Andy Deck

bardcast

I finally decided to figure out where the furtherfield.org site housed projects of its artists. It was here where I ran across Andy Deck. He has been using the internet to create work since 1994. I was hoping to see his Retrospective show, but the link for it had been deleted. After looking through furtherfield.org a little more I was able to find some of his projects. It was the description for Bardcode that intrigued me. Andy talks about how the music industry and Sony started blocking the download of music and the copying of movies. This limited the “free speech” of computer languages.

This statement of the project, lead me to believe that the project would somehow incorporate downloading. Instead I was sent through a maze of agreement policies and eventually to links that bring up words in pop up windows. From the looks of the hyperlink (which is actually dozens strung together) the words should make up a message when you click the links in order. Unfortunately they do not. This left me feeling frustrated at the project as a whole because it does not seem to have a rational behind it. It is only later that I was able to realize that the inability of making sense of the words is what Andy was implying by free speech of the computer. It is something that we all should be able to read and comprehend because computers are all around us and yet the majority of computer users do not have a clue how any of the code makes computers function.

Originally by Stewart from AVT 280 on March 4, 2008, 8:00pm