What

“The one thing that foreigners, computers and poets have in common is that they make unexpected linguistic associations”. Software Art: Text focuses on the place of software in the emergence of electronic literature. Building on existing practices, such as Surrealism, OuLiPo and chance operations, computational texts will act as lens through which we will look at the new iterations of fiction, narrative, poetry and language.

Why

The language we use defines who we are and qualify the world we live in. By paying attention to those word, from source code to thousands of posts on a forum, to the phrases we live behing in our own mailbox, this course brings back poetry into voltage-dependent realm of software, and postulates that, by adding further programmatic constraints to our means of expression, we can still reach towards the beautiful.

As such, this class attempts at making sense out of the overwhelming amounts of textual information that we are presented with on a daily basis.

How

This class will focus on three parts:
  • readings of poems, software studies and media studies.
  • weekly homework relating to techniques for manipulating and generating text.
  • three major works: cut/up (on reassembling found text), inter/active (from interactive fiction to executed source code), and out/loud (focusing on voice and performance).

Who

Instructor: Pierre Depaz

Where

Offline: C3-153 (Arts Center)
Online: GitHub

Syllabus