NODE13 The Rules

The third edition of NODE Forum for Digital Arts reflected on the topic of ‘The Rules’ and their ambivalent role in our life, work and creative processes.

In the last decades the world of code and the rules of computing have become an autonomous medium of its own right. As an addition to earmarked applications, these digital machines unfold their character and influence in their own sphere, which only sometimes manifests itself in what we call the ‘real world’. We observe the world ‘as we know it’ as irreversibly changed and restructured by the rules of the computer. Yet its us that designs using software and its us designing software itself.

Read all about the festival theme

 

Program

Next to the Symposium the Festival offered a an exhibition which investigated the topic from an artistic viewpoint and an extensive workshop program focused on hands on exchange.

 

Voices

 

  • „NODE13 actively explores philosophical and conceptual questions arising out of the melting pot of current digital art practices and creative coding as it did in previous incarnations (...) as well as the many pertinent questions arising from the artistic use of computers, software and code.“

    Data is Nature

  • „It’s not only a forum for presenting, but also for the production of arts, ideas, and viewpoints (...) inviting some of the most established producers of computer and software arts.“

    Jetzt Kultur
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Documentary

“A hundred different people of different disciplines, all connecting to one master node.”
– Geoffrey Lillemon, artist.

 
 

NODE13’s
festival theme

We can observe that everything dependent on computer rules is being transformed by them. Software leaves its initial medium and changes the way we structure knowledge, the way we produce food, interact and organise ourselves politically. New software produces new behavioural patterns. It seems that the regularity of software seeps into the ‘real world’, thereby changing it irreversibly.

From this perspective perception in a digital society changes: The world appears as an object of a computer-centred subjectivity, which shapes this very world-object according to its own rules. From this point of view rules appear as the all-connecting element, as a common language.

 

Within the exhibition and symposium we sought out to investigate code and software as a shapeable, cosmoplastic material. In collaboration with artists, scholars and technologists the exhibition and the symposium inquired the correlation of working with ‘rules’ of the computer and the transformative processes in our society.

We discover an interrelationship between the practical, aesthetic work with the computer and the alteration of our reality. This implies a huge responsibility when working with digital tools. ‘Generative design’ is not only a question of aesthetics and the search for a new ‘operating system society’ but a question of politics.

Thinking of rules as shapeable, cosmoplastic material is not new but since the predictions of its early years (cybernetics) and the ‘practical illustrations’ of the 2000’s a natural interpenetration of reality and digital rules has been established, which gives new arguments to the discourse.

 

In two days theorists and internationally renown artists discussed the rules of the digital world and their influence on other sets of rules – may it be in society, biology or art. Which autonomous creative powers are prevalent in computers? How do they change our understanding of all the areas that are in a process of transformation by computer technologies?

In addition to the philosophy of digital media, the focus was on the relationship between code and consciousness, the theory of the ‘New Aesthetic’, the potentials of synthetic biology and the shaping of public opinion via social networks (liquid democracy).

NODE13 tried not to limit ‘The Rules’ to one perspective, but aimed at facilitating an interdisciplinary take on the topic: Through a scientific and theoretical investigation via the symposium and an accompanying exhibition, reporting aesthetically on the conditions of life in a regulated world.