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INTRODUCTION

EDITOR'S NOTE
CCooddee A
Ass LLaanngguuaaggee
GUEST EDITORIAL
Click here to download pdf version.
ESSAYS

:: GALLERY
by Loss Pequeño Glazier
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier
:: RESOURCES
:: ARCHIVE
:: ABOUT K
Keeyyw
woorrddss
:: CALL FOR PAPERS poetry, language, programming, code

A
Abbssttrraacctt
To consider how code can be language one must realize that inscription is not simply
about recording ideas but about inscribing language in a specific medium. Writing
occurs in space and space is itself part of the process through which writing produces
meaning. In digital media, textuality is equally a function of the meaning of space. The
materiality of the digital written object differs from that of the print object, but is no
less material. There are specific categories that define the writerly features of writing
code as mark-making. Ultimately, dynamic text offers the most interesting way to view
how code is language. A poetics of dynamic text seeks to engage that delicate edge
where language apparatuses meet, slip, and engage, to further the possibilities of the
poetic text. Ultimately, a poetics of programming raises the question, where is the
writing — in the code or in the displayed language? If language is defined as written
symbols organized into combinations and patterns to express and communicate
thoughts and feelings — language that executes — then coding is language.

IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn

Gaps
shocks through
absorbing

-- Bruce Andrews

To consider how code can be language, I would like to concentrate on language in its
written sense, as an agency of mark-making to produce meaning in a given medium.
Here, two observations should be made. First, the nature of such agency is not limited
to simply recording pre-existing, definitive, or idealized thought, rather the act of
inscription is itself a process of thinking through thought. Second, the process of
inscription is not just about meaning being placed on a given material. Instead,
meaning is made through the act of inscribing on the specific material. Further, the act
of inscribing engages the visual, spatial, and material modes of, not mark-making, but
of meaning making through making marks. (And, one would hope, with a
consciousness of Marx). Finally, the recorded text is not an ideal or definitive one but
is merely one articulation of many possible ones; echoing Jerome McGann, Johanna
Drucker, and Cary Nelson, an exemplar of the specific material and social factors that
condition mark-making at that moment. Writing is the registering of an individual
iteration of the always dynamic multiple material possibilities of textuality.

H
Hoow
w iiss tthhee EE--tteexxtt SSppaattiiaall??

The book had some pages

Wet it becomes a brick

to play with then discard
 -- Michael Palmer

Writing occurs in space and space is itself part of the process through which writing
produces meaning. In print, there are many ways to view the interrelated nature of
space and writing. As Johanna Drucker has argued and Brian Kim Stefans has parodied,
the New York Times, for example, draws its content not only from the text that occurs
on the page, but from the masthead, the layout, the columns, the subheads on the
page. Simply by looking at a New York Times page one knows not to expect a poem by
Mallarmé, a treatise by Mao, or even reporting of any actual news. Ironic! Thus
meaning is made not just by what the text says but equally by how space is used in
the scene of writing. Such a dynamic has been explored to great effect by a large
number of poets including Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and countless Concrete Poets.

Accordingly, there is no such thing as negative space. The book itself is dependent
upon space. This includes the margins, top and side, the gutter, the space of the title
page and verso, endnotes or footnotes, the bibliography and appendices, pages and
bindings, and, more tangibly, the space between words, around illustrations, within
individual characters, the kerning, indents, tabs, font. Space is everywhere! The book is
a spatial construct. Without its given space a book would be much different in layout
than what we know as a book (e.g. there's no reason a book couldn't be a dark blob of
ink on a single scroll of paper). Even further, the space of the book is an articulation of
the material presence of paper, the production means of printing, and social processes
such as bookselling, reading, and remediation. In the work of many contemporary
poets, white space can itself constitute the content of the literary work as much as
the text itself, as William Carlos Williams argued in Imaginations. It's not just the
artists that can be spaced out, but the texts themselves. In this context, it is
interesting to look at white space in the development of the work of robotics pioneer
Norman White. White's earlier geometric paintings expressed the substance of
"empty" space and lead to strikingly similar patterns in his later circuit designs. These
are works of circuit art that make meaning as much through the physicality of empty
space as through the patterns that depend on that space for definition.

In digital media, textuality is equally a function of the meaning of space. This occurs at
various levels:

· There is the space of the network, the fact that texts can exist across nodes and
that physical space, though dramatically compressed, is inherent in the process of
reading net-based literature. There is the space of the screen, its two dimensionality
and luminescence, the way it can be navigated through scrolling, linking, and/or
paging. There is the space of the hard disk, the way data is stored in scattered
fragments on the disk and only appears to be coterminous on the screen.

· There are the spatial metaphors of specific interfaces. The Microsoft screen reality,
for example, a monopoly paradigm sanctioned by the corporate U.S. government and
complicit U.S. court system, is by no means an authoritative, useful, or even efficient
model for effecting the potentials of digital writing (Indeed, the space of such an
interface is designed to be a consumer item, as generic as the controls on a
microwave or a television remote). There are many other interface paradigms,
map-based and visual relational models for example, that have been overlooked for
Microsoft's aggressive consumerist and lowest common denominator
conceptualizations.

· There is the space of programming. In programming, space has functional,

representational, and symbolic levels of meaning. Declaring space is fundamental to
writing a program. The instantiation of variable, for example, is specific down to the
level of the data type. Indeed, one declares data types as specific as integers, strings,
characters, boolean, byte, short, long, float, and double. This is making space in the
program! As William Carlos Williams has noted, "When we name it, life exists"
(Imaginations p. 115). A statement such as:
life = new Life ();
seems to breathe vitality into naming unimagined at the times Williams theorized
poetry in his book Imaginations.

There are other spatialities key to writerly programming. Decisions such as whether
copies of objects are used in new contexts or existing objects are overwritten,
recursion, the articulate realities of arrays, and the energized antics of loops within
loops, are a decisive part of the logic of programs. When writing programs to be
displayed in a GUI, there are many ways that space plays a role: the number,
obstinacy, and design of individual pop-up windows, navigation bars, text fields, and
screen layouts. There is the fact that a program is a linear file but one dependent on
structures of space within that file. These include the expressive practice of indenting
code, the aligning of related elements, the spatial interleaving of descriptive
comments. And finally, there is the relative substance of space in different contexts.
How it varies, for example, in lines of code versus within a string, and other cases.

W
Whhaatt iiss tthhee M
Maatteerriiaall??

Not words but

wing-sounds

there is no nothing

-- Keith Waldrop

One hears the occasional argument for the immateriality of the e-text. This includes
that made by Johanna Drucker in her Language as Writing: Intimations of Immateriality
essay. There have been many arguments that assert that the printed text is more
permanent than the digital text. This, I would argue, is a matter of historical
perspective. In the way that, from a Buddhist perspective, a particular personal
problem looks so much less significant when viewed from the perspective of 6,000
lifetimes than from the one we usually desperately cling to, the difference in the
durability of paper and digital media looks much less drastically different if viewed in
terms of thousands of years instead of hundreds. I do understand the issue raised by
those who ask, as Susan Howe did in Buffalo in 2002, how can you touch a digital file?
This question raised by Howe, a poet noted for her innovative explorations of print
lineation, genuinely evokes an issue in media transition. One can begin to understand
digital materiality if one seeks, rather than a tactile grasp of the medium, an
understanding based on an examination of qualities and issues the medium presents.

· The digital art object consists of marks in magnetic media. Marks are not usually
made directly and must be made through an intermediary instrument of mark-marking,
such as a keyboard, mouse, touch pad, or other device.

· Like alphabetic characters, marks are representational. Sequences of marks convey

ideas through grammar, syntax, and expressive logic. Such ideas are evoked by the
marks but are not independent of them.

· Unlike print, such marks are fungible and highly transmissible.

· The material is a spectral one. It gives the impression of being impermanent because
it requires display or projection to be viewed. Unlike film or photo negatives however,
it has indiscernible tactile qualities, nor even on a microscopic level.

· The material naturally provides for a dynamic, rather than a fixed literary object; this
is in stark contradistinction to conventional notions of the literary object.

· The material allows for algorithmic thinking. One should, however, be specific about
the use of the term algorithmic. That is, its use should be closer to being a synonym
for logical pseudocode rather than a synonym for a concept, trope, or other such
general popularized extraction.

· The digital literary object is one that is highly specific in its historic and material
circumstances. One only need think of cgi-bin programs at their height, of php, of the
effects of pixelation, as striking as any romantic language by Rimbaud, of the Mario
Brothers generation of video games, or of present efforts in php.

H
Hoow
w IItt IIss//N
Noott W
Wrriittiinngg

To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry.

-- Williams

The fact that marks are representational immediately suggests that encoding is
writing. Of course, by this definition, one could also say that other forms of
mark-making, sculpture, painting, playing an instrument are also writing. I would accept
that these other examples are also "writing" if we define writing as an act of engaging
a material to explore ideas through the process of working through that given material,
physically, socially, and ideologically. The case of encoding is even more closely
located to what we might conventionally think of as writing. What are some of the
writerly features of code?

· Grammar. There are rules to be followed and expression is articulated through the
use of syntax. Sometimes you can break rules and get away with it. Sometimes
breaking such rules ain't bad for expressing what you wish to express. However, a
consciousness of the rules is fundamental to literary production.

· Semantics. Just because you follow grammatical rules (your program compiles)
doesn't mean your object will function (For example, just because you're married, it
doesn't necessarily mean you're happy).

· In terms of digital language art, language is a means to make language.

· Encoding is a process of mark-making. As such, it is a form of writing.

· Encoding is a means to an end but it is most expressive when the means is itself a
focus of attention.

· Meaning emerges through the process of engaging the medium.

· Errors are part of the process of making meaning through encoding. Errors
sometimes mould the production of the literary work.

· The encoded work has inherent unpredictability, often surprising even its maker.

· Encoding is making.

PPooeettiiccss ooff D
Dyynnaam
miicc TTeexxtt

The apparent
present.

-- Rae Armantrout

Of course, one might say that dynamic text, or text that is different on each reading,
is a mere dramatization of the unarguable fact that even Wuthering Heights is
different each time you read it, depending on the characteristics of the last Heathcliff
or Catherine in your own personal life and whether you are reading it on vacation in
Yorkshire or in the depths of the Yucatan jungle. Each reading of such a novel is
different, of course, because differences in context, setting, and personal
circumstances foster different interpretations, cause different words, images, etc. to
jump out.

However, dynamic text, text that is physically different each time you encounter it
offers interesting possibilities.

· It forces the literary work away from the idea of a final form presented on a fixed
surface "of record". This is why conventional link-node hypertext offers little in the
way of innovation and why, when link-node hypertext declares itself to represent new
technology, it is actually quite a heinous misrepresentation.

· When the artistic work is forced away from fixed form, one must look deeper for a
sense of meaning. This means looking to the concept, mechanism, or operation that
underlies the work, querying the core stability underlying the work, that which remains
constant beneath the litigious, shifting illusion of its surface. One must find what is
solid beneath the transitory — much like meditation!

· This also means literally looking deeper — to the code. A work of programmed
literature, and here I would emphasize works that are hand coded as opposed to
interface assembled, present a complex of writing, that is, textuality superimposed on
textuality. In this environment, one move can affect elements on other planes of
activity. As in 3-D chess, one must think on several levels before making a mark!

· Programmability may be a defining characteristic of what might really be called New

Media writing. That is, not writing that has been remediated to sit on the screen like a
colorized stuffed Iowa pheasant on the mantelpiece, but writing that engages a
complex of language (im)possibilities. Most importantly, the reader should approach
the work keenly aware of the writing within writing that makes such a work happen.
Indeed, thinking again of Norman White's robotic artworks and White's tendency to
use semi-transparent cases in their construction, one should think of looking at the
surface while bearing in mind the "writing" beneath. It is useful to approach
programmatological works with such a mindset.

· An example of this might be in processes that engage writing code structures,

displaying and sounding them, then altering the code to alter their soundings. Such an
interplay offers interesting new ways to conceive of a poetics of coding. This is
reminiscent of an interview with a Hispanic writer I heard, where he mentioned writing
a piece in English then translating to Spanish then revising by translating back to
English. It was a way of using two language processes to sound against each other to
build ... un interlinguistic objeto of arte.

· The dynamic qualities of such works are dependent on specific and varying notions
of seed and on supporting randomization and selection algorithms. These are issues in
the work also worthy of attention and debate.

"Dynamic" is not here meant to simply mean text that moves. Neither is it meant to
mean text that merely has computational origins. The object that is at the center of
this inquiry is one that does not just sit there (or sit there and move). Rather a poetics
of dynamic text seeks to engage that delicate edge where language apparatuses
meet, slip and engage, to further the possibilities of the poetic text. Indeed, one could
look at some dynamic texts at this point to consider this, but we will continue.

W
Whheerree''ss tthhee W
Wrriittiinngg??

The bright tongues of two

languages

dance in the one light.

-- Robert Duncan

Ultimately, a poetics of programming raises the question, where is the writing? It is a

perspective that looks into the coded work of digital text art, taking into account the
complex and interconnected layers of expression that constitute the work. A digital
poet who writes merely on the surface or a programmer who does not see the writing
the code makes, is simply not exploring the potentials of the medium. What are the
poetics at work in these layers?

· At the code level, poetic writing can consist of economical, tight, expressive, and
meticulously annotated works. In addition, the inventive use of method overwriting,
crafted declarations, and other tropes are strategies of writing. These strategies
likewise can influence the object being produced. Writing with such an interplay relies
on code that itself has a literary/poetic sensibility.

· At the surface level, a consciousness of 20th century innovative literary and artistic
practice can do much to advance the potentials of the digital medium. Unfortunately,
the general tendency of digital poetry seems to take a step backwards in terms of
surface content as a kind of knee jerk off-reaction to the newness of the medium (As
if, the more conventional the writing, the more likely it is the new medium will be
accepted by practitioners of the old medium). Most early hypertexts, and most of
those that are award-winning, are clear examples of how unadventurous such surface
writing can be. In interface art, this problem can sometimes be even worse, as if
Macromedia is the undercover FBI operative infiltrating the gatherings of digital
Weatherman. This phenomenon is present today in interface works that, comparing
digital media to the medium of video, have no more aesthetic depth than commercial
music videos (There is digital poetry that offers crucial thinking-throughs of these
questions, but one must seek it out).

· At both levels, a consciousness of writing as a thinking — through the specific

qualities of the material qualities of the medium. The engagement with the material,
between the coder and the code, is a real one. Like cha cha, there has to be pressure
between the bodies for it to work.

· At both levels, a consciousness of writing practice as ideological expression. For

example, how some simple programmatological objects require a lot of processor
speed to support the overhead of the interface itself. Or how some programs require
huge amounts of additional memory to produce certain fonts or how e-mail programs
will keep reattaching binary code to a message when an image cannot be displayed,
endlessly increasing the drain on available system virtual memory. What are the
ideological implications of such a bloatware ethos? In these cases there is no incentive
for precision or economy. No system eco-sensitivity. This is the same principle we find
in the corporate auto industry-oil company matrix (just keep making more cars and
placing residential areas further from work locations), a set of assumptions that have
had a devastating effect on the environment, the lifestyle of the average worker, and
even policies of war.

· The writing can probe the interface or coding issues but the result should be
interesting. Let's not produce more television commercial jingles nor regurgitate the
Wired aesthetic, itself a declaration of corporate identity.
· Not just text art that uses programming but code as poetic practice. The code or
the text may be interesting but most interesting is their interrelation.

If language is defined as written symbols organized into combinations and patterns to

express and communicate thoughts and feelings, then coding is language (With the
exception of, that is, the language I use when I receive compile errors!). One may,
however, extend this definition to suggest that language is play. Language is where
one plays and it is the play in language as a medium — the slippage and double
denotations — that can create delight enough to lighten a dreary Buffalo even in
November. How is encoding language? At both the code level and on the surface,
relevant are indicators such as humor, innovation, irony, double meanings, and a
concentration on the play of language. It is the making of marks with a sense of
marksmanship, the bull's-eye being that specific point where language doubles, allows
multiple meaning, and launches the executable onto its unpredictable, though guided,
path through the artful potentials of inscription.

RReeffeerreenncceess aanndd N
Nootteess
Andrews, Bruce, Wobbling (New York: Roof, 1981).

Armantrout, Rae, Made To Seem (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995).

Drucker, Johanna, Figuring the Word (New York: Granary, 1998).

Duncan, Robert, Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1964).

Palmer, Michael, Codes Appearing (New York: New Directions, 1981).

Waldrop, Keith, The House Seen from Nowhere (Brooklyn, NY: Litmus, 2002).

White, Norman. See http://www.normill.ca/ (21 January 2006).

Williams, William Carlos, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970).

A
Auutthhoorr BBiiooggrraapphhyy
Loss Pequeño Glazier is a poet, professor of Media Study, and founder and director of
the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu), the world's most extensive
web-based digital poetry resource, housed in the Department of Media Study, State
University of New York, Buffalo. He is
the author of the digitally informed poetry collection _Anatman, Pumpkin Seed,
Algorithm_ (Salt Publishing, 2003), several other books of poetry, and the award-
winning _Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries_ (University of Alabama Press,
2002).

Rooted in an experimental literary sensibility, his digital poetry consists of visual

text-art that engages sound, photography, video, interactivity, and programming to
explore new possibilities for time-mediated and web-based digital art. Recent
performances of, Baila, his digital poem for dancers, have occurred in London and
Buffalo. He is the author of acclaimed works such as Io Sono At Swoons, White-Faced
Bromeliads on 20 Hectares, Mouseover, Viz Études, and his work-in-progress, Territorio
Libre.

He is organizer and director of E-Poetry: An International Digital Poetry Festival, the

first and one of the most celebrated digital poetry series in the field. His work has
been shown at various museums and galleries, including the Kulturforum, Berlin, the
Royal Festival Hall, London, and the Guggenheim, New York, and he has lectured and
performed throughout the U.S. and in London, Paris, Berlin, Norway, Spain, Mexico,
Canada, and other countries. Selected digital projects and other work are available on
his EPC author page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier).

CCiittaattiioonn rreeffeerreennccee ffoorr tthhiiss LLeeoonnaarrddoo EElleeccttrroonniicc A

Allm
maannaacc EEssssaayy

MLA Style
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. "Code as Language." "New Media Poetry and Poetics" Special
Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 5 - 6 (2006). 25 Sep. 2006
<http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/lpglazier.asp>.

APA Style
 Glazier, L P. (Sep. 2006) "Code as Language," "New Media Poetry and Poetics" Special
Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 14, No. 5 - 6 (2006). Retrieved 25 Sep. 2006
from <http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/lpglazier.asp>.

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