[spectre] (publication) "Words Made Flesh", on the cultural history of program code

[Florian Cramer]

As a research project for Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, I wrote a
small book on the poetics and cultural history of algorithmic code
called "Words Made Flesh - Code, Culture, Imagination".

The publication is available online under the following URLs:

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/wordsmadefleshpdf
(140 pages/3 MB PDF file with name/keyword index)

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/
(HTML version)


Abstract:

  Centuries before the invention of the computer, executable code
  existed in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental
  poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of
  contemporary software culture and electronic arts.  Above all, they
  link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses
  art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations
  in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most
  simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed,
  and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with
  meaning.  This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative
  computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and
  contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical,
  and words are made flesh.


The book may be freely used and redistributed according to the GNU
General Public License, the GNU Free Documentation License and the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. LaTeX source files are
provided under
<http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/wordsmadefleshsrc>.

-F



Chapter 1.   Introduction: In Dark Territory

Chapter 2.   Computations of Totality
   Exe.cut[up]able statements
   Magic and religion
   Pythagorean harmony as a cosmological code
   Kabbalah
   Ramon Llull and Lullism
   Rhetoric and poetics
   Combinatory poetry and the occult
   Computation as a figure of thought

Chapter 3.   Computation as Fragmentation
   Gulliver's Travels
   The Library of Babel
   Romanticist combinatorics
   Concrete poetry
   Max Bense and information aesthetics
   Situationism, Surrealism and psychogeography
   Markov chains
   Tristan Tzara and cut-ups
   John Cage's indeterminism
   Italo Calvino and machine-generated literature
   Software as industrialization of art
   Authorship and subjectivity
   Pataphysics and Oulipo
   Abraham M. Moles' computational aesthetics
   Source code poetry
   Jodi
   1337 speech
   Codework

Chapter 4.   Automatisms and Their Constraints
   Artificial Intelligence
   Athanasius Kircher's box
   John Searle's Chinese Room
   Georges Perec's "Maschine"
   Enzensberger's and Schmatz's / Czernin's poetic machines
   Software dystopia: Jodi
   Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova
   From dystopia to new subjectivity

Chapter 5.   What Is Software?
   A cultural definition
   Software as practice
   Software versus hardware
   Conclusion 

-- 
http://cramer.netzliteratur.net