[-empyre-] replying to several posts

[geniwate <geniwate@ozemail.com.au>]

Jim, 

> At the root of the 'communications revolution' is .... the formal properties
of language that allow us to construct programmable
>languages and machines that can interpret and compile texts into instructions
that these
>machines can carry out.

It's a relief to hear you say that - I'm tired of all the essentialisms that
ignore languages/text/s - could you tell me the names of books to read; does
anybody specifically talk about the relation of natural language to
prgramming language?

I can't tell you much about the sort of linguistics I want because I haven't
done the research, and maybe it does already exist, but it wouldn't be very
mathematical; it would however, talk about the interplay of different types
of language, and how they inseminate each other; it would wonder about the
relationship of machine code to these other languages, and, tying in with
the phenomenological aspect, it would speculate on the relation of these
linguistic structures to our experience of networked data

my last work was featured in Inflect and my next work will be in the Iowa
Review; both biggish projects, both collaborations . . I am deeply
interested in the simultaneous writing of texts in english and programming
languages (actionscript and lingo), and I like to speculate about what it
means to turn our poetry into string variables; where does the poem stop and
the code begin; whether such borders can be said to exist (I think not) and
what that means for analysis of such work (and how this relates to its
experience).

> random noise.

that is so interesting, when you're progamming, how suddenly you type one
little thing that generates a bug and the whole universe collapses; rarely
happens between native speakers of the same language but can happen
unintentially between speakers of a second language. . .

i want to progam generative and rudimentary ai texts in order to have the
programming code parallel the fact that you can't control the semantic
reception of natural language; to create works in which programming and
natural language within the same work operate as metaphors for one another.


Jim siad

>For some, mathematics and computer science is associated with intellectual
torture.

Well that is certainly the case for me, but now I teach visual arts students
to write their own simple algorithms in lingo and actionscript, and as long
as I don't mention maths and science, and I *de-center the image*, they seem
fine. . . as you say, computers are language machines, and language is far
less intimidating. making parallels between natural and programming
languages seems to aid understanding

Simon said:

>...computers are linguistic and symbolic systems
>that come into being as performative linguistic events. That is, each
>computer program, as it runs, is an example of parole, the particular
>instance of language as it exists in the world. So, if computing is writing
>then programming is the "art" of forming writing potentialities and the
>execution of the program equivalent to utterance or the moment of poesis.

sounds interesting, but where is the auditor / reader in relation to the
text/machine (Aarseth), possibly implicit in your reference to 'writing
potentialities'. . .I think one must take care not to objectivize the text
external to its interpretation too greatly; one needs a reader-response
theory for the machine

consider what Cayley says, about how the programming is addressed to the
computer, not to humans; I don't think he's entirely correct becuase while
the computer does 'translate' the programming, the programming is for me not
for the machine (unless you want to grant the machine consciousness). . .
which in a kind-of way returns to Jim's musing on the nature of
human-computer relationships; talk about language can't avoid talk about
this relationship, and thus we seem to have an infinite loop, from language
to human/computer relationships, to phenomenology and back to language . . .
which is interesting to me

I've gotta go - my cpu is infested with the undead & skeleton archers and if
I don't attend to them the neighbourhood will really go down the tubes...

best, geni
-- 
cv and links available at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~jenny