Martin Howse specifies a totally pluggable environment for advanced audio and textual experimentation

Why should free software be chained to keyboard, mouse and screen? Martin Howse examines open tools which allow for embedding computation deep within the environment.

"Security is a sickness rather than a cure" - The anti-viral industries are engaged in a battle against the natural. Self reproduction is embedded deep within the technology of computation and by default its history and culture. Martin Howse sieves out the viral seed under both the open and the closed models of coding.

With its feet firmly rooted in open standards and interoperability, the Semantic Web seeks to build a meaningful and heavily decentralised net which favours language and understanding over the bland concerns of control. Martin Howse investigates technologies which could radically rewrite the Web in truly emergent fashion

Presenting the very antithesis of functional computing, the crash is an area ripe for exploration, exposing as it does the rich seam between writable and runnable, and offering radical insights into the contemporary interface between man and machine. Martin Howse dons a hard hat to mine deep into this rich geology

Developing Lisp code on a free software platform is no mean feat, and documentation, though available, is dispersed and often too concise for users new to Lisp. In an accessible guide to this flexible language, self-confessed Lisp newbie Martin Howse assesses practical issues and implementations under GNU/Linux

Under a proprietary model, the executable is all, bypassing all that is cultural or textual, and ignorant of any code above buried instruction sets. With a transparency plagued only by always impending crash and implied viral burn, the icon is the action; a conditioned reflex with GUI designers very much as Pavlov's eager pupils. It's all a game of click and run, or, with the cynical humour of small-time peripheral pedlar's, plug and pray. Just remember to keep your data safe as the creaking ship of an insecure OS tosses and heaves on an ever angry networked ocean.

"Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute"

Jaromil, also known as Denis Rojo, is a free software developer, artist, author and the maintainer of the dyne:bolic bootable Linux multimedia distribution. He’s also responsible for three Linux applications - the MuSE streaming audio server, the FreeJ video jockey tool and HasciiCam, which can serve video streams composed of ASCII characters. All of his software is released under the GNU General Public Licence - his principles as a software developer spring from his personal convictions as a Rastafarian.

Contemporary art is profoundly opposed to the search for beauty; it creates its own languages and finds its own incarnations. But we do search for beauty, and we need beautiful objects and literature to lead happy lives.