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Reading exquisite_code: Critical Code Studies of Literature 12 283 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Mark C. Marino for over a decade, since Lev Manovich’s (2002) call for“software studies” and N. Katherine Hayles’s call for media specific analysis (Hayles and Burdick 2002), critics have been turning to examine the computational artifacts used to create these works of art, examining the platforms, the broader networks, and, of course, the software. Critical code studies (CCS) emerged in 2006 as a set of methodologies that sought to apply humanities-style hermeneutics to the interpretation of the extrafunctional significance of computer source code (Marino 2006). Since that definition first appeared in electronic book review, the field of CCS has emerged through online working groups, conferences, articles, a research lab, and several collaborative book projects.The goal of the study is to examine the digitally born artifact through the entry point of the code and to engage the code in an intensive close reading following the models of media archaeology, semiotic analysis, and cultural studies. CCS takes the analytic approaches of cultural studies and applies them to the source code; however, its readings cannot discuss the code without a full discussion of the software, processes, and platform. In other words, CCS does not fetishize the code or abstract it from its conditions but engages the code as an artifact contextualized in a material and social history. When the source code of a work is published with the output text, whether in print or online, CCS takes on an even more necessary function as the artists have situated the code as part of the artwork, inviting close readings.What follows is a case study in CCS built around a multiauthored, procedurally produced1 text called exquisite_code. 284 MARK C. MARINO Enter your text here. So begins the collaboratively authored novella exquisite_code (Griffiths et al. 2010), “a radical constructivist experiment,” featuring a fragmented tale of a dark future populated by zombies, exiled yuppies, and a talking horse. As the “exquisite” of the title suggests, the novel’s creation grew out of an adaptation of the surrealist technique, the “exquisite corpse.” During its composition, seven artists sat writing together continuously at a table while being recorded through time-lapse video and audio in a London gallery for roughly eight hours a day for five days, February 15–19, 2010. The result of the process is available in a print-on-demand novel, while text, audio, and video archives are available online. In one type of exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis), developed from a parlor game called “consequences,” authors continue a piece of writing only having seen the last portion of the segment the previous writer has created; exquisite_code preserves that basic model but then adds computational elements and a few more requirements to its process. First, the collaborators would each write a prompt from which only one was randomly selected.Then, the authors had roughly six minutes to respond with a text that presumably continued an overall story. However, once submitted , these text passages were subjected to another combination or selection process according to a set of undisclosed rules and computational processes, the code for which has been published as an appendix to the print and online editions. Those programs employed variations on Markov chains, an algorithmic adaptation of Burroughs’s cutup method, and even a text message (SMS) style to process the prose. Some of these mixing processes were created by the writers themselves during the five-day period. More than foregrounding its machine-centered processes, exquisite_code entices readers to read in order to deduce the processes of its composition. Just as the procedural generation behind Dwarf Fortress drew Boluk and LeMieux’s focus in chapter 6 of this volume, exquisite_code draws attention to the processes that produced the final text. Reading the text, then, becomes a game of trying to detect the signatures...

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