24:null 25:["$","title",null,{"children":"Preface | John Cayley | Observable"}] 2a:T907,*The following is slightly adapted from a text written for the exhibition curated by Friedrich Block 'POESIS: Language Art' at the Kunsttempel Gallery, Kassel, Germany, August 2–October 6, **2019**, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the gallery and Block's p0es1s project.* *It would also, in context, be worth comparing parts of what I wrote for Cayley, John. ‘Paraphones.’ In Bandwidths: Reading across Media with Garrett Stewart, edited by David LaRocca. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.* After computation was made “personal,” accessible to individual makers, I soon realized that I had been called upon to make literary artifacts in programmable media. Given my background and inclinations, I made, specifically, poetic artifacts. For me, by contrast with many serious poets at the time, this engagement generated no existential challenge to poetic making. It did suggest, however, to myself and others, that there were a number of fundamental problems with “literature” and “the literary.” There is an irony here, in that the programmatological mediation of aesthetic language helped bring me to a place, in art and theory, that challenges the world of letters when letters – encoded transcriptions of chiefly documentary grapholects – are all that contemporary computation can address. Language as such still eludes computation. Regardless, I had learned that my medium was language itself. Computation was and is an obstacle between myself and language, proving and testing my desire for an art of language as such. Now, as of the 2010s, computation speaks and listens. It pretends language in vocal and aural humanoid embodiment while relying and insisting upon its formalist reductions. My practice-as-tragicomedy intensifies. And here's another irony, the language art of Poesis is expressed and catalogued as visual poetry, at the very moment when my work – and the culture of “reading” – is turning to aurality. There are letters and typographic words on the page image below but, in common with the graphic instantiations of all so-called literature, their visuality evocalizes. Here other readings are evoked by way of subliteral difference. You, dear reader, embody these ambiguities, meaning that you grasp them by – inner, no less corporeal – hearing.2b:T4c1,With respect to the overall argument: - computation is a new emergent technology: a *dispositif*, a technology, a system, a discourse, a network, nascent infrastructure - technology → discourse → network → infrastructure - it arises within an ideological infrastructure (historically contingent) that is liberal, soon to be neo-liberal and which is wedded to a correspondent political economy - it develops a 'personal' terminal of the network (a class of node?) - the 'personal' guarantees the liberalism of the operations that ensue - the individual is empowered by the personal node - the content with which the individual works is irrelevant; the network is only interested in the personal exceptionalism that it enables - the network is highly invested in its own activity and development, regardless of content - individuals make gestures; if any these gestures have exceptional resonance or, more often, point to a 'new' technological potential of the system, they are *awarded* without any necessary relationship to the content, its sociality (if it has any), its milieu #### *Drafting Notes* A cell for sketches, versions, notes that will not appear on the self-published draft pages.2c:[] 28:{"id":"a80d76ecc64a38e3","slug":"inapm1_preface","title":"Preface","thumbnail":"3ff8f42f32a052b66a284f167049fa43fd0f718b244ef51ecae791d16169f28b","access_level":"public","create_time":"$D2023-09-20T20:41:45.080Z","update_time":"$D2024-08-22T13:44:58.854Z","view_time":null,"first_public_time":"$D2023-09-20T20:42:41.828Z","fork":false,"stars":0,"starred":false,"owner":{"type":"team","id":"8cad4906c41da0ef","login":"shadoof","name":"John Cayley","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/d4a045c1060f722297a6047ffa90d6cd33806f54fcaa444ac3f1882c0fd4ee4f","tier":"pro_2024"},"version":103,"publish_version":null,"role":null,"authored":false,"authors":[{"type":"individual","id":"5c3cbd6193f712f7","login":"shadoof","name":"John Cayley","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/d4a045c1060f722297a6047ffa90d6cd33806f54fcaa444ac3f1882c0fd4ee4f","tier":null}],"members":[{"type":"individual","id":"5c3cbd6193f712f7","login":"shadoof","name":"John Cayley","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/d4a045c1060f722297a6047ffa90d6cd33806f54fcaa444ac3f1882c0fd4ee4f","tier":null,"role":"editor"}],"comments":[],"custom_thumbnail":false,"trashed":false,"subscribed":null,"forks":0,"collection":{"id":"31c71366ce5763a5","slug":"in-networked-and-programmable-media","title":"In Networked and Programmable Media","owner":{"id":"8cad4906c41da0ef","login":"shadoof","name":"John Cayley"}},"type":"notebook","body":{"title":"Preface","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"Working Draft\n# Preface","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":76,"value":"*In the memories ... I can remember having* then ...\n
– M. John Harrison
","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":3,"value":"> *In its current state and for some time to come this preface will be more of a *‘before writing’* than a *‘before reading*.’ As such, I anticipate that its contents and, to an extent, its form will change a great deal as this project progresses. I trust and intend, however, that it will preserve traces from its initial and early drafts. I want some of the anticipatory thoughts and feelings that I am having about the project to carry forward and find expression when, in what now seems a fairly distant future, this preface will take its finished place, before one reads.*","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":44,"value":"As I began to build and compose this, *In Networked and Programmable Media*, I became sensitized to forms of embodied thought that lie beneath, to *infra*structures of all kinds, particularly those supporting material culture and those related to memory. In part, this was because, as I say, I *build* as well as compose. I was (and am) literally building infrastructure for a project that is deeply concerned with what underlies, and quietly delineates, certain kinds of practice – both existing and emerging – and to do this I needed to remember what and how I practiced and then how I integrated this practice with existing material cultural infrastructures. My memory – as I do the remembering – has since been integrated with existing infrastructures that we call contemporary. Somehow, I must account for this reconfiguration of memory itself as I recall and give an account of what I thought I was doing.","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":54,"value":"I am not sure, by the way, that I was doing – have done – very much, or very much of lasting significance. And yet, here I am – at the time of writing – working on something that will take me a couple more years to complete, while also building an infrastructure for it that I, at least, *in*tend will last, doing so for a purpose that, at least, *pre*tends significance and affect, as addressed to others, to ‘you’ readers.","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":61,"value":"In fact, and in a number of ways, this, *In Networked and Programmable Media*, itself promises as much in the way of significance and affect as anything I have done before, due to its intentions and their commitment to the ‘personal.’ The stated academic and philosophical impetus of the project is to study what was meant and implied by ‘personal computing.’ Personal computing was an emerging material and cultural infrastructure that situated and contextualized my practice. Any statements that I contribute to this study, however, will be generated by way of a personal, self-reflexive address to my own work and my working relationship with personal computing. This narrows and anecdotalizes the academic project, but it also gives me permission – if not an obligation – to take on and into account very personal aspects of my working life, as it were. Personal memory and reflection must be integral to what you will have before ‘you,’ readers.","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":33,"value":"$2a","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":12,"value":"---","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":14,"value":"$2b","pinned":true,"hidden":false,"mode":"md","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":93,"value":"nbsNotes = nbs()","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined"},{"id":84,"value":"#### *Note Drafts:*\n

\n\n

M. John Harrsion, Climbers, London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2022 (Gollanz, 1989), p. 188. My emphasis.

\n\n

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