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\begin{document}

\begin{abstract}

This paper is based on the general (yet disputable) assumption that the
theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted, just
as the poetic practices it is shaped after, from perceiving computer
data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in
such notions as ``hypertext'', ``hyperfiction'', ``hyper-/ multimedia'')
towards paying attention to the very codedness -- i.e.  textuality -- of
digital systems themselves. Several phenomena may serve as empirical
evidence:

\begin{itemize}

\item The early focus of conceptualist Net.art on the aesthetics and
politics of code;

\item in turn, the impact of Net.art aesthetics on experimental
literature / poetry in the Internet;

\item the close discooursive affinity of Net.art to political activism
in the Internet;

\item the close aesthetic affinity of Net.art to a the languages and
codes of an older, technically oriented ``hacker'' culture (of Chaos
Computer Club, 2600, and others);

\item a convergence of the three cultures mentioned above
-- Net.art, net activism and hacker culture;

\item (a) Free/Open Source Software and/or (b) open network protocols as
key discursive, political and aesthetical issues in all these camps; 

\item finally, the impact of hacker aesthetics, Net.art aesthetics, code
aesthetics and network protocol aesthetics on contemporary writing in
the Internet. (See the work of mez, Alan Sondheim, Talan Memmott, Ted
Warnell and others.)

\end{itemize}

The question is how ``Codeworks'' (Alan Sondheim) fit notions of text
that were crafted without digital code  -- most importantly:
machine-executable digital code -- in mind,  and vice versa. Is it a
coincidence that, in their poetical appropriation of low-level Internet
codes, codeworks ended up aesthetically resembling concrete poetry?
And, apart from aesthetic resemblances, how do computer programs relate
to literature? Is that what is currently being discussed as ``Software
Art'' a literary genre?

\end{abstract}

\title{Digital Code and Literary Text}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{Sept. 27, 2001}


Can notions of text which were developed without electronic texts in
mind be applied to digital code, and how does literature come into play
here?

\maketitle


\section{Code}

% In his abstract for this conference,  John Cayley takes a position
% which to some extent seems to be the opposite to mine. It's exciting
% that we will have a debate at this conference, and so I would like to
% make my point and clear up my basic assumptions about the term
% ``code''.

Since computers, the Internet and all digital technologies are based on
zeros and ones, they are based on code. Zeros and ones are an alphabet
which can be translated forth and back between other alphabets without
information loss. It does, in my point of view, make no sense to limit
the definition of the alphabet in general to that of the Roman alphabet
in particular when we can the same textual information in this very
alphabet, as Morse code, flag signs or transliterated into zeros and
ones. The Internet and computers run on alphabetic code, whereas, for
examples, images and sound can only be digitally stored when translating
them into code, which -- unlike the translation of conventional text
into digital bits -- is a lossy, that is, not fully reversible and
symmetric translation. Sounds and images are not code by themselves, but
have to be turned into code in order to be computed; where as any
written text already is code. Literature therefore is a privileged
symbolic form in digital information systems. It is possible to
automatically search a collection of text files for all occurences of
the word ``bird'', but doing the same with birds in a collection of
image files or bird songs in a collection of audio files is incomparably
tricky and error-prone, relying on either artificial intelligence
algorithms or manual indexing, both of which are methods to translate
non-semantic writing (pixel code) into semantic writing (descriptions).

The reverse is true as well: We can perfectly translate digital data and
algorithms into non-digital media like print books, as long as we
translate them into signs coded according to the logic of an alphabet.
This is what is done, for example, in programming handbooks or in
technical specification manuals for Internet standards. Today there are
two notorious examples of a forth-and-back translation between print and
computers: 

\begin{enumerate}

\item The sourcecode of Phil Zimmerman's cryptography program ``Pretty
Good Privacy'' (PGP). The PGP algorithms were legally considered a
weapon and therefore became subject to U.S. export restrictions. To
circumvent this ban, Zimmerman published the PGP sourcecode in a book.
Unlike algorithms, literature is covered by the U.S. First Amendment of
free speech.  So the book could be exported outside the United States
and, by scanning and retyping, translated back into an executable
program;

\item the sourcecode of DeCSS, a small program which breaks the
cryptography scheme of DVD movies. Since U.S. jurisdiction declared
DeCSS an ``illegal circumvention device'' according to the new Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the ban equally affected booklets,
flyposters and t-shirts on which the DeCSS sourcecode was printed.

\end{enumerate}

That code is speech is a fact stressed again and again by programmers
and is also at the heart of Lawrence Lessig's legal theory of the
Internet (\cite{lessig:code}).  It is, strictly speaking, sloppy
terminology to speak of ``digital media''. There actually is no such
thing as digital media, but only digital information. Digital
information becomes ``media'' only by the virtue of analog output;
computer screens, loudspeakers, printers are analog output devices
interfaced to the computer via digital-to-analog conversion hardware
like video and sound cards or serial interfaces.\footnote{On the reverse
end of the chain, keyboards, mice, scanners and cameras are
analog-to-digital converters.}

An average contemporary personal computer uses magnetic disks (floppy
and hard disks), optical disks (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM) and chip memory
(RAM) as its storage media, and electricity or fiber optics as its
transmission media. Theoretically, one could build a computer with a
printer and a scanner which uses books and alphabetic text as its
storage media.\footnote{While such a machine would operate slower than
with magnetical or optical media, it would provide more robust and
durable information storage on the other hand.} Alan Turing showed that
no electronics are needed to build a computer; the Boston Computer
Museum even features a mechanical computer built from wooden
sticks.

Juxtapositions of ``the book'' and ``the computer'' are quite
misleading, because they confuse the storage and analog output media
(paper versus a variety of optical, magnetical and electronical
technologies) with the information (alphabetical text versus binary
code). It further ignores, by the way, the richness of storage and
transmission media in traditional literature which, aside from the book,
include oral transmission and mental storage, audio records and tapes,
the radio and television, to name only a few. 

If there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as digital media, there
also is, strictly speaking, no such thing as digital images or digital
sound. What we refer to as a ``digital image'' is a piece of code
containing the machine instructions to produce the flow of electricity
with which an analog screen or an analog printer is made to display an
image.\footnote{Normally, this code is divided into three pieces, one --
the so-called sound or image file -- containing the machine-independent
and program-independent abstract information, the second -- the
so-called display program -- containing the instructions to mediate the
abstracted information in a machine-independent, yet not
program-independent format to the operating system, the third -- the
so-called operating system --, mediating the program output to the
output machine, whether a screen or a printer. These three code layers
however are nothing but conventions. Theoretically, the ``digital
image'' file could in itself contain all the code necessary to make
itself display on analog end devices, including the code that is
conventionally identified as a boot loader and core operating system.}

Of course it is important whether a sequence of zeros and ones
translates, into, say, an image because that defines its interpretation
and semantics. The point of my (admittedly) formalistic argumentation is
not to deny this, but to underline that

\begin{enumerate}

\item when we speak of ``multimedia'' or ``intermedia'' in conjunction
with computers, digital art and literature, we actually don't speak of
digital systems as themselves, but about translations of digital
information into analog output and vice versa;

\item text and literature are highly privileged symbolic systems in
these translation processes because (a) they are already coded and (b)
computers run on a code. 

\end{enumerate}

Literature and computers meet first of all where alphabets and code,
human language and machine language intersect, secondly in the
interfacing of analog devices through digital control code. While of
course we cannot think of code without media because we can't read it
without them, the computer does not really extend literary media
themselves. All those output media -- electricity, electrical sound and
image transmission etc. -- existed before and without computers and
digital information processing.

I therefore have to revise the position I took in several my previous
writings\footnote{like in the paper ``Warum es zuwenig interessante
Computerdichtung gibt. Neun Thesen'' (`` Nine Points on Why there is so
little interesting computer net literature``),
\url{http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/net_literature/general/karlsruhe_2000//karlsruher_thesen.pdf}}:
If we speak of digital poetry, or computer network poetry, we don't have
to speak of certain media, and we don't even have to speak of specific
machines. If computers can be built from broomsticks -- and networked
via shoestrings; if any digital data, including executable algorithms,
can be printed in books and from them read back into machines or,
alternatively, executed in the mind of the reader, there is no reason
why computer network poetry couldn't or shouldn't be printed as well in
books.

Perhaps the term of digital ``multimedia'' -- or better: ``intermedia''
-- would be more helpful if we redefine it as the \emph{the possibility
to losslessly translate information from one sign system to the other,
forth and back, so that the visible, audible or tacticle representation
of the information becomes arbitrary}. A state not be achieved unless
the information is not coded in some kind of alphabet, whether
alphanumerical, binary, hexadecimal or, if you like, Morse code.


\section{Literature}

\subsection{Synthesis: putting things together}

To observe the textual codedness of digital systems of course implies
the danger of generalizing and projecting one's observations of digital
code onto literature as a whole. Computers operate on machine language,
which is syntactically far less complex than human language. The
alphabet of both machine and human language is interchangeable, so that
``text'' -- if defined as a countable mass of alphabetical signifiers --
remains a valid descriptor for both machine code sequences and human
writing. In syntax and semantics however, machine code and human writing
are not interchangeable. Computer algorithms are, like logical
statements, a formal language and thus only a restrained subset of
language as a whole. 

However, I believe it is a common mistake to claim that machine language
would be only readable to machines and hence irrelevant for human art
and literature and, vice versa, literature and art would be unrelated to
formal languages. 

It is important to keep in mind that computer code, and computer
programs, are not machine creations and machines talking to themselves,
but writings by humans.\footnote{No computer can reprogram itself;
self-programming is only possible within a limited framework of game
rules written by a human programmer. A machine can behave differently
than expected, because the rules didn't foresee all situations they
could create, but no machine can overwrite its own rules by itself.} The
programmer-artist Adrian Ward suggests that we put the assumption of the
machine controlling the language upside down:

\begin{quotation}

``I would rather suggest we should be thinking about embedding our own
creative subjectivity into automated systems, rather than naively trying
to get a robot to have its `own' creative agenda.  A lot of us do this
day in, day out. We call it programming.''\footnote{quoted from an
E-Mail message to the ``Rhizome'' mailing list, May 7, 2001}

\end{quotation}

Perhaps one also could call it composing scores, and it does not seem
accidental to me that musical artists have picked up and grasped
computers much more thoroughly than literary writers.  Western music is
an outstandig example of an art which relies upon written formal
instruction code. Self-reflexive injokes such as ``B-A-C-H'' in Johann
Sebastian Bach's music, the visual figurations in the score of Erik
Satie's ``Sports et divertissements'' and finally the experimental score
drawings of John Cage shows that, beyond a merely serving the artwork,
formal instruction code has an aesthetic dimension and intellectual
complexity of its own. In many works, musical composers have shifted
instruction code from classical score notation to natural human
language. A seminal piece, in my opinion, is La Monte Young's
``Composition No.1 1961'' which simply consists of the instruction
``Draw a straight line and follow
it.''\footnote{\cite{hundertmark:maciunas}, no page numbering} Most
Fluxus performance pieces were written in the same notation style. Later
in 1969, the American composer Alvin Lucier wrote his famous ``I am
sitting in a room'' as a brief spoken instruction which very precisely
tells to perform the piece by playing itself back and modulating the
speech through the room echoes. 

In literature, formal instructions is the necessary prerequisite of all
permutational and combinatory poetry.\footnote{Some historical examples
have been adapted online on my website
\url{http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations}} Kabbalah and
magical spells are important examples as well. But even in a
conventional narrative, there is an implict formal instruction of how --
i.e. in which sequence -- to read the text (which may be followed or
not, as opposed to hypertext which offers alternative sequences on the
one hand, but enforces its implicit instruction on the other). Grammar
itself is an implicit, and very pervasive formal instruction code.

Although formal instruction code is only a subset of language, it is
still at work in all speech and writing. 

It is particularly remarkable about computing that the namespace of
executable instruction code and nonexecutable code is flat: If, like
Inke Arns proposed (using structuralist terminology), we speak of
instruction code as a ``genotext'' and non-instruction code as a
``phenotext'', then computed language differs from spoken language in
that both genotext and phenotext are coded in the same alphabet of bits
and bytes, whereas in spoken language, the genotext of grammar is an
implicit, mental code. One cannot tell from a snippet of digital code
whether it is machine-executable or not, a phenotext or a genotext.  In
fact every digital code, even a "Project Gutenberg" text of, say,
Homer's "Odyssee", is potentially executable depending on whether
there's other code -- a compiler, runtime interpreter or the embedded
logic of a microprocessor -- capable to process it as machine
instructions. Computer code is highly recursive and highly
architectural, building upon layers of layers of code. 


\subsection{Analysis: taking things apart}

The fact that one cannot tell from any piece of code whether it is
machine-executable or not provides the principle condition of all E-Mail
viruses on the one hand, and of the codeworks of jodi, antiorp/Netochka
Nezvanova, mez, Ted Warnell, Alan Sondheim, Kenji Siratori -- to name
only a few -- on the other; work that, unlike the actual viri, is
fictional in that it aesthetically pretends to be potentially viral
machine code.\footnote{with the ``biennale.py'' computer virus of the
net art groups \url{http://www.0100101110111001.org} being the only
exception to date.}
% (I would not attempt to make a theoretical point for the digital
% poetry as code poetry here if it wasn't backed up by others' artistic
% practices and my own aesthetic preferences in net poetry.)

The codeworks, to use a term coined by Alan Sondheim, of these writers
and programmer-artists are prime examples for a digital poetry which
reflects the intrisic textuality of the computer. But they do so not by
being, to quote Alan Turing via Raymond Queneau, computer poetry to be
read by computers\footnote{\cite{queneau:poemes}, p.3}, but by playing
with the confusions and thresholds of machine language and human
language, and by reflecting the cultural implications of these overlaps.
The ``mezangelle'' poetry of mez/Mary Ann Breeze, which mixes
programming/network protocol code and non-computer language to a
portmanteau-word hybrid, is an outstanding example of such a poetics.  

Compared to earlier poetics of formal instruction, like in La Monte
Young's \emph{Composition 1961}, in Fluxus pieces and in permutational
poetry, an important difference can be observed in the codeworks: The
Internet code poets and artists do not construct or synthesize code, but
they use code or code grammars they found and take them apart. I agree
with Friedrich Block and his ``Eight Digits of Digital Poetry''
\url{http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2001/10/17-Block/index-engl.htm}
that digital poetry should be read in the history and context of
experimental poetry. A poetics of synthesis was characteristic of
combinatory and instruction-based poetry, a poetics of analysis
characterized Dada and its successors. But one hardly finds poetry with
an analytical approach to formal instruction code in the classical 20th
century avant-garde.\footnote{An exception being the the ALGOL computer
programming language poetry written by the Oulipo poets François le
Lionnais and Noël Arnaud in the early 1970s, see
\cite{oulipo-compendium}, p.47} Internet code poetry is being written in
a new -- if one likes, post-modernist -- condition of machine code
abundance and overload.  

The hypothesis that there is no such thing as digital media, but only
digital code which can be stored in and put out on any analog medium, is
perfectly verified by codework poetry. Unlike hypertext and multimedia
poets, most of the artists mentioned here write plain ASCII text. The
contradiction between a complex techno-poetical reflection and low-tech
communication is only a seeming one; quite on the contrary, the low-tech
is crucial to the critical implication of the codework poetics. 

The development of hyperfiction and multimedia poetry practically
paralleled the construction of the World Wide Web; hyperfiction authors
rightfully saw themselves as its pioneers. In the course of nineties,
they continued to push the technical limits of both the Internet and
multimedia computer technology. But since much digital art and
literature became testbed applications for new browser features and
multimedia plugins, it simultaneously locked itself into non-open,
industry-controlled code formats.\footnote{like Shockwave, QuickTime and
Flash} Whether intentional or not, digital art thus strongly
participated in the reformatting of the World Wide Web from an open,
operating system- and browser-agnostic information network to a platform
dependent on propietary technology. 

By readjusting the reader's attention from software surfaces which
pretended not to be code back to the code itself, codeworks have
apparent aesthetical and political affinities to hacker cultures. While
hacker cultures are far more diverse than the singular term ``hacker''
suggests\footnote{Boris Gröndahl's (German) Telepolis article ``The
Script Kiddies Are Not Alright'' summarizes the multiple, sometimes even
antagonistic camps associated with the term ``hacker'',
\url{http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/html/result.xhtml?url=/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/9266/1.html}},
hackers could as well be distinguished between those who put things
together -- like Free Software and demo programmers -- and those who
take things apart -- like crackers of serial numbers and communication
network hackers from YIPL/TAP, Phrack, 2600 and Chaos Computer Club
schools. Code poets have factually adopted many poetical forms that were
originally developed by various hacker subcultures from the 1970s to the
early 1990s, including ASCII Art, code slang (like ``7331 wAr3z d00d''
for ``leet [=elite] wares dood'') and poetry in programming languages
(such as Perl poetry), or they even belong to both the ``hacker'' and
the ``art'' camp\footnote{like Walter van der Cruijsen from
\url{http://www.desk.org}desk.org and the ASCII Art Ensemble.} 

From its beginning on, conceptualist net.art engaged in a critical
politics of the Internet and its code, and continues to be closely
affiliated with critical discourse on net politics in such forums as the
``Nettime'' mailing list. In its aesthetics, poetics and politics,
codework poetry departs from net.art rather than from hyperfiction and
its historical roots in the Brown University literature program.  

How does digital code relate to literary text? If one discusses the
poetics of digital code in terms of the poetics of literary text --
instead of discussing literary text in terms of digital code --, one may
consider both of them interrelated without having to subscribe, as John
Cayley suggested in his abstract to the German ``p0es1s''
conference\footnote{\url{http://www.p0es1s.net/poetics/symposion2001/a_cayley.html}},
to Friedrich Kittler's techno-determinist media theory; a theory which,
despite all of its intellectual freshness seem to fall into the
metaphysical trap Derrida described in ``Écriture et différence'': By
replacing one metaphysicial center (in Kittler's case: ``Geist''/spirit,
``Geistesgeschichte''/intellectual history and
``Geisteswissenschaft''/humanities) with another one -- technology,
history of technology and technological discourse analysis -- it writes
on metaphysics under a different label, contrary to its own claim to
have rid itself from it.

The subtitle of this text writes an open question: ``Can notions of text
which were developed without electronic texts in mind be applied to
digital code, and how does literature come into play here?'' For the
time being, I would like to answer this question at best provisionally:
While all literature should teach us to read and deal with the
textuality of computers and digital poetry, computers and digital poetry
might teach us to pay more attention to codes and control structures
coded into all language.  In more general terms, program code
contaminates in itself two concepts which are traditionally juxtaposed
and unresolved in modern linguistics: the structure, as conceived of in
formalism and structuralism, and the performative, as developed by
speech act theory. 



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