the 3rd International Prize Ciutat de Vinaròs on Digital Literature.

The competition is open to all writers who use digital technology to a significant extent in the creation of their work."

Random Etc.

Ebon Fisher's NervePool

Subversion

"What makes the Subversion repository special is that it remembers every change ever written to it: every change to every file, and even changes to the directory tree itself, such as the addition, deletion, and rearrangement of files and directories."

Levitated :: Jared Tarbell

Piet Zwart Institute - Words Made Flesh

WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer

A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.