// RUN
Collaborating with technology, or at least supplanting some of our own creative capacity, requires a setting of processes and rules. As humans, we speak of rules that are ‘there to be broken’.
> Message SCORE001 >
:looks akin to a soundwave, or a topological map. Inspires and invokes movement, whether auditory or physical. Appears as if the words are the epicentre of a kinaesthetic energy, pulsing out in beams of symbolism and potential meanings. In the shape of potentiality – a distant message is transmitted, waiting for an answer.
[03] post 1349620762:
Unix timestamp decode: 2012-10-07 10:39:22
…
I feel so alone
…
Why won’t anybody respond[1]
> Interpret as Chaos_Map >
: a method of producing random and unrepeatable combinations, either as an interactive tool for users to create their own performance scores, or as an instruction guide on how this could be achieved.
One such Chaos Map, in mathematics, is that of ‘Alfred’s Cat’ which works on the basis of image manipulation, applying the same formula to manipulate the image repeatedly and sequentially. In effect this is akin to folding a piece of paper, folding it again, and so forth. Once it undergoes a certain number of manipulations, it eventually returns to the original image. This means that an output image is not true-random, but a randomised selection of one of its discrete manipulations (like a numbered frame of a movie). [2]
// DRIFT
In his book Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith brings into the digital arena the words of Guy Debord. Goldsmith suggests that Debord’s concept of Détournement ‘is a way of taking existing objects, words, ideas, artworks, media, etc., and using them differently so that they become entirely new experiences.’[3]
Via Debord’s related concept of the Dérive one ‘meant to renew the urban experience by intentionally moving through our urban spaces without intention, opening ourselves up to the spectacle and theater that is the city.’[4]
The original aim: to create an algorithmic score that instructs and provokes a web-based ‘derive’.
As familiar as our urban movements are, our cyber-ramblings tend to be equally prescribed … We could break out by randomly clicking from one link to another, viewing a Web surfing session as dérive.[5]
My virtual journey began on a website of ‘random generators’. A generator called ‘random biggest mysteries uncovered on reddit’ led me to a Reddit thread from 2012 in which a user nicknamed ‘f04cb’ filed multiple posts, containing fragments: a series of numbers, encrypted codes for other users to crack. Over the following 7 years many people contributed to the code-cracking exercise:
/u/Kylix: … post titles are in Unix Timestamp format. … It is possible that the columns/rows are jumbled up to throw off the decryption tool, or the “garbage” could be used to form a picture, but not confirmed.
… Yep … I think Base64 is the right code, but this person may be encrypting using a modified version of it. I’m also starting to think this could simply a substitution cipher … haven’t had time to test it yet…[6]
The number sequences themselves, or cryptographs, turned out to reveal hidden messages, such as those at the top of this page. In one specific post f04cb had used plain text, saying: ‘please help us’[7]. When viewing the source-code for this post’s webpage, a longer message could be found buried in nonsensical symbol and lettering, embedded within the webpage source-code[8] itself. This message was scrambled and obscured.
This ‘garbage’ was ‘used to form a picture’: the obscured text was appropriated as the basis for this score. I have less interest in figuring out how the text was scrambled, instead taking this as the basis for creating a new language, or code, of its own. The message was pasted into a word document, ‘slices’ of the message were randomly selected, then these sliced fragments were processed through the software’s inbuilt translate function. The findings were such that the symbols could be read as ‘English’ when translating into specific non-roman languages. As Bulgarian was the first I had discovered, by the law of dérive, this was the ‘language’ for re-coding the text. The Bulgarian phrases were then translated back into English, to produce a new détournement of these language-fragments.
Some human capacity of manipulation was then applied to achieve combinations that were more ‘aesthetically’ or linguistically pleasing, and a new ‘original’ text-image was crafted for ACT 1.0. It is important, perhaps, to consider that the project really began at the point where the ‘please help us’ post’s source-code was manipulated by a human user in the first place: in the layering of ‘human’ language within that of the abstracted mechanisms of the ‘View Source’ page itself. Once a new user comments on the post thread this also then appears within the source-code of that page.
A now-original code-message in ACT 1.0 is fixed. It is a fixed image that marks one possibility out of a multitude of others. The very slightest of alterations to the scope of each ‘slice’ of this (or the source) text can produce wildly different outcomes. The resulting performative text in ACT 2.0 is just one example of the possible outcomes thereafter.
The performance score includes an abstraction of its process, as an algorithm in itself, so that future readers might also ‘decode’ its making and perform detournements, producing their own versions of the text. Different slices can be selected, rearranged into different orders, or perhaps a combination of both. With the addition of parsing these through another compatible language, this project has vast but finite possibilities that can be manipulated by following its process (one might think of these as small acts of disrepair?).
Perhaps, hereafter, an algorithm could be generated to automatically run various combinations of these variables…
Translation_Error >
Without the assistance of chaos, Nedorazliva might never have come to be.
// REBOOT?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/6uqkwv/decryptions_of_all_messages/
[2] https://www.jasondavies.com/catmap/
[3] Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011), 38.
[4] Goldsmith, 36.
[5] Goldsmith. 41.
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/15lqsz/reddit_get_motivated_help_us_solve_this_mystery/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/115niq/1349729397/?sort=old
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/f04cb41f154db2f05a4a/comments/115niq/1349729397/?sort=old