#the wrong

ZipIt, a project that appeared as part of The Wrong’s "Scripting the Other” pavillion, warns the user:

Before clicking download disable all preventive settings of your browser and now do the same with any anti virus programs running! These steps will help you get the huge potentialities on unzipping the bomb bellow!

When one opens the generated zip file (careful to not actually unzip it), ten folders are revealed inside, labelled 10-1 through 10-10. Each of these holds a set of ten folders: 9-1 through 9-10, to 8, to 7, a countdown leading to the final set of text files, each named zero.txt. All together, there are 10 ^ 10 of these zero files, or 10 billion; each one is 100MB in size, and completely composed of repetitions of the number 0. Expand these to full size and you get 1EB of data: an exabyte, equivalent to 1024 petabytes, where a petabyte is itself 1024 terabytes -- enough to fill anyone’s consumer harddrive (in 2017 anyway) with zeros. As promised, the potentialities were revealed to be huge -- and all packed into a 29.6K file.

“My practice was always based on the difficulty of having to live in a world where I don’t understand anything.” - Annie Abrahams

The wonderfully strange Apparatus_is {Other-s}, performed online on November 1st, was part of both The Wrong biennale and the Reading Club, an ongoing series by Abrahams and Emmanuel Guez. It began as a code poem, written by Abrahams specifically for the event, and evolved over 20 minutes, as a group of invited “readers” introduced their own changes live for an online audience. These readers included computational poet / author Nick Montfort, artist / coder Renee Carmichael, Emmanuel Guez (co-creator of Reading Club), and “nanoloop musician and javascript nerd” Zombectro (co-creator of surreal o/s Windows93). Their edits were differentiated by color, but it was not announced which color corresponded to which reader, leaving the freedom of psuedo-anonymity in the public performance.

Meanwhile, online bystanders carried a parallel discussion in a live chat window, which became a second kind of performance, reacting to and augmenting the main discussion. Where the main text’s pseudo-code was primarily C++-like, with passages in markup and scripting languages, the comment window accumulated its own mishmash of natural languages, with overlapping conversations in English, French, Dutch, and less familiar (to me) languages. These contributions reacted to the edits as they occurred and became a parallel text, which Abrahams and Guez describe as “an interpretive arena in which, by an intertextual game, each reader plays and foils the writing of the others.”