code poetics

Description (in English)

The _The_Tem(Cor)p(oral)_Body_ Project involves a mash-up of scientific jargon + mezangelled variables to create a aggregated faux scientific manual involving the concept of Temporal_Body_Divorce" [or _TBD_]. This _TBD_ emphasizes exploitation possibilities involved in gradual geophysically/synthetic/space-time disconnections and will manifest in a set of codeworks created on the 01-03 November 2011 + then updated/modified live during the Remediating the Social Event [01-03 November 2012]. The core of the work is the performative act of present/future “time modification[s]” [or timemodding] of mezangelled snippets sent to the author/artist’s future self via the use of futureme.org.

By Scott Rettberg, 25 February, 2012
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Pages
144-153
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Abstract (in English)

The standard idea of code aesthetics, when such an idea manifests itself at all, allows for programmers to have elegance and clarity as their standards. This paper explores programming practices in which other values are at work, showing that the aesthetics of code must be enlarged to accommodate them. The two practices considered are obfuscated programming and the creation of “weird languages” for coding. Connections between these two practices, and between these and other mechanical and literary aesthetic traditions, are discussed.

(Source: authors' abstract)

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Description (in English)

This poem, together with 'Square 01', is part of an ongoing series of interactive, experimental and generative poetic texts to generate visual compositions, which fill the viewable space in time, with a growing pattern triggered by sound and silence. If the sound is loud the letters become thicker and bigger. As in many of my pieces, the poems don’t exist until the viewer interacts with them. String_code is the visual representation of the code in Square 01, this is why I am presenting both as a pair. In all poems, the three communication systems converge: image, writing and code. Square 01 is formed by the western alphabet. All the letters appear lineally, in rows, superimposed over each other, until they eventually become an indistinguishable blob. It was my intention to explore the tradition of concrete poetry, its formal representations and production processes using the programming language of Processing. Taking model in Hansjorg Mayer’s alphabetenquadratbuch poem, its minimalist visual form of multiple layers, the desire to escape from the linguistic through the obliteration of the letters and the encapsulation in it by the square. Quality which is even more emphatic in the generative poems, due to the added quality of time engendered in their generative form. This kind of textuality has the impact of a visual artwork, provoking other senses and emotional states as well as open meanings. The shifting from the visual to the linguistic and viceversa to create that in-between state of verbal-visual energy is itself the poem.

Technical notes

This work is presented in Processing. The applet application function in Macs and Windows operating systems with no need of Processing being downloaded or any plug-ins. (both applet applications are included - I have coloured them in blue to make it easier for you to see what you need to open - you see blue-colour on Macs and the original file in yellow).

By Patricia Tomaszek, 27 May, 2011
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ISBN
951-39-1608-1
Pages
107-119
ISSN
1457-6899
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Abstract (in English)

The Process Window contains general information about the state of the process, with a summary of its current threads and their states.

By Rita Raley, 5 May, 2011
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Publication Type
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Journal volume and issue
2002-09-08
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Abstract (in English)

Codework refers to the use of the contemporary idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital media experimental writing, or [net.writing]. Some of the prominent practitioners include Alan Sondheim, who has given the practice and genre its name, Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, Ted Warnell, Brian Lennon, and John Cayley. These writers also use different terms to refer to work: Mez composes in a neologistic "net.wurked" language that she has termed m[ez]ang.elle; Memmott uses the term "rich.lit"; Warnell names some of his JavaScript poems "codepoetry"; Lennon refers to "digital visual poetics"; and Cayley produces algorithmic, generative texts, or "programmable poetry." Writers and artists who have taken up the general practice of codework heed the mandate - "use the computer; it is not a television" - and strive to foreground and theorize the relations between interface and machine and so reflect on the networked environment that constitutes and is constituted by a digital text. The precise techniques vary, but the general result is a text-object or a text-event that emphasizes its own programming, mechanism, and materiality.

(Source: Author's introduction