Chapter 1.   Introduction: In Dark Territory

Chapter 2.   Computations of Totality

Exe.cut[up]able statements
Magic and religion
Pythagorean harmony as a cosmological code
Kabbalah
Ramon Llull and Lullism
Rhetoric and poetics
Combinatory poetry and the occult
Computation as a figure of thought

Chapter 3.   Computation as Fragmentation

Gulliver’s Travels
The Library of Babel
Romanticist combinatorics
Concrete poetry
Max Bense and “information aesthetics”
Situationism, Surrealism and psychogeography
Markov chains
Tristan Tzara and cut-ups
John Cage’s indeterminism
Italo Calvino and machine-generated literature
Software as industrialization of art
Authorship and subjectivity
Pataphysics and Oulipo
Abraham M. Moles’ computational aesthetics
Source code poetry
Jodi
1337 speech
Codework

Chapter 4.   Automatisms and Their Constraints

Artificial Intelligence
Athanasius Kircher’s box
John Searle’s Chinese Room
Georges Perec’s Maschine
Enzensberger’s and Schmatz’s / Czernin’s poetic machines
Software dystopia: Jodi
Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova
From dystopia to new subjectivity

Chapter 5.   What Is Software?

A cultural definition
Software as practice
Software versus hardware
Conclusion

   References

   Index