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This
essay begins by identifying a central idea in the
critical discourse on code art and code poetry:
code is a deep structure that instantiates a
surface. The AP Project’s Jonathan Kemp and
Martin Howse, for example, explain that their work
makes “manifest underlying systematics,”
that can make the digital “physical, audible
and visible through geological computing.” In
what sense, if at all, can we trace a computing
operation down to a foundation, bottom, or core?
Why do we maintain this cultural imaginary of code
and how has it come into being? Moreover, how have
the metaphors of software engineering –
particularly the notion of structured layers and
multitier architectures – been put to artistic
use? The thematizing of layers, surfaces, and
spatial metaphors has become quite intricate in new
media writing practices, as I will demonstrate in a
reading of “Lascaux.Symbol.ic,” one of
Ted Warnell’s Poems by Nari, and recent
projects by John Cayley, including Overboard and
Translation. These readings, among others, will
point to a logical tension between, on the one
hand, the discourse of the foundational
architecture of code, a “geological
computing” that mines the depths to produce a
geology (or a mythology) of surface and, on the
other, the discourse of computational code in terms
of inaccessible, inscrutable processes.
1. Code.surface ||
Code.depth
2. Lascaux.Symbol.ic
3. Reading code
4. Overboard
5. Translation
6. Writing for complex surfaces
7. Black boxing code
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