainly developed by software engineers) for their usefulness in studying relatively small programs (artworks), COSE determined that they were hardly suitable to answer the questions posed in the art world or the humanities. Helping ourselves and others, COSE developed the tool Net Art Detector that visually maps the elements of the code and their interactivity. It enables researchers across disciplines to gain a deeper understanding of digital artefacts, especially when analysing generative or interactive works. The tool's flexible interface supports further knowledge transfer by making complex digital phenomena more accessible to scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. The Net Art Detector tool also helps researchers understand the deeper structures of net-based art, which often involves complex combinations of CSS, JavaScript, and other code layers. This innovation is crucial for documenting the fragility of these digital artefacts. This tool is of potential interest for a broad range of disciplines dealing with the Internet.
Having analysed software visualisation software (mainly developed by software engineers) for their usefulness in studying relatively small programs (artworks), COSE determined that they were hardly suitable to answer the questions posed in the art world or the humanities. Helping ourselves and others, COSE developed the tool Net Art Detector that visually maps the elements of the code and their interactivity. It enables researchers across disciplines to gain a deeper understanding of digital artefacts, especially when analysing generative or interactive works. The tool's flexible interface supports further knowledge transfer by making complex digital phenomena more accessible to scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. The Net Art Detector tool also helps researchers understand the deeper structures of net-based art, which often involves complex combinations of CSS, JavaScript, and other code layers. This innovation is crucial for documenting the fragility of these digital artefacts. This tool is of potential interest for a broad range of disciplines dealing with the Internet.