Logging In

Sandy Baldwin's presentation theorizes the rhythms and flows of the logging field as cognitive activities of the virtual subject. He describes a psychoanalytics and poetics of login, first in the protocols of unix .cshrc and .login files, as well as machine logs. These primary site of net inscription intensify and wane. They must be fed: you must login. The iterative inscription of the subject deepens the signifiers of login into buccal organs of incorporation. The second part of his paper focuses on Captcha software, which combines repeated Turing tests with enormous amounts of text production, all put to work in the background as the largest distributed OCR project in the world. Finally, he examines artists using login to produce work, with examples from Alan Sondheim, Noemata, and Mouchette.

(Author's abstract from the 2008 ELO Conference)