Code poetry and labour: the game excess of work
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Like most writing systems, programming languages were developed out of functional needs. However, it seems that enough familiarity with a communicative tool will always inevitably breed a creative curiosity toward the tool itself: at some point, it will be used for artistic expression and made to work for experimentation's sake. Language begets poetry. The first Perl poems were born like this, as a challenge between programmers (Sharon Hopkins and Larry Wall) who were testing the limits of what could be done with code, further than giving commands to a machine. As a descendant of constriction-based literature and the evolving self-image of programmers as writers, code poetry is an extremely labour-intensive game born out of the excesses of work, which I argue is both a transformative event for--as well as a logical consequence of--coding itself. Engaging with the work of Sianne Ngai, McKenzie Wark and Tiziana Terranova amongst others, my proposal explores different sides to the relationship between code poetry and labour: the implicit tensions between work and play, the détournement or hijacking of the means of production for non-instrumental means, and the living of language beyond its functional life. In executable code poetry that produces an output we find what the writing of what Wark calls the "hacker class" look like when it is not oriented towards a functionality with extractible value: a kind of "maximum effort, minimum result" literary form that only performs under very specific conditions--something that yields almost no information, an art-form that rejects commodification (even when it attempts otherwise).
Code poetry and labour: the game excess of work
Narratives & Worlds
Like most writing systems, programming languages were developed out of functional needs. However, it seems that enough familiarity with a communicative tool will always inevitably breed a creative curiosity toward the tool itself: at some point, it will be used for artistic expression and made to work for experimentation's sake. Language begets poetry. The first Perl poems were born like this, as a challenge between programmers (Sharon Hopkins and Larry Wall) who were testing the limits of what could be done with code, further than giving commands to a machine. As a descendant of constriction-based literature and the evolving self-image of programmers as writers, code poetry is an extremely labour-intensive game born out of the excesses of work, which I argue is both a transformative event for--as well as a logical consequence of--coding itself. Engaging with the work of Sianne Ngai, McKenzie Wark and Tiziana Terranova amongst others, my proposal explores different sides to the relationship between code poetry and labour: the implicit tensions between work and play, the détournement or hijacking of the means of production for non-instrumental means, and the living of language beyond its functional life. In executable code poetry that produces an output we find what the writing of what Wark calls the "hacker class" look like when it is not oriented towards a functionality with extractible value: a kind of "maximum effort, minimum result" literary form that only performs under very specific conditions--something that yields almost no information, an art-form that rejects commodification (even when it attempts otherwise).
Bio
María Garay Arriba is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Salamanca with a Ramón Areces contract, where she is also a member of the Ideology, Image, and Society Research Group. She graduated from Art and Art History at the University of Reading, and holds a master's degree in Art Writing from the Glasgow School of Art. She is devoting her doctoral thesis to artistic and literary phenomena in the digital realm, in particular to the aesthetics and politics of code poetry. On this topic, she recently published an article in the journal Umática: Revista sobre Creación y Análisis de la Imagen. In recent years she has also published three short literary texts and worked in museum contexts, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Venancio Blanco Foundation in Salamanca. Her research at large is situated in the field of contemporary art theory and aesthetics, placing special focus on hybrid media, the material properties of language, and the intersections between different systems of representation.