'SS 'S* 'S\ • T •• T T T • • • WORDS MADE FLESH Code, Culture, Imagination Florian Cramer Media Design Research Piet Zwart Institute institute for postgraduate studies and research Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam 3 Abstract: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh. Media Design Research Piet Zwart Institute institute for postgraduate studies and research Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam http://www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl The author wishes to thank Piet Zwart Institute Media Design Research for the fellowship on which this book was written. Editor: Matthew Fuller, additional corrections: T. Peal Typeset by Florian Cramer with LaTeX using the amsbook document class and the Bitstream Charter typeface. Front illustration: Permutation table for the pronounciation of God's name, from Abraham Abulafia's OrHaSeichel (The Light of the Intellect), 13th century ©2005 Florian Cramer, Piet Zwart Institute Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of any of the following licenses: (1) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. To view of copy of this license, visit http: / /www. gnu.org/copyleft/gpl .html or send a letter to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place— Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. (2) the GNU Free Documentation License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1.2 of the license or any later version. To view of copy of this license, visit http: / /www. gnu.org/copyleft/fdl .html or send a letter to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place— Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. (3) the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; either version 2.0 of license or any later version. To view a copy of this license, visit http: //creativecommons . org/licenses/by-sa/2 . 0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Your fair use and other rights are not affected by the above. Contents Chapter 1. Introduction: In Dark Territory 7 Chapter 2. Computations of Totality 11 Exe.cut[up]able statements 11 Magic and religion 14 Pythagorean harmony as a cosmological code 20 Kabbalah 29 Ramon Llull and Lullism 36 Rhetoric and poetics 41 Combinatory poetry and the occult 47 Computation as a figure of thought 53 Chapter 3. Computation as Fragmentation 57 Gulliver's Travels 58 The Library of Babel 61 Romanticist combinatorics 63 Concrete poetry 65 Max Bense and "information aesthetics" 66 Situationism, Surrealism and psychogeography 70 Markov chains 73 Tristan Tzara and cut-ups 75 John Cage's indeterminism 77 Italo Calvino and machine-generated literature 80 Software as industrialization of art 81 Authorship and subjectivity 83 Pataphysics and Oulipo 88 Abraham M. Moles' computational aesthetics 92 Source code poetry 93 Jodi 95 1337 speech 98 Codework 99 Chapter 4. Automatisms and Their Constraints 103 Artificial Intelligence 103 Athanasius Kircher's box 105 5 6 contents John Searle's Chinese Room 106 Georges Perec's Maschine 109 Enzensberger's and Schmatz's / Czernin's poetic machines 111 Software dystopia: Jodi 112 Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova 114 From dystopia to new subjectivity 118 Chapter 5. What Is Software? 121 A cultural definition 121 Software as practice 122 Software versus hardware 123 Conclusion 124 References 127 List of Figures 133 Index 135 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: In Dark Territory Figure 1. "300,000 pages of code. Or 60 minutes of triple-X rubber-and-leather interactive bondage porno. Technology can be used for beauty, or debasement. And until you plug it in, you'll just never know." The 1995 Steven Seagal action film Under Siege 2 tells of an elaborate flow of codes: Villain Travis Dane (Eric Bogosian) hijacks a train and puts a CD-ROM with missile launch codes into a computer to assume control over a global, satellite-based weapon system and blackmail the U.S. government. He trades binary access codes for extortion money, money that itself is digital zeros and ones flowing around the glob to offshore bank accounts. A phantasm of codes as an omnipotent force rules the hijacked train. Seagal's character, one man army Casey Ryback, and his Apple Newton pocket computer (which sends out a critical fax message to the U.S. army), embody the anti-phantasm. Ryback stands for old-fashioned physics battling symbolic code wizardry, hardware against software. When Ryback kills Dane in the end and a train crash cuts off the satellite link, physics wins over logic. It is furthermore the victory of one genre within the 7 8 1. introduction: in dark territory film over another, fistfighting realism over Utopian techno imagination, just like in every fantastic action film from James Bond to The Terminator where villain science fiction technology is doomed to be destroyed in the end. This booklet attempts to show that algorithmic code and computations can't be separated from an often Utopian cultural imagination that reaches from magic spells to contemporary computer operating systems.1 "300,000 pages of code. Or 60 minutes of triple-X rubber-and-leather interactive bondage porno. [... ] And until you plug it in, you'll just never know." This dialogue line sums up Utopian and dystopian imagination reaching from omnipotence to obscenity projected onto computer codes. In the end, the decoding of the codes is not a formal, but a subjective operation. Boiling down to either "beauty" or "debasement," two classical modes of aesthetics since 18th century philosophy, these codes are ultimately about human perception and imagination. The science fiction of the film scene relies on a gap between the computer code and a meaning made up by the human viewer. This meaning can't be perceived until the initial code has been transformed several times, from the zeros and ones on the CD-ROM to, for example, pixels on a video screen and eventually a "triple-X rubber-and-leather interactive bondage porno" image in the mind of the spectator. The wider the gap between code and perception, the wilder the imagination. The more abstract a code, the more speculative the meaning that may be read into that code. Long before Steven Seagal, codes stirred up cultural imagination just because they were open to any reading. Western culture believed Egyptian hieroglyphs to hold divine powers until the Rosetta translation stone, found by Napoleon's army in the early 19th century, debunked them as ordinary writing. Hieroglyphs on Freemasonic buildings and documents are a remnant of the older belief. The 16th century Voynich Manuscript, written in an as yet unknown alphabet, unknown language and containing obscure pictorial illustrations, has today not yet been deciphered although many expert cryptographers have tried. It is not even clear whether the manuscript contains a cypher at all. It might have been crafted just to create the illusion of a cryptogram. According to other theories, it might be written in a private Thai or Vietnamese alphabet, or by Cathar heretics in a mixture of Old French 1And which includes the system this paper was written on: the TeX typesetting system, the vi editor and the GNU utilities, each designed by one major speculative thinker of software culture, Donald Knuth, Bill Joy and Richard Stallman respectively. 1. introduction: in dark territory 9 and Old High German. Artistic speculations on the Voynich Manuscript include a story by science fiction writer Colin Wilson who links it to Lovecraft's Necronomicon. In a contemporary orchestra piece by Swiss-German composer Hanspeter Kyburz, it serves as a musical score that anticipates 20th century experimental score notations of John Cage and others. As speculative codes, Egyptian hieroglyphs (in their two different historical readings), the Voynich Manuscript and Travis Dane's CD-ROM render "code" ambiguous between its traditional meaning of a cryptographic code, i.e. a rule for transforming symbols into other symbols, and code in its computational meaning of a transformation rule for symbols into action. Ever since computer programmers referred to written algorithmic machine instructions as "code" and programming as "coding," "code" not only refers to cryptographic codes, but to what makes up software, either as a source code in a high-level programming language or as compiled binary code, but in either case as a sequence of executable instructions. With its seeming opacity and the boundless, viral multiplication of its output in the execution, algorithmic code opens up a vast potential for cultural imagination, phantasms and phantasmagorias. The word made flesh, writing taking up a life of its own by self-execution, has been a Utopia and dystopia in religion, metaphysics, art and technology alike. The next chapters will reconstruct the cultural and imaginative history of executable code. From magic spells to contemporary computing, this speculative imagination has always been linked to practical— technical and artistic—experimentation with algorithms. The opposite is true as well. Speculative imagination is embedded in today's software culture. Reduction and totality, randomness and control, physics and metaphysics are among the tropes it is obsessed with, often short-circuiting their opposites. Computer users know these obsessions well from their own fears of crashes and viruses, bloatware, malware and vaporware, from software "evangelists" and religious wars over operating systems, and their everyday experience with the irrationality of rational systems. After all, "until you plug it in, you'll just never know." CHAPTER 2 Computations of Totality Exe.cut[up]able statements Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 21:47:42 +1100 From: mez To: WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA Subject: Re: OPPO.S[able].I.T[humbs]ION!! Hello Arch.E.typal T [Claims of the n]ext W[h]orl.d --------------------(mo.dueling 1.1 )------------------- N.terr.ing the net.wurk--- ::du n.OT enter _here_ with fal[low]se genera.tiffs + pathways poking va.Kant [c]littoral tomb[+age]. ::re.peat[bogging] + b d.[on the l]am.ned. ::yr p[non-E-]lastic hollow play. jar. [*] istic [tock] met[riculation.s]hods sit badly in yr vetoed m[-c]outh. Pr[t]inting--- ::spamnation. .r [1]u[re]ins. .all. Exe.cut[up]able statements--- ::do knot a p.arse.r .make. ::reti.cu[t]la[ss]te. yr. text.je[llied]wells .awe. .r[b]ust. R[1]un[ge]ning the pro.gram[mar]--- ::re.a[vataresque]ct[orsIactrestles] + provoke @ yr response per[b]il[e]. ::con.Seed.quenches r 2 b [sIw]allowed. ::big boots make filth k.arm[N limb.ic cyst.M]a. A hybrid of net art, poetry, program and markup code, this piece by Australian net.artist mez (Mary Anne Breeze) reflects a contemporary imagination of software, computation and networks, disassembling it into its smallest symbolic particles and reassembling them into a private language, (mo.dueling 1.1) reads as the name of a computer program with a version number. Through its pointed and bracketed word fragments it expands, like running software code, into the words "module," "duel" and "dueling." The syntactical notation is taken from wildcards and regular expressions in programming languages and Unix command line interpreters forming an archetypical world. In mez's own language "mezangelle," it is called "Arch.E.typal 11 12 2. computations of totality T[Claims of the n]ext W[h]orl.d," expanding into hardware/software architectures—"arch" in computer tech lingo—, "claims of the next world," and whores. Slang and sexual language exposes mezangelle as a messy code, one that does not run on machines, but on a human imagination that encompasses machines and bodies alike. Unlike in the Steven Seagal action movie and the Voynich Manuscript, the semantic associations are not superimposed and therefore external to the code, but are embedded into the code proper. "Exe.cut[up]able statements" and "pro. gram [mar]," for example, are self-reflections of the text as "executable statements" and "program grammar." The words serve as a source code which generates "execute," "executable," "cut-up," "able" in the first word, "programmer," "grammar," "program," "gram" in the second. There is simultaneous contraction and expansion, regularity and irregularity, instruction and chaos in these words. Like a piece of software code that gets executed, the writing expands beyond itself, generating dozens to hundreds of possible readings. As it says, its "big boots make filth," and text disperses in a "spamnation." "Spamnation" also is a technical description of mez's E-Mail work that is sent, spam-style, to a large number of net cultural mailing lists at once. From a literary history viewpoint, the word hybrids and ono-matopoetics of mezangelle resemble the poetic language in James Joyce's last novel Finnegans Wake: The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarroninikonn-bronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawnto-ohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpike-pointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek Kekkek Kekkek Kekkek! Koax Koax Koax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! This paragraph, from the first page of the book, demonstrates Joyce's word poetics while referencing its literary prototypes. The ono-matopoetic "Bkkek Kkkek [...]" is taken from Aristophanes' 4th exe. cut [up] able statements 13 century B.C. Greek comedy The Frogs. "Humptyhillhead," "prumptly" and "tumptytumtoes" allude to Humpty Dumpty the nursery rhyme character and fantastic creature in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In its sixth chapter, Alice and Humpty Dumpty discuss the seemingly nonsensical poem Jabberwocky: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Humpty Dumpty explains that "slithy" is a combination of "lithe and slimy": "'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." Originally, and before it appeared in the novel, the "Jabberwocky" poem had been written in 1855 and published under Carroll's proper name Charles L. Dodgson as a parody of romantic poetry. Dodg-son was a mathematician by profession and taught at Oxford. As Martin Gardner's annotated edition of the two Alice novels shows,— which also became published as one of the first electronic hypertext books ever—the books are rich with mathematical and logical puns and humor. In the "Humpty Dumpty" chapter, absurdity stems from a seemingly straightforward, pseudo-logical explanation of the nonsense poem. Humpty Dumpty takes the attitude of a mathematician or logician who reads the poem like a formula. Joyce's portmanteau words hybridize languages, nature and history, but while they hardly ever mix in formal or machine language, they work as a kind of reverse computer code that expands multiple input into a single output. His novel is infinitely looping, with its last page of the novel ending where the first page begins. Marshall McLuhan, "Joycean hippie" (as Nam June Paik called him) and founder of the term "media theory," took Finnegans Wake as his "textbook."1 According to his biographer Donald Theall, he perceived the blend of "orality tactility simultaneity and synaesthesia" in the novel as a blueprint for a "techno-poetic" language.2 Having created, more or less, the field of "media" with its endless unresolved terminological ambiguities and contradictions, McLuhan's techno imagination appears to bridge the gap between the technopo-etic codework of mez and her net contemporaries on the one hand According to http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_Joyce/theall3.html 2According to http: //www .mindjack. com/feature/mcluhan .html 14 2. computations of totality and its protoype in Carroll and Joyce on the other.3 "Spamnation," code flowing out and spilling over, is the common denominator of Carroll's "slithy toves," Joyce's "riverrun" and mez's collapsing of program, grammar and programmer into a "pro. gram [mar]". All three artists write in the aesthetic mode of the sublime; the category of the boundless, unshapely, obscure, threatening first described in the Greek rhetorical treatise of Pseudo-Longinus, reinvigorated in the 18th century aesthetic theories of Burke, Kant and Schiller,4 and which paved the ground for the gothic novel and other forms of dark romanticism (up to the gothic, dark wave and "new romantic" pop cultures that originated the 1980s). Computer and software imagination is only inscribed into mez's piece. The software her coding conceives of is a monster, an alien resembling that of the eponymous Science Fiction movies. Unlike the "cyberpunk" Science Fiction imagination of the late 1980s and early 1990s whose sublime technopoesis consisted of an imaginary pictorial hyperrealism, mez's monsters are made up purely by abstract symbols and computational processes. Magic and religion Words becoming flesh, the symbolic turning physical - these are by no means recent phantasmagorias and speculations. The beginning of the Gospel of John in the New Testament reads: 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [... ] 1:14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. This figure of thought, of a speech act that affects physical matter instantly and directly, is magical in its root. Material creation from the word is an idea central to magic in all cultures; it is precisely 3Outside the Anglo-American tradition, the word recombinations and cosmo-logical imagination of Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov manifests another pretext which itself triggered the quasi-computational structuralist poetics of Roman Jakobson ^ Rhys Roberts, editor. Longinus on the Sublime. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1899. [85], Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990 (1757). [15], Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. [53], Friedrich Schiller, On The Sublime, http://members.aol. com/abelard2/schiller.htm magic and religion 15 what magic spells perform. Magic therefore is, at its core, a technology, serving the rational end of achieving an effect, and being judged by its efficacy. According to scholar Franz Dornseiff and his 1922 German study on the alphabet in mysticism and magic,5 the idea of divine creation through the letter has its roots in early Middle Eastern and Egyptian mystic cults. Gnosticism transformed it into theurgy, the invocation of divine powers for achieving concrete, material effects. Adopting many of its concepts from Gnosticism and Neoplatonist philosophy, Christianity introduced the prayer as its own form of theurgy, itself a practical communicative act between the individual, the divine and physical matter through a symbolic agent, or, medium. Magical thinking is even more strongly present in the Catholic Christian idea of transubstantiation, the transformation of wine into blood and bread into the body of Christ effected through the liturgic speech act of the priest.—The magical formula "hocus pocus" is derived from the Catholic liturgic formula "hoc est corpus meum," this is my body.6— Rationalization of this remnant of magical thinking occurred within Christianity itself when Protestantism abandoned the concept of transubstantiation and thought of communion service as a purely allegorical practice.7 Religion sublimates magic as a common, popular into a privilege of the god creating the world and, subsequently, his son. Magic wasn't considered occult until religion and later science and technology rivalled and marginalized it. The technical principle of magic, controlling matter through manipulation of symbols, is the technical principle of computer software as well. It isn't surprising that magic lives on in software, at least nominally. References to magic abound in computer software branding, from programs like Partition Magic, Magix Musicmaker, the /etc/magic filetype database in Unix to the program genre of "Setup Wizards" or operating systems like Sorcerer GNU/Linux in which software packages are installed with the command "cast." A Google search on "magic" and "software" today yields more than fifteen million results (see figure 1). Searching the word 5Franz Dornseiff. Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie. Teubner, Leipzig, Berlin, 1925. 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