prospectus

In Networked and Programmable Media

Language Art with Personal Computation:
a comprehensive selection with integrated commentary
before and after Electronic Literature

  John Cayley

Preamble

This prospectus describes a project that was accepted for development by Brown University Digital Publications December 7, 2022.

The purpose of this prospectus is to provide advance and current information on the project for:

• institutional organizations who may wish collaborate or
  cooperate with the project,
• potential publishers,
• interested colleagues and other individuals.

The prospectus is edited from and corresponds closely to the proposal presented to Brown Digital Publications in the fall of 2022. The author, John Cayley, was on sabbatical leave from the Department of Literary Arts, Brown University for the 2023-24 academic year and during this time he has been able to develop a ‘compositional infrastructure’ that he considers to be highly appropriate for this and potentially other digital publications, a kind of response to certain essay-like remarks in the initial version of this prospectus. Cayley is now, as of Fall 2024, well underway with composition of the body text and live-code illustrations of the project. It is clear, however, that it will take one or two more years to complete the project as conceived.

Follow this link to the landing page for the project’s public-facing working draft on the Observable platform where comments and collaboration are welcome.

Contents of this document :

• The proposal
• Institutional context (author’s institution)
• Personal context
• Digital Publication: Note on the use of a live notebook platform as this publication’s ‘development environment’
• Draft outline of the project’s content elements
• Notes

The Publication as Proposed

In Networked and Programmable Media will consist of a comprehensive selection from the author’s works of language art with personal and post-personal computation from the late 1970s through at least 2023. The core content of this integrated anthology will be the work itself, configured, so far as is possible, to be readable as originally intended on or shortly after the date of publication for its various constituent works, or to be rendered legible (in a manner ‘faithful’ to original formats) by reconfiguraton in the relatively stable framework of the contemporary internet ‘web stack’ – HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

Because the author is recognized as a leading disciplinary theorist, complementary to his practice as such, In Networked and Programmable Media will also provide commentary on the selected works. This commentary will be composed in a manner that offers a critical and discursive pathway, circumscribing the constituent works, one that might in another publishing context, provide a monographic impetus to the collection.

Parsing the Elements of the Project‘s Extended Title

In Networked and Programmable Media is offered as an evocative main title for the collection. It is based on a phrase, coined by the author and widely adopted by scholars and critics in the field. It does service in referring to the once ‘new’ and still potential situation of certain language art and literary practices which emerged following on from the historical advent of personal computing in the developed world. The two adjectives highlight important characteristics of these situated practices which distinguish them with respect to those of the compositional and delivery media of more familiar and still predominant literary practices, those of writing and publication. Computational cultural architecture now ensures that the compositional and delivery media of language art – to include writing and publishing – is most certainly ‘networked’ and also more or less ‘programmable,’ even if the associated affordances go unused or are only used non-consciously.

‘Language Art’ is preferred to ‘literary art’ in the subtitle to indicate that although graphic traces of language predominate – even in this collection as a whole – for the composition and delivery of linguistic aesthetic art, work of this kind, particularly in its networked and programmable situation, is intrinsically opened out to address traces of language practices that are inscribed in other substantive perceptible media, the obvious one being a technologically differentiated and articulated aurality, and as opposed to the usual typographic visuality.

As for ‘with Personal Computation,’ the preposition should be read to embrace both the common sense of ‘together with’ and the archaic, latent sense of ‘against.’ ‘Personal’ is an adjective that is important to this project and its commentary. ‘Personal computing’ was the term adopted in the late 1970s when now ubiquitous personal computers first became affordably available to artistically inclined individuals, including some with projects unrelated to any progress of computation – as such or as then understood. Now that everyone in the developed networked world (and also those in the developing world) have one or two supercomputers in their hands, let alone on their laps or desktops, it is arguable that ‘personal computing’ no longer exists. These devices have become part of an infrastructure – both cultural and transactional – in which we have been obliged to invest. Undoubtedly and ever-increasingly, and ‘socially,’ this computation is ‘networked’ but not in a manner that individual persons can or should personally reconfigure. They can personalize, but this is something different, something, basically, that is intended to reduce transactional friction. Similarly, our devices remain programmable but not in a manner that non-professional individuals can or should attempt, and certainly not in a manner that would disrupt operating systems or the network infrastructure on which these devices are, in the majority of cases, compliant terminal parts. One of the overarching points of interest in the language art career represented by this collection is that it spans an historical period of engagement with computation characterized by a profound change in this contextual sense of ‘personal,’ from a time when new cultural affordances appeared to be offered to individuals with the prospect of significant cultural reconfiguration, to the time, now, of proposed publication, when what was always a fantasy of empowering liberal individual creative production has given way to incorporated networked and programmable power which renders any products of the presupposed liberal individual’s creative impetus as commodities within proprietary digitalized cultural architectures. Why? Because the ‘creative’ ‘individual’ was and is an essential category within cultural architectures which resist reconfiguration, and which are – of manifest destiny – necessarily integrated with predominant western formations of sociopolitical, industrial, and financial transaction.

The elaboration of this thesis concerning Personal Computing (to be used more or less interchangeably with Personal Computation) will inform the main underlying theme of the project when read as monograph rather than as an artist/author’s anthology with integrated commentary.

Finally, for that part of the extended title which specifies the project substantively, ‘before and after Electronic Literature’ takes a slightly polemical stance with respect to the current designation for the academic discipline within which work of this kind is studied. The use of ‘language art’ for ‘literary practice’ or ‘writing’ already indicates a tenor which I have set out above, and the implicit putting behind us of ‘electronic’ is part of an argument, to be reiterated by the project’s commentary, that certain supposed characteristics associated with ‘digital’ and especially ‘electronic’ have misdirected the attention of practitioners and scholar-critics, away from more significant effects of cultural digitalization on practices of language as such, and not only within milieux concerned with ‘high-cultural’ aesthetic linguistic practice.

Why Digital Publication?

Before speaking to other contextual aspects of the project, including other aspects of what is academically ‘at stake,’ it would be as well to deal briefly with the ‘why digital?’ question. There is the obvious fact that the work proposed as gathered In Networked and Programmable Media is and was, from the outset, categorizable as what is currently labeled ‘born digital.’ This is a strange, mixed-metaphorical term. I read it as indicating, of a work and often correctly, that it was produced at a time when its compositional and delivery media could not be culturally represented in these same media. For the work to be appreciated and accredited, the predominant culture was required to remediate the work ‘back’ into ‘older’ media which would then allow the work to be read. This is like saying that a statue is ‘born sculptural’ in an aesthetically 2D flatland and has to be rendered as a painting to be seen and appreciated. And yet, for some language art, even in a manifestly digitalized culture, this was and is the case.

It need not be any longer. Although, for language art, the culture of reading has not shifted decisively in favor of alternate modes of reading – on dynamic screens as opposed to from the codex – the ubiquity of personal screens that are temporally-enabled windows on a world of textual practice have, in combination with the ability to store dynamic symbolic artifacts remotely and deliver them on the same network as that of the purely textual artifacts – this has changed the cultural situation of linguistic artifacts that require a fourth dimension, for example that of time, to appear in the 3D pageland of academic literary scholarship.

And this situation has the potential, one slowly being realized, to be institutionally supported in the form of ‘digital publications’ which take the form of an author-composed and annotated network of artifacts. The artifacts themselves may be stored in an institutional repository but, along with accompanying familiar textual apparatus, they may be brought into the reading devices of their audience to be read as they were composed to be read, and in the context of a scholarly-critical monographic, annotated anthology. For example.

Institutional Context

One reason for presenting this proposal in 2022, as opposed to earlier in the history of Brown University Digital Publications, is that certain developments have made its effective realization more certain. Brown’s Library was recently awarded an NEA grant – written by Ashley Champagne and for which I am a co-PI – to research ‘New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art.’ This will be applied to a small number of diverse-format works demonstrating the feasibility of preserving them in the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) and also ‘publishing’ them – according to terms set by the artists and authors and in the manner that they were intended to be read – from the Repository to those with appropriate access.

Assuming enough of the potentials outcomes of this grant are realized, infrastructure of the kind that I envisage for In Networked and Programmable Media will be in place, and all that will require specifying – and this could be achieved by a bespoke webapp – would be the platform that delivers commentary and organizes reading access to the BDR-stored constituent artifacts.

The underlying model here – readable artifacts preserved and stored in an institutional archive and repository, then gathered and published in a curated scholarly critical context – is one that has been possible for some time, but not one that has become established or one for which the full potential has been realized. The proof of this concept could be a major contribution to the future of cultural practice and its institutional appreciation, to scholarship in other words. Moreover, given that the artifacts are stored, discretely and with metadata, in an institutional repository, their latent potential repurposing for teaching is greatly enhanced and also exemplary, as a model, for similar work more generally.

Personal Context

I joined the faculty of Brown University in 2007 as the first (to my knowledge) ‘electronic writer’ – or, as I would now prefer, artist of language with computation – to be hired in a university department or program of creative writing, which Brown designates as Literary Arts. I was initially a visitor but was made regular faculty in 2011, then granted tenure as a full professor in 2016. In proposing this digital publication, I am aware of the contingency of these circumstances and yet I am also sensitive to the fact that they are more or less unique and thus, arguably, call out to be documented and published in a manner that is commensurate, and that does justice to the university’s investmentment in experimentation and new cultural practices.

On Using a Notebook Platform
as a Digital Publication Development Environment

What is a digital publishing platform, system, framework?

From what I can make out, one way to approach these questions is by parsing a remark on the landing page of the Manifold web site. Manifold is a digital publications platform, associated with Minnesota University Press, which has had the benefit of Douglas Armato’s involvement and long experience of commissioning in the field of, or fields adjacent to, Electronic Literature, including for series like Electronic Mediations, and Posthumanities.  Many of the finest scholars and artist-scholars who have engaged with Electronic Literature can attest to Armato’s acuity and good sense.

‘Manifold is the friendly, scalable, sustainable way to add the web to your publishing workflow,’ says the site. This platform, then, imagines entities or institutions which have a ‘publishing workflow’ and may wish to ‘add the web’ to it. The established publishing workflow is assumed, one supposes, to result in the production of printed books; ‘adding the web’ would take its potential products, while in production, and generate a website as an augmentation. The problem is, as I see it, that anyone can – personally or with the help of any number of ‘third-party’ services – generate their own website, especially from well-edited materials. The publishing platforms must be adding something a little more than ‘the web’ to this workflow. What is this something?

The answer is a certain definition or delineation of the published outcome, especially such that it can be appreciated as like the finished work that a book binds in: a distinct outcome that can be appreciated and accredited by its audiences, if not, indeed, ‘owned’ by this audience’s members.  For academic work, the audience is the relevant discipline, and the university. Accreditation by the latter is particularly important, of course, for authors who are career scholars. For works that address the general public, however, it may be difficult for its members to distinguish a website published on a platform and by a reputable institution from any other well-designed website on the internet. And who owns the website? It’s contents?

As I began this work, In Networked and Programmable Media, I found myself in a state of indecision and uncertainty as an ‘expert’ self-reflexively aware of, and highly interested in, these problems. Should I be targeting a particular publishing platform?

I am committed to ‘digital publication’ – and, for me, this does mean on the web – but what does that mean? My chief institutional sponsor, Brown University Digital Publications, has seen published or seen placed under contract – as of September 2023 – four major projects, three of them (all the published ones) award-winning. Of these, only one, published by Stanford University Press, has used a recognized platform, Scalar. Two others are websites based on WordPress – ‘the world’s most popular website builder’ (my emphasis) – with bespoke design and in-house coding. The fourth is likely the same.

The idea of working within one of the existing digital publishing platforms, as an author, does not particularly attract me. I know that I would have to learn a new system and wrangle with its peculiarities and likely limitations. And I know that, specifically, I would be obliged to do so, because much of the material that comprises my content is hand-built code that I want to be accessible as such and to operate as anticipated within the context of the ‘anthology with integrated monographic commentary’ that I am composing. The possibilities, to my knowledge, are: Scalar – it scares me; Fulcrum – I know next to nothing about it; and Manifold – which attracts me precisely because it seems to be aware of these very dilemmas that I am facing; but still, it’s an environment I would have to enter into.

WordPress? I’ve tried it once or twice. There are some very nice sites out there, but there is an awful lot that goes into getting WordPress to generate them. Despite its maturity and popularity it scares me more than any of the others.

Wait. ‘Popularity.’ WordPress is, ostensibly, for personal use, and one is - most emphatically – encouraged, personally, to own or subscribe to its software and its services. I am suddenly brought back to what I hope will be a major theme and source of argument for this very work: personal computation.

I think that an important reason that I do not want to use WordPress is because it pretends to be personal and is not. On the other hand the institutionally oriented publishing platforms intend their outcomes to be read as non- or im- or supra-personal whereas what they generate – and the outcome we all desire – is web ‘publication.’ Web publication is a major problem. It is a cultural formation that has been eviscerated by a hyper-historical myth of personal, computationally-provided, creative ‘empowerment,’ generating universal access at the expense of universally handing over the means of publishing production to the owners of infrastructure: a handful of corporate ‘persons.’

Well, here we are.

And where is that, exactly? I am writing to you from an online notebook platform. It is a service. And I do subscribe, although access to and much powerful use of the platform can be free. I have not had to install anything on my own computer and I do not need to otherwise find a way to serve, on the internet, the results of my compositional labors. Here they are. Published, and freely available if I make appropriate settings for the notebook.

This notebook platform gives me, with no install and very little effort, a well designed ‘blog.’ Moreover, this one gives me developer’s access to the entire web stack – the web‘s basic building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and more, actually). It does so in a way that allows me, if I wish, to embed live code in a notebook, with affordances to let my readers not only run but copy (or fork) and tinker with this code. On top of all this, it encourages an approach to coding that can be as representative as one likes of the principles behind Literate Programming. (Knuth, 1992) Finally, all of the textual elements in my notebooks are or can be rendered addressable by external systems – including those of the established digital publication platforms – and these elements are in standard formats, parseable by both computers and humans. I am not sure what more I need for digital publication other than, as already suggested, definition and, ultimately, delineation of the creditable work.

So here I am.

And thinking more about it: This platform – although proprietary and although targeting for its purposes of monetization a particular constituency of data visualization professionals – now feels to me like the ‘pen and paper’ of the web. When working in these notebooks, I feel once more, for the first time in many years, since the late 1970s or early 1980s, as if my use of computation for language art is open (including as in ‘open source’), appropriate (including as in ‘appropriate technology’), and, yes, personal (including as in ‘personal computing,’ fantasy of). As a language artist with computation, I feel somehow at home. And as if I’ve found the homely and creative computing that I was once promised and seem never before to have had delivered to me. I’ve found it here, in a place where I shouldn’t, and about which those who understand computation better than me are likely to say, ‘You can’t live there. It’s a start-up for one thing.’ Still, it has everything I need. Other platforms could provide the same access to the ‘pen and paper’ of our shared web of language for reading. But this one also does so, elegantly, and, if there were some disaster, it would be not so hard to remove my ‘personal belongings’ from this dwelling: my Markdown, my HTML, my CSS, my JavaScript, my data.

I’ve deliberately changed the register and introduced feeling into the final paragraphs of these notes. Because the other thing that using this notebook platform has evoked is a nostalgia for the fantasy of personal computing, for earlier times in my life and practice and career when computation did at least seem genuinely personal. So, not only will I be exploring, intellectually and academically, the relationship between the personal and computation – as well as interrogating the meaning of these once vauntingly collocated terms – I will be allowing my prose to drift into reminiscence, memoir, autobiography, autofiction, and all the affective structures surrounding these practices of language art. I will try to elaborate on this aspect of the project in the Preface.

Draft Outline of Content Elements

This sketched outline – very much an initial draft – provides one hastily assembled, largely chronological arrangement of the proposed core constituent materials with only a rough estimate for numbers of works concerned under each heading. Apart from chronology, the chief criteria operating in the design of this arrangement is, broadly, computational platform or ‘technology’ in the sense of software framework or language (also contingent on chronology). There can and should also be considerations of genre (poetry, prose, etc.) for the collection but this is a problematic and critically implicated categorization, to be addressed in the commentary. Only a few titles for specific works are noted. This initial survey estimates c.48 separately-identified works – published, self-published, and ‘uncollected.’

PERSONAL COMPUTING

• BEFORE MACINTOSH (if they can be recovered)
  • Mesostics (2)
  • Animated: Scoring the Spelt Air (2)
• AFTER MACINTOSH

  • HyperCard

    • Scoring the Spelt Air redux (2)
      • wine flying, 1989
      • bird song stream, 1994
    • Mesostics redux (4)
      • Indra’s Net 1.2, 1991
        • Under It All
      • An Essay on the Golden Lion: Indra’s Net 4, 1994
      • The Speaking Clock: Indra’s Net 7, 1995
      • Oisleánd: Indra’s Net 9, translingual, 1996
    • Early ‘collocational’ Markov-chain text generation (5)
      • Collocations: Indra’s Net 2, 1993
      • Moods and Conjunctions: Indra’s Net 3, 1994
      • Leaving the City: Indra’s Net 5, 1995
      • Pressing the <Reveal Code> Key: Indra’s Net 8, 1996
    • Self-altering text (2)
      • Book Unbound: Indra’s Net 6, 1996
    • Onto the Web
      • Oisleánd for web
      • Where the Sea Stands Still, 1997-1999
    • Transliteral (2)
      • windsound, 1999-2000
      • noth’rs with grafts by Caroline Bergvall, 1999

  • QuickTime

    • riverisland transliteral redux, 1999-2003
    • Panoramas: ‘Broadband Interactive Drama’ (1)
      • What We Will Have of What We Are: Something Past, 2000-
    • Ambient (3)
      • overboard, 2003-
      • wotclock
      • This Clock, 2011
    • Networked (2)
      • imposition, 2007-8
      • [interliteral / The Beacon]

POST PERSONAL COMPUTING

• Writing for Immersive 3D Audiovisuality (2)
  • torus (unfinished), 2004-
  • lens, 2004-
• Java
  • Writing To Be Found (3)
    • Hapax Phaenomena with Clement Valla, 2012
    • Monoclonal Microphone 2013-14
  • Installation
    • The Reading Room, 2011
  • The Readers Project, 2009-
    • How it is in Common Tongues, 2012
    • The Image, 2012
  • Inextrinsic
    • Mirroring Tears, Visages, 2011
    • Flights Unflown, with Penny Florence, 2013
  • Aurality
    • To Be With You, 2014-
    • The Listeners, 2014-
    • for Prosthesis, 2021
  • Subliteral (1)
    • Orthographics, 2012
• JavaScript / Webapps (4)
  • The Readers Project redux, 0000- (1)
  • Subliteral redux (3)
    • hearing litoral voices / bearing literal traces: Subliteral Narratives, 2019
  • Reengineered (not counted)
    • overboard, riverisland, translation

‘PERSONAL’ LITERATE PROGRAMMING

• Scoring the Spelt Air redux (4)
  • Scoring the Spelt Air, 2023 (for Catania)
  • Uchaf, 2023
• Paragram (3)
  • breathe, 2023
  • Sounding, 2024

Note Drafts: