[NetBehaviour] Code Is Not Literature

[Alan Sondheim]

one loose and false way I've described all of this is to talk about 
teleology in relation to programming; decoding has to do most often with 
understanding the mechanism, efficiency, and so on. An artist on the other 
hand, or someone interested or operating within the 'literary' (yes, I 
know this doesn't exist), accepts and might even valorize error/glitch, 
just seeing where things will go. This has played out in a lot of schools 
I've taught in, in the antagonisms between the art and design areas; the 
latter (yes, I know), are often driven by product orientation, client, 
specification, etc., while the former might emphasize a kind of goalless 
wandering. I think even a client/server model has some interest here.

- Alan

On Thu, 23 Jan 2014, Pall Thayer wrote:

> Everything needs to be decoded but it comes down to context. Someone
> attempting to decode my perl example as code might become very confused. It
> doesn't serve a purpose as a computer program. If you approach perl code as
> always having a useful function, it's not going to push your buttons. I
> could even see a serious perl programmer overlooking the serious message of
> the text. Who knows... perhaps I really am asking someone to push me off a
> cliff... but that's not what the code means. It has nothing to do with
> pushing a person, much less pushing a person over a cliff. It's simply
> adding an element to an array. And then, to top it all off, the array
> doesn't get used. Makes no sense. Or does it?
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 9:38 PM, mez breeze <netwurker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>
>       On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Pall Thayer
>       <pallthay at gmail.com> wrote:
>             And, as a reply to Seibel's comments, do we not
>             "decode" literature?
> 
> 
> Mezangelle certainly needs to be decoded. Sometimes I even help out
> with that [but only by "translating"/unpacking it into a diluted
> English version, like here: http://wishforyouand.me/2014/01/23/day-20/
> ].
> 
> 
> --
> | facebook.com/MezBreezeDesign
> | twitter.com/MezBreezeDesign
> | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mez_Breeze
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> --
> *****************************
> Pall Thayer
> artist
> http://pallthayer.dyndns.org
> *****************************
> 
>

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