For this practicum I did a slightly modified version a Flarf deformance. Flarf poetry is an avant garde movement reminiscent of Oulipo which incorporates various aspects of Web 2.0 into poetic production. One such technique involves putting a poem through numerous iterations of Google Translate to track how the text's words are transformed by a translation algorithm which can only approximate semantic equivalence. I did the same thing, only with code, using a binary translator in place of a language one. Whatever output I got from one translation I fed into the input of the next, disregarding incommensurable categories (see "Decimal to binary") along the way, until I got back to text.

Original: “Documents” have never been more material—and yet—they push against new limits of ephemerality, stretching the temporal spectrum of existence to nano-thresholds below perception and above its limits. (From a recent essay by Johanna Drucker titled "Distributed and Conditional Documents.")

Text to binary: 11100010 10000000 10011100 01000100 01101111 01100011 01110101 01101101 01100101 01101110 01110100 01110011 11100010 10000000 10011101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110100 01100101 01110010 01101001 01100001 01101100 11100010 10000000 10010100 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110100 11100010 10000000 10010100 01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110000 01110101 01110011 01101000 00100000 01100001 01100111 01100001 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101101 01101001 01110100 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100101 01110000 01101000 01100101 01101101 01100101 01110010 01100001 01101100 01101001 01110100 01111001 00101100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01110010 01100101 01110100 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01100101 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01110100 01110010 01110101 01101101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100101 01111000 01101001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101110 01101111 00101101 01110100 01101000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01101000 01101111 01101100 01100100 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110000 01100101 01110010 01100011 01100101 01110000 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101101 01101001 01110100 01110011 00101110 00100000

Binary to text: “Documents” have never been more material—and yet—they push against new limits of ephemerality, stretching the temporal spectrum of existence to nano-thresholds below perception and above its limits.

Decimal to binary: 0 (this clearly didn't work, but, being a good Oulipian, I adhered to my rule nonetheless)

Binary to decimal: 0

Binary to hexadecimal: 30

Decimal to hexadecimal: 1e

Hexadecimal to binary: 11110

Hexadecimal to decimal: 69904

Decimal to octal: 210420

Octal to decimal: 69904

Binary to octal: 0

Octal to binary: 0

Hexadecimal to octal: 0

Octal to hexadecimal: 0

Text to binary: 00110000

Binary to text: 0

The computer has been hailed, somewhat polemically, as both the beginning and end of media theory (Winthrop-Young, 2010; Mulder, 2006; Kittler, 1999, 2009); it defamiliarizes medial perception by being apparently able to emulate every kind of medium. Writing? Check. Music? Check. Film? Check. A.I.? Maybe . . . Elon Musk's recent comments on Deepmind have everyone clamoring (again). In Craig Dworkin's parlance, code is a "unit of double articulation" which elides material specificity -- perhaps only to reassert it later -- in an attempt to give us a shared language between various and disparate media (No Medium 96).

The above translations put quite a bit of pressure on this claim, most notably in instances where Drucker's prose is deformed into a "0." Though some crossovers fail, their apparent losses can always be recuperated into some kind of content by shifting to another code paradigm; the 0 value which resulted in the fourth incongruous translation (binary to decimal) was made meaningful by the fifth (binary to hexadecimal). This is simultaneously deformance and transformance. When translation fails it only reveals that 0 is not voided of a value, much like that pesky "non-breaking space" marker we all found staring back at us way back in class #3. Blank space is not nonmeaning.

To use a unit of double articulation, then, is not to use some free and easy lingua franca that benignly and benevolently shuttles meaning from one side of the material divide to another. Rather, UDAs, like any good parasite, can adapt themselves to (almost?) any kind of semiotic or semantic system and eventually bend that system to its will (which sounds a lot like our late capitalist global economy; judging by her really excellent article in this week's readings Tara McPherson would probably agree). Code: end of media theory? Alpha and omega? The Rapture is a noisy affair. Mediation as eschatology.