The Nybble-Engine-Project

Climax.at is a new arts-machinima label of konsum.net labourers. This article is going to describe why we are interested in code as arts material and why we use realtime rendering techniques for live-events.

The Nybble-Engine-Project gained recently interest in the demoscene as well as in the classical arts-scene. Hereby some of the crisscross references of this work shall be given and some of its "background"-story shall be told. It is a story of processual work which started in the digital swamp of the early server years in the mid 90ies. In these days a net of small slacker-servers popped up. Each server was hooged up on the cheap existing telephone-copper wires and was connected to the next node just a few blocks away in good old Vienna. One of these servers was the konsum.net art-server.

The actual project under the label climax.at is permanently in process, it is constantly expanded and updated. In its whole conception it is a consequence of the modular work of artists done on the Konsum art-server. On Konsum the term art-server was defined by the use of machine-processes and data protocolls as material for the artwork. Every user on the server is also labourer, worker, producer. Cancel the user! was one of the first issue.net messages of Konsum. The machine-communications, data extracted and processed namely from commands such as traceroute a.o. were used then as source for sound generation and visualisation in 3D objects. The artwork became the creation of certain tools. These software-derivates "Konsum-labourers" always used for the live realtime-generation of aesthetic artefacts. They were demonstrated in live events, entiteled f.ex. traceroute2000. Hereby the connection of an aesthetic interest with the reflection of code-texts and protocolls was formulated.

The Konsum-principles are valid in the Nybble-Engine machinimas. As every machinima is a program as well as a movie, they are themeselves at the same time code and aesthetic artefact. The environment of each machinima is based on data-objects extracted from Konsum-Server-files. The Nybble-Engine is just one further step of the processual work of Konsum-labourers. Its issue is code, data, protocolls and its "circular and causal feedback mechanismes on the nervous system" (title of the first "macy-conferences"on Cybernetics in the 50ies in New York) of psycho-organic systems. For the climax-label it is important that all the Nybble-Engine machinimas have no analog input, they are just code-generated aesthetics. Its story is a reflection of the potentionalities of graphics engines and their effects as possible visual network applications and the topic of the principles of 3D representation in the "virtuelle, seen as le possible" as Felix Guattari says.

On the adress www.konsum.net some server-arts-experimentsof the Konsum-server founded in 1995 are documented. We were using slackwareand trying to practice the art of slacking as we interpreted it: doing things with certain software-protocolls that were not intended by the inventors. In short all the configurations on Konsum were focused on the non-conformist use of technologies. The server-selfdestruction-night at the V2 in Rotterdam was the first public event based on the server and its capabilities. Free accounts were given to everybody who logged in on a certain website. Then we invited the people to hack the server during the presentation at the DEAF96 Festival. The performance consisted of the intervention into the fight about the machine of the public on and offline. Everybody tried to gain the server back. Teletypes lurked on foreign consoles. So a big party onsite and online started. The consequence were friendships and contacts to open minded nerds: the background image script on konsum.net's intro site, displaying IP numbers and names of surfers, was a gift of one of the participants.

The interest for the "Here and Now" became evident in a series of live-events with changing collaborators. We were using VRML because of its possibilities in generating a complete scene out of code. The party display were realtime rendered 3D visuals and sounds. Script based objects were the basis for the Konsum DJ lectures from 96-98. We performed at international media- and arts-festivals, such as EMAF, DEAF, Ars Electronica, Siggraph, Web3D a.o. The next step towards networked realtime environments and aesthetic experiences in multivariate spaces was then Linx3D, see for that linx3d.konsum.net. We built a real big arcade console interface in the style of the early 80ies for this installation. The Linx3D–Arcade is now in the collection of the ZKM mediamuseum in Karlsruhe. See the console with builtin live ASCII-videocamera capturing the players face on linx3d.html. A Game Engine was used for setting up the multiplayer environment. It is displaying logfiles and data images. The exact same console was setup a ta second site at steirischer herbst in Graz. Finally four different exhibition sites were connected in realtime. This was 1999. Our love to console interfaces also became evident at the installation ASCII-Race. It was a real 2x4x12meters racing-court for remote controlled cars. On top of each car a video-cam was installed. The images were sent to a linux-server, which was translating them into a realtime ASCII-Video. This was displayed in a game-console setup beneath the racing-court. See some images on www.konsum.net/race.

Now it's the age of the nybble-engine. One part of it is data-objectiles. These are materialised 3D-prints. A laser is hardening plastics directly from the film-architecture of the machinima program. The tactile object is "sinthered" as it is called in rapid prototyping lingo. The objectile is a tactile equivalent of the 3D network program. You can see and touch it. When you watch a machinima movie it is also an equivalent of a 3D data-object. We now print this object so that you can feel it. Informare means to put sth. into form. The connex between different representations and formats, logics and systematics, as the technical, the filmic and arts takes place by touching the structure of the machinima program put into form as a laser-sinthered objectile. This kind of structure is an equivalent of data. It appears also as multiplayer environment, a realtime rendered visual network environment, where you can see the actions of other users in realtime. Further this environment is displayed as generative movie. Here user movements and action-bot activities are generating the movie, always displaying a new actors-cut instead of the directors-cut. Its film architecture is derived from data objects, hosted on the Konsum server. We call this system nybble-engine. Under the label climax the server is "abused" as a videoplayer. Nybble-engine films are realtime network movies! See the working page www.climax.at

Now let's sum up the main components of a nybble-engine: a nybble-engine contains a machinima. The machinima demonstrates the potential merits of a software. It is an aesthetic display of an optional multi user peer2peer network. Each player can be a server. The login sentence in former Konsum times was: "jedem fuzzi sein server". Here this is enacted with other technologies. Each user can download and install the specific nybble movie and use it as network environment. The movie can be quitted at any time and can be used as meeting point and real communication environment, in multiplayer mode. In the climax-machinimas we display what this potential communication in visual terms could look like. All actors, the action-bots and the users display their headcameras as possible "film". So the user at each console, in reality an online-PC, can choose among a number of different films inside the same "nybble-engine"(ordinary this is just done by a click). Such an audio-visual ride through a data object could be called digital roadmovie.

When working with existing tools a specific software-reflexive self understanding, or better awareness is requested. We define this as nybble-engineering. It is enacted on some existing starting material, i.e. the networked real-time tools known as First-Person-Shooter-Games, which are technically and artistically interesting because of their replicating program-components. These are artificial intelligence derivates known as action bots. Nybble engineering is now focused on the mutation and redesign of the running program by these program-components itself. The mutatoris changing components inside the program structure. This is essential for the nybble-engine movies. Its whole appearance is triggered and changed by specific behaviours, heritage and multiplication of objects (f.ex. objects get children with the same behaviour) and actions of the subprograms. This has effects on the movie's "storyline", the "cut" but also on its whole aesthetics. In such a setup a number of feedback-mechanismes occur and eliminate the existing 3-dimensionality into a certain flatland dimension. You always just can see an actual in situ appearance of the changing movie. The same is done with the 3D sound. The action-botconcert always takes place inside the nybble movie. In the nybble-engine the bots are having a jam session, similar to jazz jams. It is never the same, always following a certain pattern which is self referential but a new derivate. In the third type of nybble-engine machinimas also real semantic information is transported. In the visual field the semantics of 3D is broken and deconstructed for the asset of an aesthetic experience. The films done with a number of text-collaborators, namely Heiko Idensen, Erik Davis, Heinz von Foerster, are set up differently. F.ex. Heinz von Foerster, the cybernetic pioneer, was providing some unpublished audio material. Because he is talking mainly on circular and causal feedback mechanisms and on conceptual machines as trivial and non trivial machines, it was the perfect voice for some mutated action-bots. Now they talk to each other with the voice of HvF and, we assume in his sense, give an open minded impression by recombining and reformulating different theses on computation: compute comes from contemplate. This means tinking together instead of just calculating together. So nybble-engine is the ensemble of biogenic programs intervening with expectations and interpassivity in software triggered programs inside the running machinima-program.

In the territory of cultural grammar (i.e. of computer-games) the machinimal approach in nybble-engine is a statement for atopie in nonlinear software systems. The nybble-engineer is thena deviationist with his credo in dérivé and détournement; similar to a cybernetic machine, moving in the mental figure of a tetrad, which Marshall McLuhan describes in the book "The Global Village". The tetrade - or nybble in hackerjargon - is a navigation on a double-twistedbanner in computated space. The tetrade can be seen as a coiled rotation focusing on the processual. This mental image involves inversion, twisting, turning.

So if you now really ask frequently after giving your attention till here, finally some explanations:

FAQ 1: Nybble
Nybble - Four bits. Or, twice a tydbit, which is two bits. Every byte can be represented by a two-digit number from the hexadecimal system. Each of the two digits stands for a tetrade (also: a nybble) of a byte, i.e. four bits in binary format.

FAQ: Machinima / game-engines
Machinima is to be understood as a real-time software film that is generated on a home PC using a game-engine. A game-engine is basically an algorithmic machine for rendering realtime graphics and in the most cases also networked 3D. By the cybernetic concepts of trivial and non-trivial engines we establish a connection to the term of graphics engines in relation to PCs as universal machines. Alan Turing's concept of the machine, the Turing Test from the 40's, exists as a theoretical engine and the basis for the development of computers. The discourse taken up again by Heinz von Foerster in this context revolves around trivial engines, in other words those that do not change their rule system, in comparison with non-trivial engines, those that continue to modify (themselves). The concept tetrade thus leads on to the graphics engine, which emerged in conjunction with graphic card technology. This essentially involves an algorithmic engine, a software for calculating real-time 3D representation on the computer.

FAQ: Emergence Engine
Emergence - emerge - reemerge: in emerging develop, arise, evolve as an added value invested in something.

Just as the demo scene outgrew its roots in the cracking scene, so tracking outgrew the demo scene. That one develops from the other and that one needs the other to explain itself, as Heinz von Foerster says, can also be demonstrated in the software scene culture. The demo-scene and other software-scenes as tracker, cracker, machinima demonstrate the deep intertwinedness of strategies how to deal with certain technologies, to abuse it and to create artefacts out of it. Each of these scenes is defined by using a certain technology. Tracker f.ex. even refers to both the software and the people who work with it. (See also our project ntracker we perfomed in 2001 at the 11th Youth Salon Zagreb.) It even defines that there is collaboration in teams of coder, sounder and artist - but everyone is an artist or has to be a coder, or not? This is also an invitation, to contact us if you are curious, or if you would like to intervene or even collaborate.

For more FAQs go to http://www.climax.at

The people of Climax.at