Plaintext

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The Project is concerned with the agency and programming of writing technologies, with the goal of creating and publishing original research, providing resources, and fostering community.

First off, what is "Plaintext"? In the world of computers, plaintext is unencoded text, human-readable, without any formatting. This definition seems clear enough, at least at first. Everyone is familiar with ASCII text. ASCII is plaintext, but since ASCII is defined by encoding standards, this makes the "unformattedness" of plaintext a function of the formats and protocols regulating its appearance. In the same way, computer source code typically must be plaintext but at the same time must conform to certain rigid syntactic standards in order to compile and run. Every example of plaintext will be paradoxically both unencoded and rigidly framed by codes.

Plaintext is also a term from cryptography, where it refers to the input into a crypto system, or the message to be encoded (also referred to as "clear text"). Plaintext is a strategic resource in the military intelligence world of cryptography. "In any crypto system, plaintext must be handled properly lest an attacker gain considerable advantage." In fact, "possession of any plaintext whatsoever," whether meaningful or not, "makes several cryptanalytic attacks either possible or easier" (Wikipedia). As a result, cryptoanalytic strategies seek to mask the plaintext itself prior to encryption. The literalness of cryptographic plaintext is surrounded by and enables entire institutions of protection, concealment, and distribution. Storage of plaintext is equally a strategic issue. Even the most carefully destroyed and deleted media leave unerasable traces. The coding and transmission of plaintext is inseparable from its physical instantiations.

The point here is that plaintext cuts across issues of writing and inscription, law and institution. "Codework" names a direction for research and creative action into the history, politics, and art invoked by the complexities of “plaintext.” Here the Project draws on two concepts of “code.” The first is Lawrence Lessig's concept of "code as law." For Lessig, "code" is a complex intersection of regulation and action resulting from the transformed textual and legal environment of cyberspace, but crossing into and structuring our everyday political and social selves. Computer code works on us, works us over. Lessig argues that we need to address the “non-transparency” of the codes at work in writing today. To write is to engage in distributed and heterogeneous activities across multiple media. Under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example, every written text is potentially granulized into the economics of "rights management" – others may own and charge rent for every word we write.

At the same time, the Project invokes “code” as identified by net artist and theorist Alan Sondheim: a tradition of experimental writing engaged with formal procedures, emerging most dramatically in the programmatic writing of computer environments. There are obvious parallels between innovative writing practices and program code: both are self-reflexive, complexly figural, and concerned with iconicity. Digital code and literary text both involve language working on itself. New media artists and scholars are increasingly focused on code – it is no accident that the Ars Electronica 2003 Festival is entitled Code – the language of our time. In practice, code is often obscured. Sondheim points out that most computer users "work on or within graphic surfaces that are intricately connected to the programming 'beneath'; they have little idea how or why their machines work." Similarly, he argues, for "thousands of years, writers have, again in general, taken their tools — taken writing itself — for granted." Codework is precisely the entanglement of writer and medium, computer and code. The artistic practice of codework is concerned with the “back end,” a focus on the means and work of writing. If our writing tools write our thoughts, as Nietzsche had it, if the medium in some way determines the message, then codework offers a much-needed attention to the media and tools of writing.

“A society is defined by its amalgamates, not its tools,” write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The Project addresses the nature of writing in terms of paths and protocols, boundaries and correlations between strata of media. Codework offers a more rigorous and critical approach to the current technological moment than other related initiatives. For example, "cyberculture" has generated much excitement and attention, but this term is used so generally and across such a range of phenomena as to become totally useless. Attempting to address an amorphous cultural configuration around the use of "cyberspace" (itself a mythic refiguring of computers), one ends up finding cyberculture everywhere and nowhere. Codework has the advantage of being both broadly applicable and minutely specific. Codework reflects real practices and protocols in technical environments; codework equally reflects the living encounter of thought and formal systems that is as least as old as the first act of writing. The Project has similarities to existing projects such as the Electronic Literature Organization or the Dead Media Project, among other examples. These projects facilitate and promote literature in electronic media, and offer alternative histories of writing technologies, respectively. Similarly, there are listservs focused on artistic codework, such as wryting-l. But no current research project focuses on the history, politics, and artistic practice of codework. The challenge is to think transdisciplinarily rather than interdisciplinarily, by opening a field of problems and practices that inform and define the infrastructures of disciplines concerned with writing.

Some significant scholarly references for the Project include Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and Sondheim’s “Codework” issue of American Book Review (both mentioned above); John Cayley’s “The Code is not the Text (unless it is the text),” in the Electronic Book Review and elsewhere; Florian Cramer’s “Digital Code and Literary Text,” in the Beehive literary journal and elsewhere; Friedrich Kittler’s “There is no software” (in his Literature, Media, Information Systems); the Ars Electronica 2003 Festival on “Code: The Language of Our Time”; and the annual Read_Me festival of software art.