I've been working on something for a while now and am ready to release a prototype. This is something that requires the participation of people to be successful. Here's the background and a little info on what it is:

Recently, an interview appeared on the Rhizome list in connection with an exhibition in Spain. Amongst the people interviewed was Christiane Paul. In the interview she mentioned something along the lines of understanding the language of new media. I replied to this interview posting with a posting asking, what exactly is the language of new media? In my response I suggested that it was somewhere within an understanding of code. And it makes sense as far as "coded" artwork goes. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. What we need is more open discussion between artists regarding the value and importance of code and coding methods and the conceptual/aesthetic implications of such practice. We, the arist-coders, need to openly discuss our methods so that others, not versed in code, can pick up on some of the issues and discuss them in less technical terms. That's the whole idea behind the project I call "CodeChat". A side-effect of this whole thing is that artists will have to open-source their code or at least portions of it to allow people to discuss it. The system is very simple to use. It consists of a single Perl script that you feed your text-based code file through and it automatically generates an html file with comment sections for each line of code. The commenting system is AJAX based, driven by Javascript, PHP and MySQL. For now, I want to test the system and hope that as many people as possible will join in and generate some discussion. After the testing, I will release the system under the General Public License and hopefully others will help in making it more dependable and secure.

The whole idea of this kind of discussion was sparked by another project, also from Christiane Paul, the CODeDOC exhibition on the Whitney website:

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/

Where the code was put on center stage and artists involved were asked to publicly comment on each others code.

The CodeChat prototype is running at:

http://pallit.lhi.is/~palli/codechat