Exe.cut[up]able Statements – Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts („Exe.cut[up]able Statements – Poetic Computations and Phantasms of the Self-Executing Text“) is a 350-page German-language book on computational language and algorithmic codes in literature and other arts: from speculative, fantastic and experimental writing to concept and computer art; from magic charms, kabbalism and Renaissance permutational poetry to aleatoric collage in 20th-century avant-garde arts, Oulipo poetry, stochastic and recursive texts, hacker slang, net.art and codeworks.

The book wraps up a good decade of critical participant observation of net and computer arts, and reflects many discussions and encounters with artists, theorists and activists on mailing lists, at conferences and festivals – including Ars Electronica, where in 2003 the author gave a talk on the poetics of command lines also entitled “Exe.cut[up]able Statements”. The title is taken from a codework by the Australian net artist mez (Mary Anne Breeze). In her net-cultural, poetic language “mezangelle”, the hybrid portmanteau word describes statements that are technically executable program codes as well as – in the tradition of Brion Gysin und William S. Burroughs – cut-ups, ecstatic-hallucinogenic text collages. These two poles are short-circuited in algorithmic poetry, and traced in the book: computation and the fantastic, techno-positivism and occultism, formalism and anarchism, engineering and excess, art and anti-art.

A good example is the artistic and philosophical transfiguration of simple combinatorial wordshuffling. In kabbalism, they are understood as a method of cosmological creation; later, they are satirized, reflected in prose, rediscovered as a means of nonsense and destroying meaning, rationalized as technology and reappropriated into occultism. Such contradictory imaginations do not only develop across the centuries, but often within one and the same epoch of art. Often, the imaginations are more complex than the actual products of algorithmic processes. For instance, the 17th century German poet Quirinus Kuhlmann and Jorge Luis Borges each speculate independently on computations that might generate all existing and future books. Alongside “mezangelle”, there is thus a whole tradition of a fantastic literature that does not merely describe its phantasms – as conventional science fiction would –, but also applies them to its own language. It does not just read meaning into seemingly unsemantic codes, but actually speaks in them.

Two close readings, which make up almost a third of the book, reconstruct how those codes become viral – not only in dubious email attachments but also in literature and art. Kuhlmann’s 1671 permutational sonnet Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen (“On the Permutation of Human Matters”) and mez' codework Viro.Logic Condition 1.1 (2001) contaminate their own writing with computations and infect their readers with semiotic paranoia when they claim to contain the “seeds of [all] wisdom so that you will find more, the more you look” (“wi in einem Klumpen / die Samkörnchen der Schluss Red=Sitten=Weiß=Rechen=Erdmessungs=thon=Stern=Artznei=Natur=Recht=Schrift=weißheit verborgen / und wirst du imehr antreffen / imehr du suchest”), becoming artistic buffer overflows and segmentation faults via “N.pu.t][rojan.logic][strains [or physical N.put”.

But contrary to all theories of technical media as the a priori of intellectual history, it is rarely reallife technology that triggers the imagination of this literature. More often, phantasmagorical imagination precedes technology. This does not mean that literary computations are just metaphorical. In the writings discussed in the book, computations are not separate from the text, but part of poetic language; not only signifieds, but also signifiers. Just as visual poetry highlights the visual arts dimension of all writing and literature while sound poetry emphasizes its musical dimension, combinatorial and algorithmic literature extrapolates the computational dimension of writing. Computational literature has existed at least since antiquity, when names of gods and kings were numerologically encoded into other words. This book attempts to describe this literature as a whole – beyond individual forms such as Renaissance poetic games, aleatory poetry and computer arts, and beyond historically and aesthetically more specialized literary and art histories. If literature is a crossover art made up not only of semantic, phonetic and graphemic narratives, sounds and writing, but also of countable and computationally executable signs, then this allows, among other things, comparative readings of Sade’s pornography, Novalis‘ aphorisms, Italo Calvino’s late novels, John Cage’s chance compositions, Alvin Lucier’s tape music and net-artistic codeworks.

The book deliberately does not differentiate between literature, visual arts and music when it reads the scores of fluxus and concept art as algorithmic poetry, when it places net and software artists such as jodi, Graham Harwood, jaromil and Adrian Ward alongside Georges Perec and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, true crime books next to semiotics, or Hugo Ball’s sound poetry next to monologues from Jess Franco cannibal flicks. The first chapters cover prototypes of algorithmic language in magic and Pythagorean thought, their synthesis in Jewish and Christian kabbalism as well as in the Llullist ars combinatoria and Renaissance permutational poetry. The second half of the book focuses on 20th- and 21st-century arts, with romanticist computations as their prototypes.

Yet a distinction is made less between epochs than between processes: algorithmic total art, from Sade and Mallarmé to La Monte Young; structural language combinatorics, from Saussure to Duchamp; stochastic poetics, from Shannon and Bense’s information aesthetics to the “travesty” computer program; algorithmics in its dialectic of chaos and restriction, from John Cage to the psychogeographic computer of socialfiction. org; recursion, from Gorgias’ rhetoric to postmodern fiction and the GNU acronym; algorithmics as an aesthetic figure of thought in computer programming language poetry, from Oulipo to net.art; and poetry and art generators failing because of the false promises of “artificial intelligence”. The final chapter questions concepts that have so far dominated critical scholarship on computational arts and doubts that terms like, for example, “medium” or “media” are useful or tenable.

Exe.cut[up]able Statements – Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts was accepted in 2006 as doctoral thesis in comparative literature at the Freie Universität Berlin; it has not yet appeared as a book. Parts of it are based on the essay Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, which was electronically published by the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2005 http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/. However, the book is a significantly more extensive and scholarly text.