Hi Fiorina, I started writing a response to the other thread you started about forums for software art. It seems that thread was deleted, so I'm posting my response below.

I don't know any texts that reference psychoanalysis directly, but I would recommend looking at texts by Lev Manovich, Inke Arns and Alex Galloway. Most of them are published online in PDF format, just google their names and you'll probably find some.

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This was my response on the difficulty of finding disucssion forums for software art:


Unfortunately, I'm not aware of such a forum at the current time. The field tends to split into 3 camps:

- Generative work with a focus on visual art (Generator.x, Dataisnature)
- Generative art with a focus on conceptual aspects (The eu-gene list, Runme)
- Software art with focus on political / social aspects (Rhizome, Runme)

All three camps talk about software art in some way, but often disagree about what they think is important about it.

I would say your best information sources would be the various blogs out there. The eu-gene list is the closest thing to a discussion forum. It's a low volume list with the occasional interesting post, but threads often end up in semantic nit-picking.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of blogs I would recommend. I'd be very happy to hear other people read:

Dataisnature
Infosthetics
The Teeming Void
Serial Consign
CONT3XT
FlowingData
Abstractmachine
Burak Arikan
Processing blogs
Pixelsumo
Sojamo Tumblr
we-make-money-not-art
Visual Complexity
PostSpectacular
Theverymany

hello

can you tell more about the concepts you are looking for?  Freud models processes of minds in mammals called humans, and software is the art to model processes.

There is a computer scientist Marvin Minsky who developped the thoughts of Freud quite a bit further. Freud divided the mind mainly into 3 layers, basically: instincts, conciousness and (learned) cultural values. Minsky introduces layers of "reflection" needed to model processes in the mind.

1. instincts (= hard-wired experiences of stimuli, e.g. feeling warm)
2. learned reactions (= experiences obtained by trial-and-error, ways to build and basic inputs to "higher-level-abstractions")
3. deliberative thinking (= guess results of trial-error approaches and make better strategies)
4. reflective thinking (= make better representations of strategies)
5. self-reflective thinking (= make better representations of designer/agent and views of future/past of agent)
6. self-conscious reflection (= take into account cultural, social, religous, ethical views propagating within the society)

Other writers who write about Freud's interaction with computers is Manfred Clynes, inventor of the Cyborg concept (iirc)

and Daniel Dennett in his book "Conciousness explained" (starts with a thought experiment of a dinner conversation on Freud)

See also my blog at: http://pmulder.blogspot.com for more ideas into this direction.


add on: another pointer:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/artofprog.html