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Week Two: Indigenous Programming

Main thread: http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/70/week-2-indigenous-programming-main-thread Despite being taught around the world, programming languages are written primarily in English. Why is English our default? While an increase in support for the international text encoding standard Unicode has allowed developers to create computing languages in their native tongues, their widespread adoption is far from the norm. In Week Two of the Critical Code Studies Working Group, Dr. Jon Corbett (a Cree/Saulteaux Métis media artist, computer programmer, and sessional faculty at the University of British Columbia), Dr. Outi Laiti (a Sámi Associate Researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Indigenous Studies program and project manager at […]

Week One: Introduction to Critical Code Studies

Software as Literature In 2006 Mark Marino released his Critical Code Studies Manifesto. This essay laid the groundwork for a recognized field of Critical Code Study: reading code as a work of literature. Everything involved in creating software, the code, the comments, the repository commit messages, the data structures, can be objects of interpretation. I am writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment is high, but people are hiring COBOL developers. The unemployment insurance machines are in COBOL, and they are breaking. There are technical reasons why these systems are failing. What else will we find? From […]
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Learning Management Platforms: Notes on Teaching “Taroko Gorge” in a Pandemic

When I first proposed this paper, I had wanted this to be a closer analysis of learning management systems and their abilities and shortcomings in encouraging non-programming students to engage with code in critical and literary ways. But, as it so often does at the end of term, the grading took its toll. Indeed, this is particularly true for me as an adjunct instructor juggling the grading for more students than I care to admit while preparing for the next term to begin. So, this paper is in some ways less of an analysis of the platforms at play, and […]
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Language |H|as a Virus: cyberliterary inf(l)ections in pandemic times

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. -William S. Burroughs If the computer virus is a technological phenomenon cloaked in the metaphor of biology, emerging infectious diseases are a biological phenomenon cloaked in the technological paradigm. As with computer viruses, emerging infectious diseases constitute an example of a_ counterprotocol phenomenon. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit Linguistic Inflections In Plague and the Athenian Imagination (2007), Robin Mitchell-Boyask considers the hypothesis of the Athens Plague being responsible for changes in the ways Greek tragedies came to […]
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Electronic literature as a method and as a disseminative tool for environmental calamity through a case study of digital poetry ‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’

The terms “making” and “building” have circulated for some years in the field of Digital Humanities (see Drucker 2009; Svensson 2010; Stephen and Rockwell 2012; Klein 2017; Endres 2017). These terms indicate empirical and pragmatic approaches and have brought a paradigm shift in the graphic tools and digital technologies used for visualization. These approaches in the humanities deploy the information and innovative visualizations to reinforce and supplement the conventional hermeneutics. This transformation is underpinned by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration and brings together a range of stakeholders and experts from different fields such as writers, artists, researchers, and the public. Scholars […]
Read more » Electronic literature as a method and as a disseminative tool for environmental calamity through a case study of digital poetry ‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’

Digital Narrative and Experience of Time

It is often said that our relationship with time has changed in recent years. New Management strategies mean that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. FOMO, the fear of missing out is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment and its constant flow of information. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay connected and respond immediately to digital notifications and solicitations on a 24/7 basis. According to Paul Ricoeur (1984), “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its […]

The Art Object in a Post-Digital World: Some Artistic Tendencies in the Use of Instagram

This paper aims to reflect on two labels that have been used to define sets of artifacts born out of the same context but evoking different connotations. I refer to the terms “post-digital” and “post-internet”. Both terms allude to a post-stage, a leap that announces a cultural shift, perceived by artists but difficult to pinpoint and demarcate with precision, a prefix that might refer to ‘after’ (chronologically) as well as ‘beyond’ (spatially); often used to highlight that what has been superseded is the novelty and exceptionality of the internet and digital technology. Actually, these terms address the fact that digital […]
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Repetition and Defamiliarization in AI Dungeon and Project December

Introduction Recent advances in machine learning provide new opportunities for the exploration of creative, interactive works based around generative text. This paper compares two such works, AI Dungeon (Walton, 2019) and Project December (Rohrer, 2020a), both of which are built on the same artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3. In AI Dungeon, the player can choose from several predetermined worlds, each of which provide a starting point for the story generation. However, while interacting with the system within this world, the player can stop, edit, modify, and retry each utterance, allowing the player to iteratively “sculpt” the AI’s […]
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Neocybernetic Posthumanism and the AI Imaginary: Artificial Communication in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora

Since its consolidation in the late 1940s, cybernetics has been the primary locus for defining the posthuman as a comingling of computational devices, cyborg amalgamations, and AI entities. At the same time, in its development to the present moment, other lines of cybernetics have performed a series of self-reflections, generating cogent conceptual and philosophical responses to their original technoscientific premises. That process has endowed contemporary systems theory with a range of important differentiations. Foremost among these is the distinction between first-order and second-order cybernetics. First-order cybernetics maintains traditional scientificity in its stance of objective detachment toward the systems it designs […]
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Contemporary Posterity: A Helpful Oxymoron

What does it mean to be post? In a time of countless movements of post-[x], the value of the prefix itself becomes of interest: what happens to a concept when we turn it into a ‘posterity’? In the light of recent discussions surrounding post-humanism within electronic literature (cf. Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism), as well as the questions surrounding post(?)-pandemic platforms discussed at the 2021 ELO Conference (cf. ELO 2021), it seems that we are far from being post-post, and the prefix continuously returns in different forms to allow us to discuss ongoing, multidirectional, and complex changes with a sense of […]