Great conference speech by Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language. I'd better say "editor" of the Perl programming language, if I want to be true to his stance about postmodernism being the theoretical and cultural background this language.

Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. (...) In Perl, AND has higher precedence than OR does. There you have it. That proves Perl is a postmodern language.

(...) When I started designing Perl, I explicitly set out to deconstruct all the computer languages I knew and recombine or reconstruct them in a different way, because there were many things I liked about other languages, and many things I disliked. I lovingly reused features from many languages. (I suppose a Modernist would say I stole the features, since Modernists are hung up about originality.) Whatever the verb you choose, I've done it over the course of the years from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lisp, Ada, C++, and Python.

I picked the feature set of Perl because I thought they were cool features. I left the other ones behind because I thought they sucked. More than that, I combined these cool features in a way that makes sense to me as a postmodern linguist, not in a way that makes sense to the typical Modernistic computer scientist.

This is a speech from 1999! This proves that this blog is not about "what's up" in media theory but what is the state of media theory accessible on the Web in 2005 -  same for artworks.

By the way, Perl is aknowledged as the first language to have been used for poetic purpose, with the famous signature "Just Another Perl Hacker" written by Randal L. Schwartz. This is the most simplest form:

 print "Just another Perl hacker,n";

which output is of course, the string itself. And here is a more obsfucated form: 

 $_='987;s/^(d+)/$1-1/e;$1?eval:print"Just another Perl hacker,"';eval;

I will come back on the matter as it is one of my main interests, though I have a  hard time getting into programming languages unlike Nick Monfort, whose essay "A Box, Darkly: Obsfucation, Weird Languages and Code Aestethics" is fascinating. 

Here is the winning entry of the Haiku Perl Contest 2000:

sub summer { my $sum;

$sum += $_ for @_;

$sum } print summer (split);

        Ronald J Kimball

n.b: summer.pl is a sum-er and a season. :) 

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Larry Wall, "Perl, the First Postmodern Programming Language" http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/03/pm.html 

Nick Montfort & Michael Mateas, "A Box, Darkly: Obsfucation, Weird Languages and Code Aestethics" http://nickm.com/cis/

Perl Poetry:

- Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_another_Perl_hacker 

- Winner of the first Perl Poetry Contest: http://perlguy.com/contest.html 

- Perl Haiku contest: http://history.perl.org/CHI/index.html 

Originally posted on Grand Text Auto at http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/01/23/glazier-carpenter-moulthrop/

Attention Philadelphians and those nearby! The MACHINE reading series at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization, will soon feature:

On February 15: Loss “Pequeño” Glazier (University of Buffalo, author of Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, numerous digital works, and Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm) joins Penn’s own Jim Carpenter (creator of the Electronic Text Composition system) to take the Writers House to the limits of computing and poetry. The program will be hosted by poet and critic Charles Bernstein (With Strings, My Way: Speeches and Poems, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Dark City). This “Constructing Poets” program is co-sponsored by the Penn Creative Writing Program.

(See my Ressources to get rss feeds of Grand Text Auto's blog)

UPDATE: I WENT TO THIS EVENT,

I TOOK SOME NOTES,

I WROTE A BLOG ENTRY:
http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/7811.html 

I recall having read the famous Vannevar Bush's "As we may think" some months ago, and thinking how interesting the idea of Memex was, as an operation of hybridization: the analogy between the brain and the computer is also a differentiation, that is a process of association and a process of indexing. The Memex, which was born from "the process of tying two things together" becomes a "associative indexing": it is one of the first answers to Artificial Intelligence as an hybridization of these two systems, human and machine.

"The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage."

I like the idea that this is the birth of social software, i.e., a program that allows a multitude of users to retrieve and exchange information (as wikipedia or mailing lists are for instance). It is interesting to me as the same kind of definition applies to cybertext, as developed by Espen Aarseth :

"The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, the user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim (1997 - p.1)"

The notions of mechanization, exchange and interaction, and medium-specific, apply both to social and literary software. The Cybertext has to deal with the process of information before any aesthetic concern. I like the idea that creativity is not immediately interpreted as artistic but has to do with pure data first. V.Bush again:

The repetitive processes of thought are not confined, however, to matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines.

An example of how social software is used and abused by poets or artists are mail-poems interventions within a topical discussion/mailing list: the following I got on Nettime, a big mailing list discussing New Media objects, processes, and events. 

 -----------------------+

| ascii images brought to you by http://www.ascii.lt |
| Please view them in monospaced fonts like courier. |
+----------------------------------------------------+

                          ______
       |_______________ (___________________     IS IT SO WRONG
HH======#H###############H#######################    TO MASTURBATE
       ' ~""""""""""""""`##(_))#H"""""Y########    TO THE SHOOTING
                         ))    #H       `"Y###    SCENE IN HEAT
dew                       "      }#H)

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net

The poem seems to stand against informative data by seemingly talking non-sense, but is also another way of using a network of mailboxes (cf. mail art). The poem can also be considered as an original way to advertise a poetic trend, even if the poet is anonymous - someone will figure out somehow who he is. I read this in perspective to buzzes in advertisement: they seem out of place in the publicity world, but they are actually creating this contrast in order to mark the spirit in a stronger way.  It is a common strategy among designers. These  poet-people (mi-ga?) not only hijack a medium, they also literally "mail" their art (like angry kids could do to call for attention: the point is not to steal the car but to show that we can steal it, we advertise our power to do so, to know the language of thief, because we want to be seen/sold as such): the poem is as well a design object as a subversive reflective piece of art. There nothing wrong in that. It's pretty cool, in a sense; but it is not "executable/code art". This can be seen as well as an hybridization between 2 conflictual ways of processing data. 

update (01/31/06): teacher Trebor Scholz told me about what a nuisance can be these "spam-poems", because they do break the process of communication that a mailing-list is. It even caused the end a famous mailing list which name I can't seem to remember right now (Spicta?).

It is also interesting, in regard to design, that this kind of poetic writing is called "pseudo-code" (like MEZ's "mezangelle" language is). Not the "pseudo-code" which is a first draft of code used by programmers to landmark their way through the actual code, but "pseudo-code" as an imitation of obsfucated computer languages to write perfectly readable in a "natural" way (as opposed to "formal" languages). This is another form of rhetorics - the way language designs itself in order to convince. 

update_2: i just read today (hours later) that I should rather call this "faux-code" than "pseudo-code", following the expertise of Alan Sondheim. He also speaks of these works as a "third content (...) resulting from the entanglement" of natural language and the logical structures of programming language. A. Sondheim certainly wouldn't agree with me when I refer "faux-code" works to design  - in the way that it imitates a language to have more efficiency - I am not saying of course it is trying to impose an object on the reader, though I do think of "faux-code" as a kind of object, more than a performative action. Sondheim's stance is not the opposite but is certainly conflictual: for him codeworks are the sign of a disorder. His basis, I think, and I may be over-simplifying, is an organic view of language (in this reference from "Plaintext/Tools" he refers to Wolfram's cellular automata),  based on a phenomenological perspective, which is out of my concern.

update_3 (06/01/06): an interview with mi_ga is to be found on the nettime mailing-list here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00058. . for some reason, i am having trouble retrieving theirmail-interventions on the same mailing list: the search engine simply doesn't find him. for other e-mailing art intervention, check out this post on jodi: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/10606.html  

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Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/%7Educhier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997

Nettime mailing lists : http://www.nettime.org/ 

MEZ: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/ 

Alan Sondheim, posted answer to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, http://www.as.wvu.edu:8000/clc/projects/plaintext_tools/Codework 

An interesting article was posted on the nettime mailing list today; an essay published in Felix Stalder's new book Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Here is the final statement:

"The controversy between the object-oriented and the exchange-oriented visions of culture is currently being fought on all levels, legal (expanding versus narrowing copyrights and patents), technical (digital rights management versus distribution and access technologies), and economic (exchange of commodities versus provision of services). Crucially, however, it is also fought in the field of culture itself, in ongoing experimentations on how we can produce, reproduce, and interpret new forms of meaning."

This is interesting in regard to the debate on "Plaintext/Tool" led by Alan Sondheim that I cited in my previous post, which is strongly affected by a quasi-religious belief for processuality as the only valuable posture/gesture to make sense from now on. Stalder seems to reformulate the debate as positing that the flow of conversation of an "exchange-oriented" network society opposes a resistance to the "object-oriented" one (law, goods, etc.); but there is no fight in this dichotomy (the rhizomatic/anarchist against the authoritarian/capitalist), there is a "jeu d'influence", inter-determination between the two. They do relate closely together, and evolve according to that relation.

 That is why the aesthetics of "debris" and chaos that Sondheim and his people advocate seems weird to me. I don't deny it is interesting but it is just not all what code is about. Is it a not coincidence that most of programmers who deliver open source are also those who work for "evil" companies. It doesn't make them some self-righteous little demons in charge of maximum capitalization, but it makes them embody the relational principle that new media technology does question (not invent).

(...) the fixed and the fluid, the objects and the exchanges, are becoming harder and harder to differentiate.

But it doesn't mean that in the digital form, the object-orientation has disappeared ; for instance, there is a strong sense of service on the WWW, which, through its logic of the flow, still tends to fixate things (into goods, into rules, the persistance of copyright, etc.). Stalder adds: it is not because it is not material that it is not object-oriented (and vice-versa). The problem with the blurring of boundaries (or wrong definitions), is that, in one case, there is the improbable cyber-utopia of a "netwurked" (to use MEZ's vocabulary) and "messy"(Sondheim's)mode of expression, and in the other, in the context of "informational capitalism" as Stalder calls it, the generalization of prohibition for both objects and exchanges, the mode of repression (I think it is not a coincidence that the surveillance process uses flows and means of communication like medias to fixate people, categorize them; but I don't know too much about this, it is just a guess). Hmmm.

 The "Plaintext/Tools" discussion unfolds in an interesting way as 2 statement are made: 

1) "What interests me about a "low level" codework in particular is its capacity to address textual primitives like automation, intention, and intelligibility. By foregrounding these facets of textuality, by rendering them normative and essential, computers open up the most extreme textual fields I know". Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 11:23:00 -0500

I like the idea of working with code as an exemplification of the rule that is not political but relational : it is essential the text and the rule be related to each other (not forced into each other like the political would do).

This point interests me because it talks about rhetoric; but the "process" at work is a difficult issue because it is a much a "mechanism", the act of processing, as an intention, "processuality" which is the new motto but tends to be used a metaphor for all texts working in New Media objects: though they don't all process, they also are processed (as objects), and they want to show process (as symbols). 

Enough for now. 

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I came across Nick Montfort (from Grand Text Auto collective blog)'s notes on a Phd dissertation by Maurice J. Black, entitled The Art of Code. This polemical dissertation was written right when Humanities were shifting from Cybertheory to a more technological and code-based approach to computer knowledge: that is when the software theory became accessible. That's interesting because, while claiming that he has a literary approach to the field, for Black it is only legitimate to talk about software as aesthetics as long as you consider computer as an "interdisciplinary" object, meaning that the literary approach should in no way be prior to other perspectives. That may state the obvious but it is important to consider the computer not as an object that can be abstracted as an conceptual entity, "artifactual monolith" (N. Monfort), world of meaning in itself. Instead, the computer, through software, is seen through a series of determinations shaped and constantly modified by reference to a practice, to an action. N. Monfort summarizes:

"For the hacker, the central issues have to do with where code comes from, who owns it, who writes it, and how good it is".

It is not really the point of knowing what the computer means as an abstract entity, but what we mean by handling software issues.

Also, it reminded me a my recent reading of the whacky Timothy Leary's Chaos and Cyberculture, that also deals with a transition from hat can be abstracted as an conceptual entity, "the computer as vague metaphor" but nonetheless "prophetic and poetic (...) connected to (...) utopian writing" that are cyberstudies (here N. Monfort nuances Black's position). Though in Leary's case, this transition is not really conscious, more hallucinatory. Here are some of my fav quotes:

"Personal Computer owners are discovering that the brain is:

- the ultimate organ for pleasure and awareness
- an array of a hundred billion microcomputers waiting to be booted up, activated, stimulated, and programmed;
- waiting impatiently for software, headware, thoughtware that pays respect to its awesome potential and makes possible electronic internet linkage with other brains." (p. 50)

 
"Joyce was only a writer, but also a word-processor, a proto-hacker, reducing ideas to elemental units and endlessly recombining them at will. Joyce programmed reality using his own basic language, a quantum linguistic that allowed him to assemble and reassemble thoughts into fugal, repetitious, contrapuntal patterns. (It also helped that he was semi-blind and dyslexic).

Imagine what James Joyce could have done with MS Word or a CD-ROM graphic system or modern data base! Well, we don't have to imagine - he actually managed to do it using his own brainware." (p.47)

Which is quite sensible as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the major references of literary programmers (along with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky), and a paradigmatic example for Black ("Object-oriented Joyce")

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