Your Wish Is My Command

Your wish is my command 2004 | Installation
Medium: electrical typewriter, paper, ink, electronics & software
Dimensions: 15.7 x 6.7 x 13.8 inch

Installation with electrical typewriter. The typewriter endlessly types the sentence 'Your wish is my command', but in the process, it mixes up the words of the sentence.

Imagine my shock when I found out how most computer programmers actually did their work. It wasn't like that at all. There were these things called "programming languages". The programming languages didn't have much to do with what you were actually working on. You had to write out all the instructions for the program in advance, without being able to see what any of them did. How could you know if they did what you wanted? If you didn't get the syntax exactly right (and who could?) nothing would work. Once you had the program, and you tried it out, if something went wrong, you couldn't see what was going on in the program. How could you tell which part of the program was wrong? Wait a second, I thought, this approach to programming couldn't possibly work! | Henry Lieberman, Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA

Typing replaced the distinctive character of written language with a string of mechanically produced data points. And, as Friedrich Kittler argues, this “irruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word,” constitutes a pivotal moment in the history of modernity when “writing and soul fall apart.” | source: http://235bowery.s3.amazonaws.com/exhibitionlinks/56/GITM_Themes.pdf

Your Wish Is My Command
exhibition 'Met Stip' at GEM, Den Haag

08/04/2006 t/m 25/06/2006