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ap03

the ap project is primarily concerned with the expansion and contraction of the notion of an operating system within technology and the social. we are concerned in both cases with the liberation of data generation from an imposed model and architecture (any fixed operating system in its widest sense). such a liberation operates at the border of control and non-control,; the space which ap inhabits and investigates (paradise of such a border).

a real world os which embodies such ideas in a performative sense is sorely lacking within the sphere of technological systems art. much current artistic work still relies heavily on antiquated tool (and parody) metaphors, and the limiting notions/divisions of system, user and programmer. the much needed and revolutionary meeting of contemporary artistic practice with the ideas of the free software movement (to create a new as yet undefined scientific practice) has failed to materialise again due to the over-reliance from both sides on metaphor/non-poetic metaphor.

ap03 will provide a concrete implementation of these ideas across hardware and software and will be fully functional in both a performative and exemplary sense. ap03 implements a (self) re-configurable virtual machine os for promiscuous data generation across network and external device attachment. the os architecture is decentralised and non-hierarchical, involving layers of virtual machines running self evolving code which is highly determined by the environment (in contrast to current alife work such as thomas ray?s tierra).

ap03 questions the givens of any operating system architecture. such givens are necessarily interwoven with processor achitecture and instruction sets and underlying philosophical assumptions and mathematical/logic models (turing). diissecting such a tree of model and metaphor within a practical project has wide reaching consequences for any understanding of contemporary digital culture. the development of a (self) re-configurable architecture is essential to the ap03 project, and it is of vital importance to such a realisation that institutional assistance is obtained.

ap03 is a total (non-deterministic) hardware and software environment characterised by promiscuity (open-ness to any data and active seeking for data across any network), a virtual machine architecture (layers of (self) re-configurable code interwoven with such data), reliance and self-definition through environmental data and viral expansion through diverse environments.

layers of abstraction are inherent within the concept web which is modern systems theory and wider digital culture. again the border which ap plays is that between underlying (physicality) and virtuality embodied within these concepts. ap03 employs such contradictions within the virtual machine layering.

preliminary research has suggested possible starting points for the lengthy programming of such a system. it would result in too much unnecessary work to attempt to code the prototype os from scratch. the first system will probably be based around the oskit mach kernel running on x86 architecture. this prototype os will be used as the basis for software/hardware work (the distinction is blurred in such a case) making use of self-programmable fpga technology. all work will be made widely available and released under a suitable license to allow others to develop and modify the system.