notes

meta-questions

• what is the distinction between creative and aesthetic writing of source code?
• decide between writing and reading? usage and possibilities?
• what definition of code do i want to choose?

questions

• what are the literary standards to which code can be held to?
• what is source code, as a literary object? (aka does it need to be defined from the definitions of lit / e-lit? )
• what are the unique ways that code can demonstrate/express an aesthetic sentiment?
• • what are its structures, vocabularies and syntaxes (Cayley)?
• • what are the (interpretative, critical) techniques to identify these aforementioned?
• how does the creative/aesthetic use of code start to involve the rest of the world rather than simply the self-reference?
• are existing theories applicable? to what extent do we need to modify them? to what extent do we need new ones?
• • theories for what? theories to explain how source code can be a means of creating aesthetic objects.
• how can source code lit be categorized according to different periods?
• • historically?
• • linguistically (i.e. different programming languages)
• • socio-economically (enterprise, hack, poet)?
• what are the useful conceptual tools that i use from the research on e-lit (e0poetry, etc.) (e.g. combinations, potential, interactivity, …)

thoughts

• double-meaning (paloque) is the fact that one can play between machine-language and human-language
• • possible triple-meaning with an interplay in conceptual structures (OOP)
• • creativity might then be that we’re applying software metaphors to classes of concordance
• referring to software itself
• referring to the environment in which software exists
• • productive software
• • • what is the place of uselessness in productivity?
• • but also the fact that the domain of application of software can always expand can always expand (from a computational perspective)
• • there is also the idea that, even when the code might not work properly, or might barely work (in a functional perspective), it might still work in a literary perspective, the same way that flaubert works, or that beckett works, i.e. does what is intended of it to do.
• which languages for which sets of aesthetic relationships?
• • this is kinda what los pequenos glazier was saying when he was asking “how does materiality influence the text itself?”
• there is the reader, and there is the act of reading. does it need to be out loud? how are things pronounced?
• what are the tensions between lit and code?
• • lit can create any word (joyce), code cannot –but that is changing with OOP?

• what is code trying to make visible (following deleuze on bacon)? forces? hysteria? time? space? can it, even?

• marino: “Much of this preliminary work on code has tried to determine what constitutes this unique semiotic system, work that prepares the discussion of code analysis, but CCS needs techniques for developing particular coding structures.”

• art works to shape our basic sense of what is and what matters (heidegger)

structure

• recap of existing work on why code is an object of study
• extending that range of study, (1) theoretically (other philosophical help), (2) empirically (other domains, such as style guides, comments, new corpuses that have been released since the previous studies (source code poetry, etc.)) and (3) practically (new reading postures -readers as compilers and interpreters)
• include a linguistic/semiotic study of programming languages, starting from perl and extending
• close reading of {source code poetry}
• and then some of the poems i write also

art is a breach in the system

• the comment asks the question of the voice of the programmer
• • do github commits count?
• the style guide
• • aesthetic of cooperation? what does that even mean?
• • the style guide transforms a readerly text into a writerly text (barthes, le plaisir du texte)