Quine
Kyle McDonald
Artist
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Iconoclasm is a manner of unfolding that seeks to protect the infinite by violently destroying any image that might unfold from it. Iconoclasm repudiates unfolding altogether. In the history of art, iconoclasts have always attacked not their own art, but images meant for other people. Iconoclasm seeks to incapacitate the beholder.
This program outputs its own source as text.
Here is the purest, most arid form of algorithmic expression, the quine (named for Willard Quine, who worked on problems of indirect self-reference), the program which produces its own source code as its sole output. The infinite and its enfolded possibilities are left untouched; information expresses only itself as form and content; the imagistic content is mere formatting of a closed loop. Each remains separate, and in their isolation they call into question whether the three have ever really spoken: a program at once complete in itself and perfectly broken, a dead end.
“Iconoclasm repudiates unfolding altogether, Like aniconism, it warns the beholder that the image has nothing to do with the underlying information; it also engenders fear that information has nothing to do with the underlying infinite.” (p. 217)
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