Portfolio of creative works: Intimacy of the Commandline

BACKGROUND The Intimacy of the Commandline is an oeuvre that explores the relation between poetry and technicity. It aligns with artist Yvonne Rainer (1999) who in ‘A Woman Who…Essays, Interviews, Scripts’ states: ‘My own forays into this territory border on a kind of banditry, the need for which has slowly evolved out of a dilemma imposed by subject matter.’ Despite the plethora of media theorists’ revelations (Kittler, Stiegler, Hayles), there is a gap in thinking through the larger philosophical, cultural-political implications of technicity in the field of performance art. The research progresses the productive relations between poetry, language and techne, drawing upon media theorist and artist Alan Sondheim’s (1999) notion that the ‘linux _has_ changed the language’. CONTRIBUTION The 3 works in this portfolio interrogate the meaning of natural language while exposing the ‘concealed control codes’ of the techno-cultural world. The performances featured live, executable codes in a Linux terminal to parse through the canonical text ‘A Room of One's Own’ by Virginia Woolf (1929), suggesting our limited ability to experience the unfathomable. The findings reveal the incongruity of both the polemics and the behaviour of which media theorists are critical of, which comes from the misconception that communication emerges from its context, rather than its form. SIGNIFICANCE The works were reviewed in the journal ‘Art+Australia,’ exhibited at ‘Anywhere III’ which was curated by expert peers from the New School (NY), and included at the refereed symposium ‘Women, Art and Feminism in Australia since 1970’ at Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne) led by art historian Prof. Anne Marsh.