Thesis Research

Source: Internet Art

pg. 160-163: “Finally, not all software art exists in a functional state; some of it remains purely propositional. Moving away from the explorations of functionality and visualization in the previously discussed works, Graham Harwood’s London.pl (2001) exists in an even less objectified form than an application: it is simply a script in Perl (a language designed for processing text). ...

“London.pl consists of a program that calculates the collective lung capacity of children in London who have been, in the artist’s words, ‘beaten, enslaved, fucked, and exploited to death’ since 1972 (at the time of Britain’s Industrial Revolution). The vital statistic is used to time a scream—the collective scream of these children—to be broadcast in London in the hope of redressing what that artist cites as an ‘imbalance of imagination and innocence’. The consequences of the Industrial Revolution are also alluded to in quotations from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are remixed in the code along with the artist’s premise and the Perl commands. In this work, code calculates the forman consequences of the artist’s prescription for England. Engineering and functionality are designed but sidelined, and the work instead draws attention to its socially inspired internal content. It is the concept that gives the work its strength, not its materiality.”