IX
X
IV:17. As delivery media, computer systems also allow the real-time presentation of
aleatory and procedural work, which may be both complex and radically indeterminate to a degree
which is very difficult to realize in codexspace. Not that the presentation of such work is impossible in
more familiar media. Even as books The Classic of Change (Yi Jing), Raymond
Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Po¸mes, Mark Saporta’s Composition
no. 1, for example, allow their readers to become the producers of their texts, to such an extent
that these works properly should not be considered as fixed texts at all — neither the static record
of, for example, many throws of the dice, nor the application of, say, diastic rules (as with certain of
Mac Low’s printed works), nor a function of some set of specific readings by
particular readers — the work in these and other cases is the entire conception and the whole
process of its reading. Literary objects engineered through software (especially where the software is
immediately accessible to the “reader”) allow a more thorough realization of works with
similar varieties of textuality (see ¶28 below),
even works which exist only as the
literary performance of the object itself.
IX
X