laob_editorial = md`This is the <span class="headincopy">UTOPIAN PRE-LAUNCH ANNUAL</span> of the ${LAOB}.
The annual’s contents have been assembled in relative haste, thanks to the gifts and goodwill of contributors and colleagues associated with the founding editors. We are proud of this pre-launch annual but we’d like to make a few things clear.
For future annuals, selected members of our already impressive board will be asked to review submissions and propose commissions. This will be undertaken in order that the ${LAOB} publishes language art with computation that has some strong claim – aesthetic or critical – on its potential readers’ attention.
${LAOB} is dedicated to welcoming poets, prose writers, fiction writers, language artists who already have a recognized practice in their art or genre but who may have less experience of integrating this work with computational affordances, especially during the processes of composition, such as to allow computation to affect the experience of the work. ${LAOB} will provide resouces for these makers. <small>*One clear example of what we mean by this is the animation of screen-read poetic texts. There are a couple of examples in our pre-launch annual. Language only exists as temporal artifact. Even when read from a ‘page’ this is true. The experience of poetic language art need not be constrained by what is, historically, a recent form of reception. Today, the typographic dimension can be relatively easily animated. Why haven’t poetic writers explored this potential? It seems likely that the reasons have something to do with the relative absence of venues for animated poetics (not to mention the biases of a prose-centric regime of computation).*</small>
${LAOB} is further dedicated to making space for early-career artists, for the not-yet-recognized and under-represented makers of language art pure and simple, and for makers and coders of computationally implicated language art that is not yet recognized as such, not yet recognized as poetry, fiction, ‘literature.’ And ${LAOB} will welcome more members of these constituencies onto its board.
For the purposes of the pre-launch annual ${LAOB} is being assembled within a relatively familiar academy-underwritten gift or ‘gray’ economy. Contributors gift their labor, art and goodwill, and may receive some return expressed in readers and reputation. In the medium term ${LAOB} will seek to set itself up as a non-profit and fund itself as sustainably as possible. Priority, in terms of outgoings, will be given to costs for infrastructure – hopefully minimal – and appropriate, if modest, compensation for commissioned and accepted makers.
${LAOB} will be a critical observer for language art in any world for which computational infrastructures and computational practices are formative. It will provide and hold space for language art practices that have yet to find a forum for sharing work or a venue for publication. ${LAOB} now takes its place as both forum and venue, in both instances one that is appropriate to, conversant with, and critical of computational infrastructures. Another distinguishing characteristic of ${LAOB} is that it seeks to expose and share – by making them observable – the programmatic devices, the code – of language art in the increasingly influential cultural milieux – the browser-accessed internet – where computation is predominant.
${LAOB} is and will be a utopia, a no place – in the sense that it cannot be where it says it is, or do what it says it will do.
For example, we aware that we are asking this collective and our contributors to invest poetic, makers’ time, energy, and resources on top of and into a real-world platform, [**Observable**](https://observablehq.com), that is at the present time a ‘start-up’ and one which, although it shares a measure of network, digital-culture utopianism, is by no means entirely open source, not itself entirely ‘observable.’ ${LAOB} must commit, therefore, to preserve whatever work is done for the ${LAOB}, and which is published on its platform in a form that is free from dependencies on Observable(hq) as such.
${LAOB} has been proposed to the 2021 ‘Platforming Utopias’ exhibition of the Electronic Literature Organizaton’s conference. This pre-launch annual is the artifact that we are exhibiting in an existing venue. When ${LAOB} was being considered for acceptance, one anonymous reviewer expressed concern that ${LAOB} might be too “journal-like,” reproducing “the closed, selective and exclusive nature of traditional art and academic fori, rather than inviting community members to learn and experiment in a (possibly moderated) shared space, which seems to me to be the hosting Observable’s spirit, and which would in my sense be closer to a utopia.” ${LAOB} in no way intends to foreclose the relatively free-invitational and collaborative spirit of Observable itself. On the contrary, subject to artists’ overriding specifications, ${LAOB} notebooks will be Observable notebooks, published and open to forking by anyone who is given access. This will not compromise the curation and quality of the published work – driven by their protected ‘parent’ notebooks and linked from the ${LAOB}’s web-facing site – but it will expose and open up the affordances of the artifactual devices (code in current web technologies) to precisely the ‘shared space’ that this reviewer and ${LAOB} would like to bring into our shared discourses. We also plan, as a part of this ‘editorial space’ to have op-ed or discussion fori that are notebook-based, allowing anyone to make comments and suggestions using the modern, versioning-style mechanisms that codeworkers have adopted and that language art codeworkers might well benefit from.
<div style="text-align: right; padding-bottom: 2em;">– John Cayley, Providence, May 2021</div>`
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LAOB
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