HASTAC

HASTAC ("Haystack") is committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology.

ELO Symposium 2007

Technologies of Writing

"The phrase 'technologies of writing' refers not to the script or alphabet, the calligraphic or marking system that a text employs, but to the practical methods by which these systems are applied—pencil, brush, quill, ink, paint, print, machine key and pixel—and to the material surfaces and sites of writing itself—clay, animal skin, parchment, linen, wood pulp and cyberspace."

Bill Viola : Artists "detoxify and transform" technology.

interview pt2: "...it is up to the artist to understand the inner technology of their own thought, and make sure it's as pure and honest and direct as it can be..."

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.