Commands to command - gestures and numbers

Beyond the chase for the latest, ever-faster and performative wonders of digital technologies, a digital art practice has much to gain from a look into its own not-so-distant past. There, a digital art practice finds the space to confront some of the most pressing issues that, then as today, remain unresolved: embodiment, selfhood and expressivity. This intervention presents the case of a digital art project that has engaged with a command-line toolkit, Sox, developed in the early 1990’s and redeployed now so as to address the meaning of code/commands when becoming central/essential to an art practice. What is the expressive latitude of a command when informing an art practice? The re-interpreting and re-enabling of old digital technologies affords lines of enquiries that point straight to those existential groundings on which a digital artistic practice evolves (i.e. the quantitative vsqualitative conundrum)