Code_II
CyberEbonics and a return to Code_v1.0
In the research project entitled ‘Code’, I proposed the metaphorical use of the term ‘Patois’ to describe the array of inter-language that enable communication between human users and computers. These are commonly referred to as ‘scripting languages’.
These languages, sit at various points between the binary machine language of signal 'presence' vs signal 'absence' (ones and zeros) with which computers monitor, generate, store and exchange information, and the massive array of human language systems, linguistic, symbolic, visual, sonic and much else besides. These inter-languages range from the most ‘verbose’ (a term in this instance used to describe coding languages that most closely mimic spoken ‘human’ language) to deep level languages that exist in closer proximity to 'machine code', and are packed into a dense array of terms, number and symbols that require expert knowledge to use and decipher.
‘Code’ took as its starting point a coding language known as ‘Lingo’, that provided the interactive programming functionality within a software package called ‘Macromind Director’ (later becoming Adobe Director). This software package was widely used by artists and interactive designers in the 1990s, including key works within my own practice.
Lingo was a ‘verbose object-orientated scripting language’ developed by John H. Thompson in 1989 for inclusion in the release of MacroMind Director version 2.2, and remained core to the programme (in an evolving array of ‘flavours’) until Director was finally removed from the market by Adobe in February 2017.
It was John Henry Thompson's celebrated status as a ground-breaking software engineer of Jamaican descent (born in Hackney London and later moving to the USA) that first sparked my interest in examining ‘Lingo’ in relationship to notions of ‘Patois’. It is important to point out that whilst this research recognised the distinctions between ‘Patois’ and ‘Creole’ on the one hand, and more informal (and often derided) forms such as ‘Pidgin’ and regionalised forms of vernacular ‘slang’ on the other, all of these terms could be useful as metaphorical models for computer programming languages.
The metaphor starts with 'machine code' positioned as the ‘indigenous’ language system of the computer. It is a ‘mother’ or ‘native tongue’, that it can use to communicate freely with other similar computers. When an encounter occurs with a ‘non-indigenous outsider’ who uses a completely different language system, an evolving assemblage of terms, signs, words and gestures need to be negotiated, often borrowing elements from both languages. These 'Creole' or 'Pidgin' forms can hover at varying levels of proximity to the ‘pure’ language forms from which they borrow elements. Alternatively, they can develop as ‘translators’, communicating across linguistic boundaries to reprocess or ‘compile’ information between language systems (and other creole forms).
CyberEbonics.
‘Ebonics’ is a term originally coined in 1973 by African American psychologist Robert Williams and consolidated within his 1975 book ‘Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks’
“Ebonics may be defined as (representing).. the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendants of African origin. It includes the various idioms, patois, argots, idiolects, and social dialects of black people" especially those who have adapted to colonial circumstances. Ebonics derives its form from ebony (black) and phonics (sound, the study of sound) and refers to the study of the language of black people in all its cultural uniqueness.”
In many ways this was an attempt to finesse and consolidate discourses around the various patois, creoles and vernacular spoken forms developed by peoples of African descent in the ‘West’ as 'interlanguages', combining elements of ‘heritage’ linguistic forms with the need to navigate spaces dominated by the language systems of European colonisers.
In my project ‘Robot Bodies’, I attempt to argue that within a range of key science fiction texts, the 'machine' (the Robot, the Computer etc) exists in the place of the (black) ‘other’, sometimes acting as servant, and at others as monstrous threat to the human (white) ‘norm’.
Within this metaphor, the programming language used to bridge the linguistic gap between the machine ‘other’ and human ‘norm’ could be termed as a ‘(cyber)Ebonic’ form (to borrow and distort the Williams term).
John Henry Thompson’s ‘Lingo’ becomes a useful symbolic space as a programming language emerging from a computer program developed by a software engineer of African Caribbean descent, and as such the original project ‘Code’ intended to explore ‘Lingo’ as its core subject.
This project acts in tandem with the ‘excavation’ and ‘recovery’ of a range of my art projects from the late 1990s which were programmed using ‘Lingo’ within MacroMind (Adobe) Director including the 1997 CD-Rom ‘Relocating the Remains’. As mentioned above, Director was removed from the market by Adobe in 2017, and ‘Lingo’ can be defined as an ‘archaic’ or ‘dead language’ with little or no contemporary usage beyond acts of ‘nostalgic’ excavation of legacy projects.(See ‘how the futurist archive became archaic’)