User:LEa/SI28

Special Issue #28: Writing Machines–Protocols–Feedback

September—December 2025

Since human beings developed the software of the alphabet, they have engineered a series of technologies to manage and enhance its power. These include storage and operating systems such as books and libraries, along with more recent (computerised) systems of information collation and dissemination. In the twentieth century, the realisation that writing is a technology – as opposed to a "natural", direct conduit to the soul – came as a creative inspiration to many writers and artists.

This sounds liberating, but in the twenty-first century we have reason to be critical of how easily the creative potential of the software of the alphabet can be commodified and pre-programmed. As knowledge transfers to ever-larger datasets, and drops into the hands of a minority who own them, we must ask again: what is our stake in the software of the alphabet?

Where is our agency when human expression through writing is understood as a code managed by a series of protocols? What is at stake when a large dataset can claim the space of "creativity"? Can we, through learning about how the past has been structured, shape information technologies that serve our own desires and interests?

Worm Radio Shows

Week 1

Hosts

Luca, Robin, Valentin, Lea (me)

Session 3 | Lea

As part of the first episode of our Special Issue #28, aired on 25-09-22, I brought a cut-up text to perform together with the group. The concept follows the surrealist idea of latent news, but can also be traced to Tristan Tzaras text To Make A Dadaist Poem or the cut-up technique used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

The input consisted of the principles of permacomputing and Sunjoo Lee's descriptions of her artistic research project Electric Garden, as well as the articles How to Mount a Balcony Awning by Dmitriy Kurochkin and Building a slow web by Greg Sarjeant. As I did not have enough time to cut up everything I brought, not every input text made it in to the final output. Each of us took a few snippets of text (single words or phrases) and rearranged them into longer phrases or sentences. We then went around in a circle and read them out loud.

Output

All hardware especially the internet as chips to be fed

Flexible electricity built on radio signal are the principles of permacomputing

Never stops pushing. Is an ongoing electric garden

Artistic research powered by the early internet consider carefully insects

The best I remember showing the electric garden

The worst relational process explores the garden

Flowing and it is still making control the feed integrate coming to bathe never stops

Interaction between hope for but the feed is flourishing

Living you don't

Simplicity, complexity and almost biological and renewable one year old

A place solid ground electricity that algae now