Surgical Strike Free Software
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Building
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To build, run make. You'll need to have the OpenScenGraph libraries installed. 


Running
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surgical_strike
  Read from stdin, write to out.obj|mtl

surgical_strike [input file]
  Read input file, write to out.obj|mtl

surgical_strike [input file] [output file]
  Read input file, write output file


Warning
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The dxf and png images included in this project are copyright and/or trademarks
of their respective rightsholders. They are not covered by the licence of this
software. Use at your own risk.


About This Project
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"Surgical Strike" was a 1996 art computing project concerned with the social 
history of art computing. "Surgical Strike Free Software" is a 2008 
reimplementation of the original project.

Computing has trickled down from military applications through corporations to 
universities and finally into art practice. This history is present in the 
language and social assumptions of computing. This culture sits uncomfortably 
with the culture of art, or at least it should. Surgical Strike depicts these 
contradictions in the form of ironized computer art in order to make them 
explicit. I forget what I was reading at the time but it was probably "War In
The Age Of Intelligent Machines".

The source materials for Surgical Strike were military jargon, the art of 
William Latham (due to its status as paradigmatic "computer art" at the time), 
3D models of stealth aeroplanes, 1990s computer software logos, and verbal 
descriptions of awkward facts from the history of commercial computing. The 
swirly structures of stealth bombers replaced the innocent spheres and 
cylinders of Latham's computational Darwinism with more significant forms. The 
texturing of these forms with commercial trademarks rather than procedural 
textures was another level of indexicality. These were then sandwiched between 
texts describing things the computer industry would rather forget in the 
background and the source code for the depicted form asserting its primacy and 
interfering with the unreflective consumption of the image in the foreground.

The composition of the images produced with the original system was probably 
based, unconsciously, on Art & Language's "Hostages" series. The idea of an 
indexical computer programming language came, again unconsciously, from PJH 
Halls at KIAD. The project came to me fully formed as I walked to the CEA at 
Middlesex University early on the morning that I desperately needed to have a 
project to start.

Surgical Strike proper is a toy programming language for creating patterns of 
textured 3D objects. The keywords of the language are intended to sound 
militaristic. Although Surgical Strike can use any 3D models or textures, it 
is intended to use models of military artefacts and images of software logos. 
The language features iteration but not branching or even variables so it is 
not anywhere near Turing complete.

The original version of Surgical Strike was written in C++ using Apple's 
QuickDraw 3D for Power Macintosh on Mac OS 7.x . The parser was hand-written 
and compiled programs were executed using a bytecode format inspired by the 
public documentation of Display PostScript. Given the unmaintainability of this
code and to avoid any conceivable rights issues the current version has been
written from scratch.

Surgical Strike is not anti-militaristic except to the extent that it works 
with the assumptions of the cultures it is targeted at. Those cultures were 
idealistic mid-1990s art computing and mid-1990s art criticism ignorant of the 
content of art computing. The title is a piece of military jargon that served 
to illustrate the gap between depiction and reality. But the gap that it 
indicated was in the target cultures, not (neccessarily) between the ideals and
reality of militarism.