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The following are snippets taken from Loss Pequeño Glazier's 2006 article Code as Language, that may come in useful as quotes.
  1. APA: Glazier, Loss Pequeño. "Code as Language." LEA 14.05-06 (2006). http://tinyurl.com/nvu6aqm Accessed on December 11 2013.
  2. Chicago: Loss Pequeño Glazier. "Code as Language." LEA 14, no. 05-06 (2006). http://tinyurl.com/nvu6aqm Accessed on December 11 2013.

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Writing occurs in space and space is itself part of the process through which writing produces meaning. In digital media, textuality is equally a function of the meaning of space. The materiality of the digital written object differs from that of the print object, but is no less material.

A poetics of dynamic text seeks to engage that delicate edge where language apparatuses meet, slip, and engage, to further the possibilities of the poetic text. Ultimately, a poetics of programming raises the question, where is the writing — in the code or in the displayed language?
If language is defined as written symbols organized into combinations and patterns to express and communicate thoughts and feelings — language that executes — then coding is language.

Language in its written sense, as an agency of mark-making to produce meaning in a given medium: The nature of such agency is not limited to simply recording preexisting, definitive, or idealized thought, rather the act of inscription is itself a process of thinking through thought. Second, the process of inscription is not just about meaning being placed on a given material. Instead, meaning is made through the act of inscribing on the specific material. Further, the act of inscribing engages the visual, spatial, and material modes of, not mark-making, but of meaning making through making marks. Finally, the recorded text is not an ideal or definitive one but is merely one articulation of many possible ones; an exemplar of the specific material and social factors that condition mark-making at that moment. Writing is the registering of an individual iteration of the always dynamic multiple material possibilities of textuality.

As Johanna Drucker has argued the New York Times, for example, draws its content not only from the text that occurs on the page, but from the masthead, the layout, the columns, the subheads on the page. Simply by looking at a New York Times page one knows not to expect a poem by Mallarmé, or a treatise by Mao. Thus meaning is made not just by what the text says but equally by how space is used in the scene of writing. Such a dynamic has been explored to great effect by countless Concrete Poets.

Accordingly, there is no such thing as negative space. The book itself is dependent upon space.

The fact that marks are representational immediately suggests that encoding is writing. Of course, by this definition, one could also say that other forms of mark-making, sculpture, painting, playing an instrument are also writing. I would accept that these other examples are also "writing" if we define writing as an act of engaging a material to explore ideas through the process of working through that given material, physically, socially, and ideologically. The case of encoding is even more closely located to what we might conventionally think of as writing.


Drucker, Johanna, Figuring the Word (New York: Granary, 1998).