There are people to which you have been connected long before you knew them. Fabulous a communication medium, the Web manifests this connection and turns it into real words, real exchange. You just find your people. Call it magic, automagic or just plain network theory, it works. Or at least it works for me. Always. What I seek seeks me. Ariel was no exception.
In this Dialogue, I want you to meet Ariel Malka and his thoughts about text, code, programming and experiments.
Ariel is a programmer and designer working on a range of interactive projects. A freelance software architect, Ariel spends a respectable amount of time on projects like chronotext.org [a growing collection of software experiments exploring the relation between text, space and time] and chronotext-cross [an open-source C++ code-base for creating cross-platform mobile apps and games].
With us having so many touching points (mostly text- and code-wise) it was a matter of text, space and time for our connection to become a first order one. Enjoy this dialogue and the portals Ariel opens while talking about software architecture, textual threads and hyperlinks.
Oh, and by the way, this was the Tweet with which Ariel won my heart forever (there’s Semantic Web inside it, so no wonder)
@TheodoraPetkova Hey. Yes, a 3d wrapped text head sounds like a good direction (even better with semantic-web hyper-linked hairs :)
— Ariel Malka (@arielmalka) January 19, 2017
Building Worlds with Code and Text
What is it to be a software architect? What worlds do you build?
Writing a program can be simple on day one, but as the amount of code grows, it tends to get messy up to a point where it is difficult to understand what’s going on and to add new features. One of the roles of the software architect is fight this condition (also known a spaghetti code), the sooner the better it is for a project.
As a software architect, I’m also writing well-structured and intuitive code to be reused by others in their programs. For example, I wrote once an “engine” for rendering international text which was then used to build a Math teaching app.
I’m making a living from startups. Each time, it’s a matter of turning into reality the dream of some entrepreneur. One nice mobile app I programmed once offered gps navigation with the road to follow projected in 3d on top of the camera. So instead of looking at the map, you would mount your device on the windshield and look through it…
Where does text fit into all that?
Even-though a programmer spends most of his days writing text to talk to machines, I don’t think it makes her/him more sensible to text in general.
So I would say that text is usually not the main topic in my startup adventures, and that I’m dealing with text mostly while working on chronotext, between two startup projects…
When did you sense that there is something with text on the web?
I 2001, I was asked to prepare a course on interactivity so I made a few months long research on the topic. Among other things, I discovered the semantic-web, information architecture and epistemology. At some point, I envisioned an experiment where several people would be given a device for recording their act of writing while describing an artifact which is new to them, and whose appearance evolves. The results could then be replayed in sync or remixed… The concept of chronotext was born!
What made you work with text as an art-techy medium?
It happened naturally… The first sketches in the chronotext collection were technical bits destined to learn how to draw 3d text, which requires some mathematical rigor. Then came Genesis 11:1 (2003), my first metaphorical work, where one can read the biblical passage on the tower of Babel wrapped on a helix. Since then, my works are always on the art-technology continuum.
Setting Text Free Through Experiments
Many try to tame text, you (with your projects) try to unleash it. That is inevitable as together with the practical bearings comes also the need to create something for the sake of creating. Tell us some more about your projects.
My projects explore new ways of reading and writing at the digital age. They can be sketches or artworks, projected on a wall or touched on a mobile device. They reflect what can be produced by a designer who is also a programmer. Some examples:
- Sketchbook on the Book (2005): exploring the readability of text mapped onto landscape, putting into practice the space-filling property of spirals. This work is a preliminary study which led to the commission of Javascriptorium (described later.)
- Mapping, augmented (2007): mapping text over architecture (a biblical oracle on the siege of Jerusalem flowing over a Bauhaus building in Tokyo, or a song by Serge Gainsbourg flowing over the protuberant boxes on the facade of the musée du Quai Branly in Paris.)
- The war of the words (2008): flying through a textual landscape where two armies of words clash on the semantic battlefield. Each camp is composed of groups of elevated keywords. Each group is firing at one or more groups from the opposite camp. Each time a keyword is hit, its elevation decrease. Fire will cease only after one camp has been wiped off the face of the page…
- Lui les Hėbreux, moi Pharaon (2013): a take on Guillaume Apollinaire’s La chanson du mal-aimé, mixing the written and spoken forms of the poem, which contains references to the Song of the Sea celebrating Pharaoh’s defeat in the Sea of Reeds (a text written in the Bible with a different layout to the normal simple columns: the alternating words are supposed to represent the two walls of the split sea.) In this work, words and the space between them are represented as bricks, synchronized with their spoken and unspoken counterparts in the soundtrack.
- He liked thick word soup (2014): a mobile app for reading James Joyce’s Ulysses by disentangling a soup of sentences taken from different parts of the book. The goal was to create a very intricate, obsessive and sensual reading experience (the most interactive chronotext experiment so far…)
What is Javascriptorium?
Javascriptorium (2006) is a work commissioned by the Shrine of the Book, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Between 2007 and 2009, it was projected on wall at the end of a tour showcasing the most ancient fragments of the Bible as well as the first Bible in form of a book (the Aleppo codex), creating a perspective of 2000 years of scripture reading.
The work is exploring the evolving concept of “sacred place” through the history of the Jewish people while suggesting the metaphysical experience associated with desert wandering and reminiscent of the state-of-mind of the Qumran Community (who left a corrupted Jerusalem for a desert retreat…)
Javascriptorium contains several episodes (each with its own textual / visual metaphor) featuring a passage through the wilderness. It’s the only work in the chronotext collection which was commissioned by a museum and it has been a rewarding experience to collaborate with the Dead Sea Scrolls editor in chief.
The Organics of Textual Threads and Networked Words
In a networked environment what are textual threads made of?
I will answer as a simple programmer :) A textual thread (e.g. twitter, forum) is made of posts, which can be described as follows:
Class Post {
Identity poster;
Date publishTime;
RichText body;
List replies; // magic!
List likers;
List comments;
List tags;
Text title;
}
Note that some properties are not mandatory (e.g. a tweet have no title.) The interesting part in this structure is the ability for a post to include a (potentially infinite) list of response posts (each of them capable of the same, recursively.) A manifestation of what some call collective-intelligence?
What are the features that you like in unplugged text (offline, old-fashion, paper text) and the one you dislike in networked texts and vice versa?
– Advantages of unplugged text: it is not final, there is time for iterations. Disadvantages: the curse of perfectionism and the potential lack of influence and feedback.
– Disadvantages of networked text: irreversible, possibly not mature enough. Advantages: prompt reaction, potential influence and feedback.
Does interactivity help text or devoid reader from their imagination and interactivity – tacit, in their mind?
Both… Like with Ariadne’s thread (taking care of Theseus while controlling him.)
The same goes for hyperlinks: they can be a blessing when they enlighten us and a curse when they limit our freedom to discover.
Where do you think are the limits of text, if any?
Text is limited by our own subjectivity and lack of precision, therefore it is not possible to faithfully reproduce voice, music, Mona Lisa, dreams nor thoughts based on (human-produced) textual description.
What do you think is the sine qua non for a text to exist…in these formless times, where everything could be everything?
The first condition for a text to exist is to represent a collection of readable glyphs. Then, the glyphs must be rendered (carved into stone, written on paper, displayed on screen, etc.) or at least stored in human or computer memory (e.g. after all the books have been burnt or before a certain web-page have been accessed…)
What are you up to these days?
I have been busy remastering a bunch of older chronotext experiments which stopped working due to technology decay. Regarding new works, the truth is that inspiration and motivation are a bit lacking (I hope this dialogue won’t be considered as a post-mortem for chronotext.)
In parallel, I’m working for a very geeky startup, specializing in flying drones for photographic missions.
Quick Favourites
What’s your favourite text, piece of text :)
It exists only in my memory. I found it on the web more than a decade ago, but I have lost the link, and I’m unable to trace it back with Google. So here is an approximation:
A long time ago in the city of Aleppo lived Rabbi Elbaz, who became famous for his wisdom and erudition and for the fine rugs he was weaving for a living.
One day, while walking at the souk, he was abducted by a merchant who enslaved him to produce rugs all day long…
Rabbi Elbaz finally regained his freedom by weaving an encrypted message on the surface of some rug destined to be sold. Since then, he responds to the family name Abuhatzeira (father of the mat.)
I love this story for several reasons. First, Rabbi Elbaz was one of my ancestors. Another — funny — reason is that when I ask people in my family, they tell me that I’m wrong since it’s well known that the first Abuhatzeira was a holy man who received his name after flying on a carpet :) Finally, I find the idea of transmitting a salvatory message via weaving very inspiring and related to my own work.
Favourite intersection between text and programming. Between human language and programming language.
- Text and programming: code is text. A program can be made of hundreds of source files and managing an evolving body of code in a team environment can be very challenging. The state of the art in this domain is github.com, worshipped by millions.
- Human language and programming language: stackoverflow.com is the reference, where almost any possible programming question is being asked, answered, commented and re-answered.
Favourite font, why?
Franklin Gothic, because of the letter g.
Favourite Chronotext project, why :)
The Text Time Curvature, commissioned for the Processing exhibition in 2004. It’s my only implementation of an epistemological device. It allows to record an act of writing and features a tree structure for managing thought interruptions. It’s my favourite experiment because it have a lot of potential left to be explored and because it is close to the original concept which led to chronotext.
Who’s Gonna Interview the Interviewer?
Ariel: In a networked environment what are textual threads made of? I’m returning this question to you because I would love to hear a non-programmer’s answer :)
Teodora: Souls. Reaching out one to another.
Ariel: What is it to be a philologist? Can philology be applied to the world-wide-web (e.g. the same way it is applied to a body of text like the Bible?)
Teodora: Yes, it can, through hermeneutics. So why not use this approach to explore and uncover things in the giant corpus of text, what the web is. Of course, not without the help of algorithms.
To be a philologist is, for me, is to see through words, to let them sink through their roots. To care very much about naming and the volatility of meaning. These days, at least for me, to be a philologist, that is to navigate the world of language and meaning is inseparable from being very alert to what happens in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing (OK, you got me, I am trying to avoid saying AI :). Or to be more poetic, to listen to the rhythm of text and data clapping together.
Ariel: How does the future look like in Bulgaria for people of your generation?
Teodora: If you have asked me a week ago, I would not be able to say bright :) But after Webit (Stay tuned for my post about this amazing even) – a Digital Festival, I really feel there’s a lot of potential waiting to be out to work for the right causes.
Ariel: An original piece of text is destroyed after being memorized by someone. Can we say that the text now exists in that person’s mind? If so, what happens when memory starts failing?
Teodora: Myth is born. And culture takes care of the rest. Memory can be outside us. In signs and reminders. Like it was, the exacerbated case with the Guy from Memento.
Ariel: What could serve as a base for the next Chronotext experiment?
That’s an ambitious task to dive into. Need to think about that!… The first thing that comes to mind is exploring ambiguity. Then comes the idea of context-less texts. Texts that need to be read with a very little context around them, words, realia that need more than a dictionary, they need a holistic understanding about the culture and everyday life of the environment they were born into. Then, to read them, we will have to do what we do with Latin and Ancient Greek – to understand a text we need to immerse in the culture, to recreate the environment and the situations these texts were part of.
That said, I would split the experiment in two parts:
Imagining the Web as a papyrus: Found in the middle of nowehere, with language unknown to the founders, with unknown context. Having to “read” the Web from the scratch. What these Ancient people meant, what was that gigantic endless scrolling paper.
The Ambers of Ambiguity: Exploring the depth of words through the shallow (in terms of poetic use) “understanding” [i.e. computing meaning/computational] of algorithms. How algorithms “perceive” poetry. What literal and machine understanding can teach us about our poetic intuition and our indescribable (unrepresentable in code) ways of knowing. How a fixed term (an amber) is understood at all?
Epilogue
Quite a ride, Ariel. Thank you for your questions and for the insightful and inspiring answers-direction you drove this Dialogue towards. Now it’s time to pull over, before we embark on another journey, who know, we might create a Chronotext project together… Let me ask you something, instead of an epilogue:
Once we talked and you threw that vision of a 3d wrapped text head with semantic-web hyper-linked hairs :) If you were a text what would you be like?
I would be like a passage in a lipogrammatic novel (for example La disparition, written by Georges Perec, entirely without the letter e, following Oulipo constraints.)
Make sure to follow Ariel on Twitter and check his website chronotext. If you want more things text, you might also like: I, Text and The Brave New Text.
