»_ell_ Worl_!« – the rule becomes the author
Research Paper Publication @ Proceedings of the International Meeting of Research Groups: convergences between art, science, technologies & mixed realities (brazil)
Published on 06/21/2022 – ISBN: 978-65-5941-702-5 – DOI: 10.29327/164891
authors:
Christian Heck
Ting Chun Liu
Mattis Kuhn
Tiago Ive Rubini
Julia Nakotte
The text is a reflection about the process of writing code as a form of literature. It deals with a specific esolang called Beatnik. An esolang is a language system composed only for the sake of seeing how it works, which is usual for artistic and creative processes dealing with coding, poetry and related practices. Beatnik was created by Cliff Biffle in the beginning of the last decade, and it served as an inspiration to write our own programming language, also called Beatnik, designed mainly by Ting Chung Liu and Christian Heck. In the paper, we will discuss how this came to be. First, we talk about the structure of the code, that works through stack piles and the processing of words in English and German. We are also interested in talking about authorship through the perspective of sociotechnical networks, as pointed out by Bruno Latour. Finally, we relate our will to write through algorithms to modern literature, such as the works of the Beat generation and Gertrude Stein.