Language, Life, Code

Software increasingly determines what can be designed, constructed and even how design occurs. Here, Alexander R Galloway and Eugene Thacker present a series of investigations with the collaborative Radical Software Group (RSG). Their practice examines the nature of software code as a form of language. Addressing theoretical issues regarding meaning and representation, they argue for thinking more abstractly and generatively about language, and propose a new, or liberated, computer language in which the representational determinations implicit to any software are geared towards innovation in communication and design. By rewriting the software that allows for the transmission and translation of knowledge across previously discrete fields of production, programming allows for new and productive cross-pollination. Indeed, programming becomes a new site of design that enfolds disciplines not traditionally seen as part of the creative processes of innovation.