Simon Biggs in his 2003 “web art” work Book of Books, clearly sees language and machines as intertwined. As he writes in Computing the Sublime, “. . . it can be established that the computer is firstly a language machine. It is a machine that is formed with language (symbolically) and which operates as a semiosis, perhaps sometimes as a form of poesis, on language.” However, despite his mention of semiosis, in Book of Books this vision of the intertwining of language and machine is not in the sense of how they are both socially situated and culturally constructed, but in the sense that language, like mathematics, is a tool to be used, a tool entirely separate from its users. In his artist’s statement Biggs writes:
Rather than monkeys typing we have a computer program tirelessly generating random words and inserting them into the resulting ever expanding text . . . we can imagine that this system might, given an infinite period of time and processing power, generate such a book ... Eventually, after a reasonable period of time . . . the text is reduced to a one pixel font size at which point it resembles our new universal language, binary code. All languages are thus seen to be one and the same in a demonstration of what the term convergence media might really imply, as the erasure of difference leads to the text becoming unreadable.
What is so curious about this statement is that on the one hand the pieces of Book of Books show language, like numbers in Euclidean arithmetic, as an infinite plane of possibility that, again, exists apart from the vagaries of space, time, and users. But on the other hand, while Book of Books might appear to triumphantly represent the mathematicization of space that the computer offers us, the ultimate unreadability of Biggs’ texts seems in fact to point to a desire not just for language itself but for language to remain untouched by the zeroes and ones of an encroaching digitalization.
Rather than monkeys typing we have a computer program tirelessly generating random words and inserting them into the resulting ever expanding text . . . we can imagine that this system might, given an infinite period of time and processing power, generate such a book ... Eventually, after a reasonable period of time . . . the text is reduced to a one pixel font size at which point it resembles our new universal language, binary code. All languages are thus seen to be one and the same in a demonstration of what the term convergence media might really imply, as the erasure of difference leads to the text becoming unreadable.
What is so curious about this statement is that on the one hand the pieces of Book of Books show language, like numbers in Euclidean arithmetic, as an infinite plane of possibility that, again, exists apart from the vagaries of space, time, and users. But on the other hand, while Book of Books might appear to triumphantly represent the mathematicization of space that the computer offers us, the ultimate unreadability of Biggs’ texts seems in fact to point to a desire not just for language itself but for language to remain untouched by the zeroes and ones of an encroaching digitalization.
