Codelab exists since 1999 in Berlin. »Understanding code as an artistic material« is one of the key preoccupations of the programmer and artist Ulrike Gabriel, co-founder and now manager of the laboratory. In the meantime, Codelab has left its first site in the former »Ostbäckerei« in Berlin-Mitte and has been resides in Podewil since the beginning of the year.

»Even if Podewil does not become a high-profile media laboratory in the future,« says the media curator of the Podewil and artistic director of the Transmediale Andreas Broeckmann, »it is still striving to improve both the media arts infrastructure and its own production conditions in the medium-term, with the cooperation of other Berlin institutions.«

Codelab has so far managed to remain a small, self-governing unit independent of public funding.

netzspannung.org: The Codelab documentation states that it came about as a logical next step in the development of the new electronic media arts. What does this mean?

Ulrike Gabriel: Codelab has grown. All artists of the Codelab underwent a long process during which particular working methods developed and a point of view emerged where the generative systems we are working on during the process are seen as the common denominator on which the lab can function.

The consequence of using generative systems is that you can »bolt them on«, so to speak, treat them as materials, and then work with the computer as a medium. »Multiple media«, which are just variations of display forms, are not of interest here. The focus is on what lies behind. As materials, you can reduce them down to the electronics and then of course down to the software which controls these electronics. The next logical step is that the artist understands hardware and software quite literally »gets to grips« with them and knows how to use them freely. He is also an engineer. When you attempt to define the material e.g. as programming, this material automatically includes the displays of all programmable applications. The focus of interest shifts. A further logical step when you look back at history is to investigate this process. The distinctions have not yet really been made. It is good to define them.

When did Codelab come into existence?

The common denominator was a founding spirit. We moved into the first lab in the former »Ostbäckerei« in Autumn 99. In the meantime various interlinked threads are running in parallel alongside the projects in the Codelab.

Martin Carlé and I developed Codelab as a free learning environment last year.At the moment we have one student. We will continue developing our cooperation with universities and networking with other labs.Since 99 there has been a cooperation with the Technical University in Eindhoven - students can undertake practical placements within arts projects that will count as part of their studies. Last autumn we made the first Codelab workshop at an exhibition in Eindhoven. We exhibited the workshop as an installation and worked on the process together with the students there. That is the third thread - a travelling lab which can be set up anywhere in the form of installations or a temporary laboratory and communicate precisely this process of »artistic engineering«, that is, being both engineer and artist at one and the same time.

What does the cooperation in Codelab, the generation of different work processes, look like?

The projects are the real generators of the overall dynamic. A project is something which has an author, an artist, representing it. It is a generative process in itself. The projects are not planned in advance and then carried out technically, but rather all projects are process-governed and ask questions to which perhaps no final answer will be found. During development, new questions always arise which generate more new cooperation. In his project, the artist represents the motor for an entire generative system. Naturally, people cooperate with each other. Another area includes studies which arise from the projects and accompany them.

What does that now mean for you personally?

Although I am, if you like, the underlying core of the project, the project itself is an open zone. I work in other projects and involve others in my own. It is not a closed shop. It is inspiring and great fun.

What resources does Codelab have to fall back on?

Up till now, Codelab has been self-supporting thanks to the projects of the people working there. The school has also been self-supporting, being financed by student grants. Only now can the project area be defined and it needs a financial plan. It would not have made sense for Codelab's development to proceed in any other order. The projects should have a solid basis so that time at Codelab can be used exclusively for development. At the moment I am envisaging a situation whereby every artist receives a grant and a starting budget for the project which then supports itself as it develops.

Which projects are currently taking place in Codelab?

In his »Data Scapes« project, Pepe Jürgens deals with the glut of information about different philosophies and ways of filtering this. Christoph Kummerer is developing network art projects for extremely small bandwidths. In his »Kaleidoscopic Universe« project, Sandro Canavezzi deals with simulations of mirrorings which generate and organise information. The »Independent Artist« project from Francis Wittenberger has an autonomous high-performance robot as its subject, whose behaviour results from a combination of hereditary structures, conceptual dependency and predictable logic. I myself am continuing my work on »Sphere«, where authentic reality is viewed as a hybrid made up of digital and physical reality.

How do you see the role of Codelab in Podewil?

Codelab is »in residence« in Podewil. I think it is the first time that technologies have been applied to Podewil in this way, and also the first time that a discourse has taken place on coding in the context of art. A new infrastructure is emerging from this which will also be available to other artists at Podewil in the future.

Do you at Codelab also want to take part in the Podewil programme?

Using current projects as a basis we will take up spin-offs from these and show these publically in the Podewil club. For example, for Sandro's »Kaleidoscopic Universe« we will invite a mathematician to give a workshop and lecture on the subject of »symmetry«. This will be the first time in the public eye, as Codelab has been a closed studio up till now. We will try to convey in an exciting way everything up-to-date and interesting that the Codelab generative system produces.

Codelab places emphasis on creating artistic software and hardware, where programming as an artistic material is viewed as an important component.

As long as computers, software, code and compilers have existed, there have been artists who see the code for these technologies as a material in itself. But generally it has not been worked with confidently. Up until now, this discourse has still not been explicit. A break is occurring in the fictional pact between the user (who could also be the programmer) and the code he has in front of him. This fictional pact can only be broken when the nature of the material is understood. This is precisely the common denominator that has always existed, ever since artists began to work with technologies. For the first time ever there was the category »artistic software« at the Transmediale. You could see that this form of art was not seen as such in its own right. At Codelab it's different.

You were a member of the »artistic software« jury at the Transmediale. The individual jury members had their own interpretations of this term. I would very much like to hear your definition of »artistic software«. What do you understand by this?

For me, programming itself is quite explicitly an artistic material. This understanding has developed over the course of my work. For me, programming involves working with the material and the process in the same way as painting. That also applies to software and the code. It simply leads to a different result. It starts from a fundamentally different point. The focus of interest shifts, leading to a specific way of looking at the systems. Dealing with the code is the key factor here. I think that it is not possible to do artistic research in the information society without cracking its codes. You must unravel these codes and engage with them. If you do not achieve this, then you are simply looking at an illusory world. How can you describe a world if you cannot crack its codes. [...]

I envisage an authentic reality consisting on the one hand of its physical, natural reality and on the other of all the worlds of information. But both together makes up an authentic reality - both are real. It is no longer about whether something translates between the virtual and the real, but rather about the fact that they form a single unit. Everything is authentic. Perhaps you do not understand one part, so you explain it to yourself as a black box that can yield something capable, for example, of causing a stock market crash. Or you can try to understand what is being done when working with these codes. It is precisely at these interfaces that you should carry out research and try to understand how it works.

What does Art OS mean to you?

It means both Art Open Source and Art Operating System. Art OS was a project suggestion. The idea was to collaboratively program a system via an open source platform, i.e. each person was to program one module, the »shifter« of a machine which provides a live commentary on events at a congress, listens to what is being said and develops a stance. It would be a good opportunity to network the programming artists and would be exciting to see what works it generates. An interesting code-resource archive would also be created.

How do you see the connection with today's Codelab? Was the Art OS project suggestion a forerunner of Codelab's collaborative way of working today?

I wouldn't describe it as a forerunner - but we will definitely be implementing it.

Could you compare the differences between media-artistic production or working conditions in Japan with those in Germany, drawing on your experiences of cooperation with the Canon ARTLab Tokyo ('Perceptual Arena',1993) andthe Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt ('Terrain 01',1993).

We developed the cooperation with the Canon ArtLab here in Germany and worked with the Japanese engineers who were in the ArtLab at the time. The Canon ArtLab has grown in the meantime, in the sense that it has established itself within Canon and has a large amount of freedom for the projects taking place there. The cooperation happened a long time ago, but I think it was a relatively new occurrence for artists to go so deeply into the material. And it was certainly also interesting for ArtLab to have artists and engineers working together on the development of the software. I worked with Bob O'Kane at that time. Together, we defined this artist/engineer relationship. Those who work more at the technological level also explore the artistic level equally profoundly and vice versa. This is a stepping stone in the project. It facilitates a process-oriented way of working in which the material is »kneaded« jointly.

Was it the same at the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt?

Francis Wittenberger and Bob O'Kane were also at the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt. Artists such as Michael Saup and Akke Wagenaar were also »coding« at that time. It was a period of 2-3 years when new things were emerging and being implemented. This institute was a very small, dynamic and »uninstitutionalised« body. It was like a UFO - it therefore also disappeared quickly in this form.. But it was a very inspired and intense time, I think, for everyone who worked there or visited it from all over the world.

How do you see the production opportunities for media artists in Germany today? And what need do you think there is for production opportunities?

The production opportunities are good. There is no longer any need for a high- performance computer and networking is no problem either. You can use any small PC provided you understand how it works. I think the need for expertise is more important. Expertise is a rare commodity. There are two fundamentally different ways of doing this. The first way, and the most conventional, is to have staff who can solve technical problems; the other is expertise in the sense of understanding what needs to be done and created, i.e. a source is also needed.

At the current time there is much discussion about how to draw up curricula at media academies. Wouldn't it be interesting to communicate the idea of the 'code as an artistic material' in this environment in order to propose this as the way to teach the subject in future?

Yes of course. For example, artists ran into great difficulties at one school for media art by running a sniff program because there was no system operator there at the weekend and they had to manage on their own. Instead of this situation being acknowledged, they were falsely accused of being hackers. This is probably down to the fact that this area is still not part of the syllabus. This shows that schools are still completely taken in by illusions of networked applications and their fabricated laws. How can students develop a free outlook under these circumstances?

Quite apart from codes as an artistic material, and simply because there is so much superficial change, it pays to go deeper. For example, the 'C' language is still taught from a book from 1978. Nothing has changed, except on the media surface and on the periphery. There will be no final technology course, the whole area is a dynamic field which changes all the time. When you have learnt a language, it is easy to learn another one. To take a longer term view, ways must be found to acquire knowledge. This will not happen in two years of learning or study, but may happen in thirty years of working with technology in a process-oriented way. I think that art and media colleges first need electronics and programming courses. Students need the codes on both the hardware and software levels in order to give them the freedom they need. Perhaps the next actual change will be the quantum computer, if it really does work.

Thank you for the interview.

Participants:
Ulrike Gabriel, programmer und artist

For netzspannung.org:
Andrea Helbach, Gabriele Blome

Berlin, March 10, 2001