scripting reading motions

## manuel portela ### mit press, 2013

---

summary

the book is about poetic practices in digital text/lit/poetry. not directly related to source code but it’s interesting in two ways. first, it does provide some excerpts of source code by artists which will be added to the corpus of primary sources. second, it does engage into interesting discussions of the act of reading, which is a dimension that i shouldn’t overlook.

a bunch of e-lit artists have a practice called PROGRAMMATOLOGY (that’s how john cayley calls it)

there are specific modes of individual attention in reading (e.g. affective, cognitive, -bootz even says cognitive-), which highlights that, in literary theory, reading is a co-creation of meaning (“this is what this means to me”, etc.). and yet reading source code is a different co-creation of meaning, if at all. co-creation of meaning happens through a reading loop. the reading loop in reading source code is always a back and forth with the text, and a goal of chaning that text/getting inspired/appropriating it.

stephen ramsay: “programming is an enactment of critical reading strategy” (Reading Machines: Towards an Algorithmic Criticism)

i’d argue that the reading of source code is actually flipped from natural language lit: the writing is highly personal/subjective, while the reading is social/subjective.

“legibility emerges from formal differences between signs executed by linguistic, bibliographic and computer programs”