In November 2002, an
extraordinary event occurred in Buffalo. Key practitioners in new media
arts, cultural theory, computer science, and poetics gathered to
deliberate issues critical to the intertwined engagements of language,
expression, and computer code in emergent media. Addressed were questions
of the status of code as language, how programming languages modulate
intention, and how programming mediates language. Further, the often
contradictory interdependence of language and encoding, the duality of
code as notation and instruction, the "otherness" of the executable work,
the relevance of particular languages to specific tasks, and the
machine/human language border were interrogated. Responding to these
issues were artists, programmers, and scholars with wide-ranging interests
from diverse fields.
The idea was not
to think of code independent of its "genre" or "field". My own interest
in organizing such a gathering was to think of code as a material and
as a means to an end. The way writing is a material and a means to an
end: the written object is not just writing -- but turns out a love
letter, a poem, a legal document, an entry in a diary. The question
then becomes what issues are dealt with through the writing process
itself --independent of the stated aim. That is, what issues are present
in the writing "as writing". The same question of writing as a means
to an end is present when you think of writing as encoding and the ends
as programming-based works: digital poetry, new media experiments, artificial
intelligence, cultural interventions, installation art, or robotics.
The idea is to break away from familiar patterns of thinking of coding
as an activity that exists on its own or as a process that is detached
from its produced object. Code as writing but also as writing that "works",
the wiring that makes the digital object tick.
The issue of what
is present in the writing of code differs according to the demands of
a given project. Different ends reveal different strategies, different
conceptualizations of how encoding works in realizing the object. What
was consistent in the Symposium was how encoding was not just a necessary
task but an active site of poesis, or "making".
The papers in this
issue reveal a range of conceptions of code. The reading here is doubly
satisfying, not only for the clear presentations of these engaging projects,
but for the sense of code as undercurrent, the way encoding, language,
and artistic expression are separate undertakings, but inescapably intertwined.
Writing, as a human
activity produces texts that seek to tell about us -- histories, novels,
documentary films -- works constituting the human record. But even more
can be learned about us through looking at how we negotiate language
in order to produce such documents. Our relation to language, its very
strategies and resistances, tell us more about ourselves than any document
that might be produced through the process. The papers here seek to
present a similar way to contemplate writing as encoding, not as merely
a way to produce objects, but as a window on artistic production,a means
to think through the digital medium.
Language & Encoding
was organized by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Mark Böhlen, Department of
Media Study, State University of New York, Buffalo, November 8-9, 2002.
The Language & Encoding panels included Beige Records, John Cayley,
Alex Galloway, Lisa Jevbratt, Lev Manovich, Michael Mateas, Jonathan
Minton, David Rokeby, Phoebe Sengers, Marc Böhlen, and Loss Pequeño
Glazier. This issue of Dichtung Digital presents a written record
of those panel presentations. Addtionally, the Symposium featured performances
by Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley, John Cayley, Loss Pequeño Glazier
and Beige Records, not represented here. Archival information about
the Symposium is available at the Symposium's web site (http://epc.buffalo.edu/events/02/encoding), with video documentation
forthcoming..
With best wishes from the Niagara frontier,
I present these evocative readings for your pleasure. Here's to further
dialog on these crucial issues!
Buffalo, 4.08.2003
Loss Pequeño Glazier
dichtung-digital