Introduction: authorship, inorganic actors and esolang.

In his text “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric Raymond talks about an unorthodox form of authorship, which he calls “constructive laziness”[Raymond, 1999]. By this, the author and programmer means that “good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)”, shifting the value of good coding from trying to be a pioneer to putting effort in practical solutions. Raymond does not argue in favour of disrespecting one’s authorship, but assumes that knowledge itself claims to be further developed, not by an individual but by collective work.

If we take this idea in a more radical approach, considering a given text or writing process as a sociotechnical network, as Bruno Latour (2005) points out in his Actor-Network Theory, this sort of collective practice could be extended even to non-human, inorganic actors (cf. [Latour and others, 2005]). Algorithms are not authors in the traditional sense, since they do not have the same agency as humans, but they definitely influence the way we write. That was exactly the inspiration for this text.

The questions to what extent “_ell_ Worl_!” can be considered literature or poetry and to whom authorship can be attributed are closely related to the algorithmic approach. In addition to the basic conceptual idea, it is above all the firmly defined rules for generating the text, the algorithms as actors, and the use of foreign texts as a basis that determine the “new” text. However these factors collide with notions of authenticity and creativity, which still play a relevant role in the classification of literary works today.

Beatnik, the basis of the following artistic process and text, is a simple stack-based esoteric programming language written by Cliff L. Biffle in 20011. It was adapted in the making of the poem »_ell_ Worl_!«, bringing together the poem and it’s Beatnik-Interpreter, and now taking part in the present paper. If we say “stack-based” we talk about the way in which Beatnik functions. Beatnik is a Stack Machine, a machine which operates stacks, i.e. an ordered pile of items where the addition of new items and the removal of existing ones always takes place at the top of the pile. In the case of Beatnik a stack represents a single sequence of objects and/or values that are modified by simple instructions. “Stack-based esoteric programming language” means not so much that Beatnik is a language but rather a form of language encoding.

Even though esoteric programming languages (esolangs for short) are called esoteric, they actually have nothing to do with esotericism. The crucial thing about esolangs is their relation to conventional programming languages. They are usually not designed for practical use, but remain in part as a theory or idea, sometimes even without having found a real implementation in technology. They can have academic value, but often they are simply a joke or a play on words to test a concrete idea. Therefore, these languages are perhaps not always directly useful, but nonetheless are very good testing grounds for new artificial, artistic, formal and natural language concepts, since they can be designed with the idea of cultural and artistic value in mind.

References

Lothers05

Bruno Latour and others. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford university press, 2005.

Ray99

Eric Raymond. The cathedral and the bazaar. Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 12(3):23–49, 1999. Publisher: Springer.

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URL: http://cliffle.com/esoterica/beatnik/ (Accessed 24.08.2021)