IV. Codework:
“Writing” in a digital environment consists of both text and code, and many of the other works on the shortlist for the Electronic Literature Prize might be called “codeworks,” works in which programming languages are revealed on the surface of the text, or executable code shapes the writing and reading of the text. Techniques vary, but the general result is a digital text that emphasizes its own programming, mechanism, and materiality. Rita Raley – whose important article “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework” forms the basis of the following discussion – notes that practitioners refer to the practice variously as: “net.wurked” language, “rich.lit,” codepoetry”; “digital visual poetics”; and “programmable or machine modulated poetry (n. pag.). Some works, for example, rely on operable code using algorithms and randomization functions to generate new texts from pre-existing ones. The new text is different every time it’s read, and you see it being built on screen a little at a time.

Other authors use code mixed with a natural language like English. The work of Mez – the screen name of Marianne Breeze, an Australian author – is a good example of this practice. Mez calls her hybrid language “mezangelle.” Mez uses code fragments visually, on the surface of her texts – square brackets, operators and those of you familiar with mobile phones, pagers, instant messengers, and other info shorthands will be familiar with the look of some of this work. Work like this interrupts and impedes smooth transmission of information, rendering meaning opaque and troubling interpretation, which results in another text of jouissance. Not surprisingly, lots of people dislike it. Mez receives email regularly from people asking “why can’t you just write in plain English?” and Mez’s answer is found in the work itself: “[meaning code: if narrative is essential to comprehension, then TTT is not for you. turn reading ‘off’ and filter ‘on’. if, on the other key, you enjoy dream sequences/ sequentials, reverse the last.]” (Mez, Puzzle Pieces of a Datableede Jigsaw)

Codework has roots in earlier avant-garde practices – found poems, concrete poetry, Oulipian texts, Dadaist composition – but the context and circulation of the texts is different. Mez makes clear that her writing practice has at its core an ongoing sense of performance and collaboration: “code wurk_remnants d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network” (qtd. in Raley).