code

“He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

This is because whatever is literary in a humanist sense is not usually considered communicable in anything other than human-only language. And yet, here is this alien “alpha-eater” not only hijacking control of the narrative from the children, but also ‘eating the alphabet’ and regurgitating it in human-readable, or what I venture to call ‘plus-human’ code.

Turning from Cold War-era sci-fi to electronic literature, Nick Montfort’s single page of Python code in The Truelist bears remarkable similarities to Brooke-Rose’s Poccom 3. Although the code can only be found on the last page of this book-length poem, it is as in Xorandor central to the book as artefact, for it was used by Montfort to generate the poetry. “Xorshift to create a random-like but deterministic sequence”, reads one of the lines of code, simultaneously describing its role in recombining a concise inputted lexicon according to rules also specified by Montfort.

The effect is a journey “through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself”, complete with idiosyncratic compound words (e.g., “voidring”, “book-bound ear”) not without analogues in Jip and Zab’s private programming-inspired idiom (e.g., “diodic!”, “Avort”, “flash-in-the-datasink”).

Notwithstanding that Xorandor and The Truelist are books containing and driven by pages of plus-human code, it is the profound differences between the two that gives scope to this proposed paper. Brooke-Rose’s is firmly of the print tradition, where the paper medium brings to readerly attention issues of language such as: the richness but also (from the perspective of a computer) the illogic of polysemy; the power of discourse to subject a sub-human object to study or enslavement, to make peace or war. Montfort’s offering, although in the final instance presented on paper, belongs to an emerging tradition within electronic literature: one that produces and benefits from a programmed artefact’s affordances for scale, dispersal and change (e.g., Stephanie Strickland’s V: Vniverse, Deena Larsen’s Stained Word Window), before remediating it to the stable, serial, although not necessarily linear platform of print (Strickland’s Losing L’Una/WaveSon.nets, Larsen’s Stained Word Translations).

This begs the question, What does electronic literature – for which ‘born-digital’ is at once a sine qua non and a raison d’être – seek to gain, supplement, or reverse by printing out its exercises in plus-human language?

In this paper we deal with the necessity of a post-digital text layout rethinking. Such layout differs from a layout of a printed text, because a post-digital medium is based on different principles from a traditional codex book. Arrangement of a layout in case of printed text, also in case of (post)digital text, is often based on the grid model. The alternative arrangement was specified as experimental forms. To go back in history, the grid model comes from cognitive preferences of a western reader and conforms to the principles that we follow in Gestalt psychology. These are the aesthetic references of typographical analysis of Modern movement, which was based on the golden rule principle and its application in the rectangular grid. The idea of grid followed Cartesian measurement of a codex page. According to Design Dictionary (2008) layout is often based on a design grid. Also Ellen Lupton (2010), and other authors described the model of a grid layout as a complex system applicable for every kind of media, so for the (post)digital media as well. In contraposition to the grid model we use arguments based on post-digital text and post-digital media analysis. A post-digital media enabled a shift from digital based on binary code machine functions to new conceptual models based on interdisciplinary relations between art, design, computing, philosophy and science that avoid binarism, determinism, and reductionism (Pepperell and Punt, 2000). In the way of how the reading of a post-digital text is performed, its perception has changed. It is connected with a possibility to interact with a text which leads to rethinking of reader/author of a text. This first argument leads to rethinking the grid as the model of a “universal layout”. The second argumentation is based on a process model of the post-digital text. It was caused by existence of the materiality of a post-digital text with the layer of programming code and a layer of a visible text via the interface. The code as an algorithm is a tool of programming with different levels of variable relations of a text/author/user. In a non-finite re-order it is possible to realise continuum changes and evolution of a system of a post-digital text layout. The solution of how it is possible is based on the philosophical concept of Rhizome described by Deleuze and Guattari (1980). Rhizome as a concept is a model which shows how to change the view of fixed relations of a closed system to flexible relations of an open complex system. The solution is not in finding a new kind of form, but a process as such. The process is not in a fixed definition of Cartesian geometry co-ordinates, but a flexible abstraction of algebraic algorithm with dynamic relationship between text and (post)digital media. This paper serves as a viable confirmation of a possibility to apply such thinking paradigm into typography.

In this paper, I share my experiences and some strategies developed while teaching my first E-lit course at a small urban liberal arts college. Mills College at that moment, had no campus digital curricular resource center for faculty or students and the English department’s approaches to digital humanities were, by necessity, hyper local and “small batch.” As the first E-lit course offered at Mills it was designed to be both an introduction to E-literature and criticism, and to literary critical practices and it was also to have a creative component that allowed students to develop their own born-digital projects. The course drew students from literature and creative writing majors and non literature majors and enrolled both graduates and undergraduates. It was an exuberant group who brought a tremendous range of skills to the table. Figuring out how to teach this cohort and this material was a creative-critical challenge of its own. E-lit as topic and medium invited me to think in new ways about my pedagogy. I had taught creative writing workshops (in poetry) and had some experience of the workshop model found in MFA programs -- though I felt it wasn’t a model that worked well. I had experience teaching literature and theory at both an advanced and beginning level and had found that often the best way to teach someone to write about literature was to have them try to write it first. For this course, I needed to come up with assignments and structures that helped students to develop as both literary critics and as creators of E-lit. Some of my students had deep technical backgrounds and skills; they could code and were familiar and comfortable with the technologies they might use to create E-lit projects. Others had almost no computer experience outside of facebook and email -- which meant that they needed help identifying technologies that they might use to build E-lit which they could learn to use within a short matter of time. Some of the students were fairly adept at academic writing/reading conventions or interpretive strategies, but most were not. Also, I was teaching in an institution that required a final “grade” and in a department that had specific learning goals in close-reading and thesis driven argument, and so I faced challenges regarding assessment. This presentation is designed to be helpful both to those who are thinking about how to design assignments in classes when teaching E-lit in spaces without structured institutional support and to teachers who want to think about pedagogical tools for E-lit, who might want to use or amend a couple of the assignments which I hope may be useful to others. I will share examples of student work for both of these assignments, and share what worked particularly well, and where I encountered challenges. I will end by asking a couple of questions about E-lit and pedagogy. I hope this presentation leads to a larger conversation about teaching practices for E-lit.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

What is reading? As a transitive verb, and in the strict action, it is to pass the view by the signs that we recognize from our mother tongue, written in a text to understand them and turn them into sounds. The act of reading goes beyond the interpretation of an inherited code. Reading is a cognitive visual/motor activity and meaningful of reality. When we read a text, our thinking manages a bunch of received information that little by little it is organizing according to its maturity, experience, cognitive processes, intuition and conceptualization. The order in which it happens does not matter. What is important is the fact that when it is read, the construction and appropriation of both historical and a-historical concepts is happening. But, what happens when we read Electronic Literature? Technology, following the proposal of Marshall McLujan, is an extension of our own body. For that matter, clothing is an extension of our skin. The shoes are an extension of our feet. One might think of the transitive verb of reading as a natural activity in the human being. Simone de Beauvoir affirms in her novel "Una Muerte muy Dulce" that neither death is natural. The act of reading has implicit the development of a technology of reading. So, we could make the statement that everything is Electronic Literature. You cannot think of reading as a natural act. The expansion of reading happens at the moment in which a common code is constructed that is accepted by a specific society as an element of meaning of identity. Thus, the idea of understanding ourselves as undifferentiated beings of nature is displaced. Code technology makes man more cultured. It subjects you to the understanding of reality. Reading will no longer be the understanding of sound, the use of taste as appropriation and cognition, touch as the experience of unity. The artificiality affirmed by Simone de Beauvoir and the extension proposed by Marshall McLujan coincide in the code of the written language subject to the truth, to the construction of concepts. The act of reading is now understood, not as passing the view on a text that contains an artificial and literal code; but as an act of acculturation and appropriation of an identity discourse. Sound and vision, substantial elements of the primitive, are reduced to the subjection of the text that is read and is true in itself.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a 1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on the structure and nature of regulation of the Internet.

The primary idea of the book, as expressed in the title, is the notion that computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does. More generally, Lessig argues that there are actually four major regulators (Law, Norms, Market, Architecture) each of which has a profound impact on society and whose implications must be considered (sometimes called the "pathetic dot theory", after the "dot" that is constrained by these regulators.)

The book includes a discussion of the implications for copyright law, arguing that cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law to protect against illegal copying. It goes so far as to argue that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use. If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use. The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples in the book show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against "unlimited copying."

(Source: Wikipedia entry on Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace)