Something I'm learning to enjoy through my interactions with computers is that what exists in digital space came out of some weird place in someone's brain, somewhere, so that it can stimulate some weird place in the brain of the user, here. Digital text is such an odd platform because many brains have been trained to convert characters into ideas and information, but somehow the computer distorts the distance between a reader and the idea into an archive even more foreign than physical literature. My experience activating "bot or not" online widened the gap between where I was, what I understood, and the computer I was using. The website made me feel bamboozled - tricked into believing that what I read was generated by a bot simply because I was told that it was a bot, and even more so uncertain if the activity was meant to kindle intrigue or frustration. A bot only knows that which it is told to consume.
Reading Response - Week 5 Alan Sodenheim 's explanation of what codework actually is in it's physical and verbal contexts, by telling us what it is not and where it exists. This work is likely more comparable to a poetry than coding or programming, which drives me to believe that that is exactly what programming is - poetry. Programming language is a coded, determined, and layered rhetoric designed to produce a desired output. And so is poetry. Yet both forms of communication are driven by a force beyond themselves, which objectifies them into use for commodification. But how do we learn to understand and to recreate for a desired effect? Saussure's explanation of signs and signifiers can provide some solace for those seeking to know why we identify "what is" as that specific "what is." The object of programming, like that of linguistics, rests in an input - a "what is"- that requests a visual and reactive output. Yet in the realm of ...
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