Here there are some interesting problems and focus:

"Whether a prize for an artwork/works/networks should go to any soft-
ware at all (beyond art-specific software projects) is another ques-
tion."

By confusing metalanguage and language, by making transfer from
aesthetism(philosophy) to enginering, we are getting off the original
sense of every art concept.
No linguist is able today to say that informatic language which are
constituting any software are a language, regarding lingusitic analysis
they are metalanguage for one specific reason which is: that no computer
is now able to have their consciousness, specially about their language
mutations. If they would, they would make computer psychoanalysis
regarding their way of thinking ;-)
We are not on this point...

Linux is a software developped by various people who are trying to make it
better. It is free to break microsoft market. It is operating in more and
more companies. We can say also that Linux Olswald had no artistic
intention but technical intention. He's an engineer.
So how can we say that something is an artwork when the origin of this
object is not and is not coming from this intention ?
May be by using the same way that Duchamp has done by saying:
this is a ready made.
Today no artist has done this gesture regarding this.
I heard only from only one field that linux is art: not artist,
philosopher, critics, but from engineer and staff from computer industry.

Here we are.
We may be careful about this kind of confusion, it is looking a kind of
stalinism socialism realism:
cutting from all the environment to concentrate on one utopian field based
on sharing, equality and freedom.
in our case computer world.
If linux is art, he may deal with art world also and art definition, but
it don't ....
Linux has became just a symbolf of a new kind of utopian modernism based
on teknè, by pushing up the modernism logical by cutting off the
environment he's coming from ....
It is really symptomatic to see engineer to speak about art.
A new totalitarism is born from Microsoft:
the power is not coming from money, political but from engineering. to
this totalitarism Linux has became a kind of a resistance symbol. It is
dealing more with politics than art.

We know who did confusion between art and politic ! remind this ....


Valery Grancher
vgranger@imaginet.fr
http://nomemory.tsx.org
http://www.united-art-space.com


Alan Sondheim wrote:

> Linux is art, not becomes it receives a prize, but because of the
> aesthetics, in the collaboration, in the organism whose parts are
> naked and self-evident even to those reasonably unfamiliar with
> operating systems, in the ability to make and wear it like a skin
> crossing the world where the Net continues to flow and stumble.
> Linux in shell mode is a potential field that appears to follow
> the thinking of the user; it doesn't appear (unless one wants it
> to) like a carapace or graphic superstructure. It's film-theory '68
> all over again, the parameters and articulation of the system vis-
> ible, the artifice revealed, the imaginary laid out in palimpsest.
> What's more, it's not only easy to configure (in the sense of
> speech), but also to program (using shell scripts, 'dialog,' etc.);
> if art is connected in any way with representation, one might say
> that the interactive representation of linux is, if not art, at
> least fashion, wearable, at problematic variance with capital (punk
> for example), useful for intruders, the mouth and tongue for some
> of the rest of us.
>
> In other words, for some of us, linux _has_ changed the language.
>
> Whether a prize for an artwork/works/networks should go to any soft-
> ware at all (beyond art-specific software projects) is another ques-
> tion.
>
> Alan
>
> Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
> Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
> Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm

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