## The Publication as Proposed In Networked and Programmable Media will consist of a comprehensive selection from the author’s works of language art with personal and post-personal computation from the late 1970s through at least 2023. The core content of this integrated anthology will be the work itself, configured, so far as is possible, to be readable as originally intended on or shortly after the date of publication for its various constituent works, or to be rendered legible (in a manner ‘faithful’ to original formats) by reconfiguraton in the relatively stable framework of the contemporary internet ‘web stack’ – HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Because the author is recognized as a leading disciplinary theorist, complementary to his practice as such, In Networked and Programmable Media will also provide commentary on the selected works. This commentary will be composed in a manner that offers a critical and discursive pathway, circumscribing the constituent works, one that might in another publishing context, provide a monographic impetus to the collection. #### Parsing the Elements of the Project‘s Extended Title In Networked and Programmable Media is offered as an evocative main title for the collection. It is based on a phrase, coined by the author and widely adopted by scholars and critics in the field. It does service in referring to the once ‘new’ and still potential situation of certain language art and literary practices which emerged following on from the historical advent of personal computing in the developed world. The two adjectives highlight important characteristics of these situated practices which distinguish them with respect to those of the compositional and delivery media of more familiar and still predominant literary practices, those of writing and publication. Computational cultural architecture now ensures that the compositional and delivery media of language art – to include writing and publishing – is most certainly ‘networked’ and also more or less ‘programmable,’ even if the associated affordances go unused or are only used non-consciously. ‘Language Art’ is preferred to ‘literary art’ in the subtitle to indicate that although graphic traces of language predominate – even in this collection as a whole – for the composition and delivery of linguistic aesthetic art, work of this kind, particularly in its networked and programmable situation, is intrinsically opened out to address traces of language practices that are inscribed in other substantive perceptible media, the obvious one being a technologically differentiated and articulated aurality, and as opposed to the usual typographic visuality. As for ‘with Personal Computation,’ the preposition should be read to embrace both the common sense of ‘together with’ and the archaic, latent sense of ‘against.’ ‘Personal’ is an adjective that is important to this project and its commentary. ‘Personal computing’ was the term adopted in the late 1970s when now ubiquitous personal computers first became affordably available to artistically inclined individuals, including some with projects unrelated to any progress of computation – as such or as then understood. Now that everyone in the developed networked world (and also those in the developing world) have one or two supercomputers in their hands, let alone on their laps or desktops, it is arguable that ‘personal computing’ no longer exists. These devices have become part of an infrastructure – both cultural and transactional – in which we have been obliged to invest. Undoubtedly and ever-increasingly, and ‘socially,’ this computation is ‘networked’ but not in a manner that individual persons can or should personally reconfigure. They can personalize, but this is something different, something, basically, that is intended to reduce transactional friction. Similarly, our devices remain programmable but not in a manner that non-professional individuals can or should attempt, and certainly not in a manner that would disrupt operating systems or the network infrastructure on which these devices are, in the majority of cases, compliant terminal parts. One of the overarching points of interest in the language art career represented by this collection is that it spans an historical period of engagement with computation characterized by a profound change in this contextual sense of ‘personal,’ from a time when new cultural affordances appeared to be offered to individuals with the prospect of significant cultural reconfiguration, to the time, now, of proposed publication, when what was always a fantasy of empowering liberal individual creative production has given way to incorporated networked and programmable power which renders any products of the presupposed liberal individual’s creative impetus as commodities within proprietary digitalized cultural architectures. Why? Because the ‘creative’ ‘individual’ was and is an essential category within cultural architectures which resist reconfiguration, and which are – of manifest destiny – necessarily integrated with predominant western formations of sociopolitical, industrial, and financial transaction. The elaboration of this thesis concerning Personal Computing (to be used more or less interchangeably with Personal Computation) will inform the main underlying theme of the project when read as monograph rather than as an artist/author’s anthology with integrated commentary. Finally, for that part of the extended title which specifies the project substantively, ‘before and after Electronic Literature’ takes a slightly polemical stance with respect to the current designation for the academic discipline within which work of this kind is studied. The use of ‘language art’ for ‘literary practice’ or ‘writing’ already indicates a tenor which I have set out above, and the implicit putting behind us of ‘electronic’ is part of an argument, to be reiterated by the project’s commentary, that certain supposed characteristics associated with ‘digital’ and especially ‘electronic’ have misdirected the attention of practitioners and scholar-critics, away from more significant effects of cultural digitalization on practices of language as such, and not only within milieux concerned with ‘high-cultural’ aesthetic linguistic practice. #### Why Digital Publication? Before speaking to other contextual aspects of the project, including other aspects of what is academically ‘at stake,’ it would be as well to deal briefly with the ‘why digital?’ question. There is the obvious fact that the work proposed as gathered In Networked and Programmable Media is and was, from the outset, categorizable as what is currently labeled ‘born digital.’ This is a strange, mixed-metaphorical term. I read it as indicating, of a work and often correctly, that it was produced at a time when its compositional and delivery media could not be culturally represented in these same media. For the work to be appreciated and accredited, the predominant culture was required to remediate the work ‘back’ into ‘older’ media which would then allow the work to be read. This is like saying that a statue is ‘born sculptural’ in an aesthetically 2D flatland and has to be rendered as a painting to be seen and appreciated. And yet, for some language art, even in a manifestly digitalized culture, this was and is the case. It need not be any longer. Although, for language art, the culture of reading has not shifted decisively in favor of alternate modes of reading – on dynamic screens as opposed to from the codex – the ubiquity of personal screens that are temporally-enabled windows on a world of textual practice have, in combination with the ability to store dynamic symbolic artifacts remotely and deliver them on the same network as that of the purely textual artifacts – this has changed the cultural situation of linguistic artifacts that require a fourth dimension, for example that of time, to appear in the 3D pageland of academic literary scholarship. And this situation has the potential, one slowly being realized, to be institutionally supported in the form of ‘digital publications’ which take the form of an author-composed and annotated network of artifacts. The artifacts themselves may be stored in an institutional repository but, along with accompanying familiar textual apparatus, they may be brought into the reading devices of their audience to be read as they were composed to be read, and in the context of a scholarly-critical monographic, annotated anthology. For example.