critical code studies

In this project review, I discuss the companion website criticalcodestudies.com in relation to Mark C. Marino’s book Critical Code Studies (2020). Over the past decades, companion websites have become a small but persistently growing genre in academia, with products ranging from paratextual records to publications in their own right. The Critical Code Studies companion website makes excellent use of content and design to make media-specific arguments that interrogate the research subject, foregrounding a method that oscillates between close reading and contextual reading as well as promotes personal and communal reading practices. The combination of book and companion website successfully makes intellectual interventions into the case studies but also into our conception of source code in general. I review how the companion website reflects, amplifies, and contradicts the arguments made in the book.

(Author abstract)

Ocean as Media Platform for Electronic Literature 

The ocean is a media platform. Recognizing it as such can change how we think of platform, media, and meaning. This panel takes an ecocritical approach. We understand the ocean to be a primary platform for life on Earth, encompassing 70% of our globe, and also a platform that inspires much of our digital life and literature. We take Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune’s FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as sinew connecting our diverse our critical methodologies and perspectives, as we consider how emerging knowledge from environmental humanities informselectronic literature.

Melody Jue: "Beyond Blue: Ocean and/as Platform":What might it look like to speculatively submerge our ideas about computational platforms in the ocean? How terrestrial is platform studies? Drawing from my book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), this talk explores the valences of the “platform” in oceanic contexts, considering its media-specific meaning alongside others (oil platform, advocacy platform) and the metaphor of the platform as a flat, planar surface. I consider the affordances of platforms and oceans through a reading of the video game Beyond Blue, by BBC and E-line media, which presents an occasion to consider ocean health and resource extraction alongside multiple senses of “platform,” from computation to environmental politics.

Mark Marino: “Diving into the code of immersive e-lit.”From immersion in sound and image in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) to immersion in a downpour of letters in Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” (2000) to immersion in a sea of text in Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s “Sea and Spar Between” (2010), artists of electronic literature have plunged readers into virtual oceans. This presentation will take a deep dive into the Processing code to explore the ways “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” immerses its participants in tides of gender, hybridity, and fantasy.

Diana Leong: “Silhouettes and the Sea: Mediating Racial Fetishism”:From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to artist Kara Walker’s cut-paper installations, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within the iconography of slavery and its afterlife. This style of illustration can be understood as operating within the dynamics of racial fetishism as it attempts to resolve tensions between the universal (e.g., racial blackness) and the particular (e.g., black bodies). This talk examines how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” evokes a similar dynamic by staging oceanic entanglements between depth (e.g., immersion) and surface (e.g., silhouette) as a complement to universal/particular. By mapping these entanglements onto the mermaid’s multiple forms of liminality, “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” gestures towards a reading of racial fetishism as a form of pleasure predicated on an ambivalent relationship to difference.

Jessica Pressman: “Mermaids in Elit”:This talk explores the role of mermaids in electronic literature, past and present, as poetic symbol and formal device. We can read the presence of mermaids as portending transformations in literature’s media, signifying change in the materiality of literary production and reception. In this talk, I use “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” as exemplary of how electronic literature uses mermaids and what we can learn by diving deep into consideration of them.

Marino, Douglass, and Pressman describe their award-winning collaborative project, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2015). Given the novelty of Poundstone’s work and its deviation from traditional forms of print-based literature, the authors break down the methods and platforms that allowed them to respond with new ways of reading—what they call “close reading (reimagined).” Indeed, their respective methods of interpreting Poundstone reminds that the field of e-literature not only brings new literary forms to our critical attention, but also necessitates that hermeneutics adapt to digital contexts as well.

Computer source code has become part of popular discourse. Code is read not only by programmers but by lawyers, artists, pundits, reporters, political activists, and literary scholars; it is used in political debate, works of art, popular entertainment, and historical accounts. In this book, Mark Marino argues that code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means. We need to learn to read code critically. Marino presents a series of case studies—ranging from the Climategate scandal to a hactivist art project on the US-Mexico border—as lessons in critical code reading.

Marino shows how, in the process of its circulation, the meaning of code changes beyond its functional role to include connotations and implications, opening it up to interpretation and inference—and misinterpretation and reappropriation. The Climategate controversy, for example, stemmed from a misreading of a bit of placeholder code as a “smoking gun” that supposedly proved fabrication of climate data. A poetry generator created by Nick Montfort was remixed and reimagined by other poets, and subject to literary interpretation.

Each case study begins by presenting a small and self-contained passage of code—by coders as disparate as programming pioneer Grace Hopper and philosopher Friedrich Kittler—and an accessible explanation of its context and functioning. Marino then explores its extra-functional significance, demonstrating a variety of interpretive approaches.

(source: mit press)

Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changing—and, indeed, must change—to keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together radically different methodological approaches—close reading of onscreen textual and visual aesthetics, Critical Code Studies, and cultural analytics (big data)—into a collaborative interpretation of a single work of digital literature.

Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a work of electronic literature that presents a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time animation synchronized to visual and aural effects. It tells the tale of a mysterious pit and its impact on the surrounding community. Programmed in Flash and published online, its fast-flashing aesthetic of information overload bombards the reader with images, text, and sound in ways that challenge the ability to read carefully, closely, and analytically in traditional ways. The work’s multiple layers of poetics and programming can be most effectively read and analyzed through collaborative efforts at computational criticism such as is modeled in this book. The result is a unique and trailblazing book that presents the authors’ collaborative efforts and interpretations as a case study for performing digital humanities literary criticism of born-digital poetics.

(Source: University of Iowa Press catalog copy)

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

As scholars experiment with collaborative, multimodal approaches to analyzing electronic literature, the tools, methods, and practices of such collaboration become increasingly an issue. How do we share, edit, archive, and publish arguments that address and evolve across multiple types of data, platforms, and disciplines? How can the approaches (data visualization, code analysis, textual explication, bibliographic history, etc.) be shared in ways that other scholars can engage not just with the final interpretations but also with the processes that lead to them? Recent publications such as 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10, represent the value of such collaborative efforts in combining media archaeology, platform studies, software studies, and Critical Code Studies. Our own work in collaboratively close reading William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit],” which we presented at ELO 2010 (held at Brown University) and are now developing as a book for Iowa UP, has prompted us to reflexively consider how the processes of our own collaboration might prove generative to other scholars. Supported by an ACLS Collaborative Scholarship Fellowship 2012-2013, we are developing an open-access scholarly website to facilitate collaborative critical interpretations of digital art, a platform for digital humanities scholarship focused on born-digital poetics. The goal is to produce a workbench where scholars can apply critical tools to works of electronic literature and share the results of their investigations. We propose to present this website, in its nascent stages, and discuss its ambitions and affordances to producing complex, multimodal, and collaborative critical readings.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a provocative mobile phone app by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) that provides sustenance to border crossers by leading them to water and guiding them with poetry. Although the tool can be applied to any border, the chief border it has been tied to and tested on is the US-Mexico border. The EDT present the project as an artistic disruption of the tired national political theater staged at that border. The piece refocuses attention on the basic human needs of those caught in the middle of the stale and stalemated divide. For the EDT, every part of the piece participates in this disruption not merely the finished app or the poetry but the code as well. In this paper, I ask, what would it mean for the code to poetic disruption? One set of poetry for the project created by Amy Sara Carroll offers instructions for desert survival. By presenting instructions as poems, she offers one entre into reading the source code of the app as poetry. Using the methods of Critical Code Studies, I read the code of TBT in light of and as part of the poetic intervention of this complex performance.

(Source: Author's abstract at DHQ)