Mods, Glitching, Softbending
Software Art
- electronic art specifically about the code.
For example, see the show CODE at the Whitney artport site.
also, runme.org.
- art that uses or deconstructs the structure, rhetoric, or appearance of 'normal' software.
- mods: modifications to existing software, particularly games
Glitching, or SoftBending
- Remember, everything is data
- you can open any kind of file in Photoshop (use RAW format). text, programs, sound, video, anything.
- of course, some things are more flexible than others.
- glitching is interesting to think about in terms of Claude Shannon's Theory of Information, which is specifically about signal/noise ratios in electronic communication systems, but has been heavily influential beyond just the realm of engineering.
Modding Mac Applications
The easiest way to modify a Mac application is just to edit the resources. Back in the Mac Classic era, this was done with the beautiful little tool ResEdit, and now can be done with the Interface Builder that comes free with Xcode on the OSX install DVD. This lets you change menus, windows, dialogs, text, icons; though not the actual behavior of the program.
Modding Firefox
With open-source applications, you can simply change part of the source code for the program and recompile it to change what it does. Firefox is one application that's even easier; it's highly extendable and is designed to be easy to write plugins for. One plugin, Greasemonkey, takes it one step further and lets you write Javascript code that hooks into the actual page display on the browser side. To do this, you'll need Firefox 1.5 and Greasemonkey. See greasemonkey.movdev.org.
Examples