To close out the week, we invite everyone to submit their own queer code poem! Drawing inspiration from our [PROMPT] and [PROCESS] discussions, how might your own creation address queer code, embodied code, nonnormative identities and desires, and radical technologies?

Here's a short BASIC code poem that I had ChatGPT generate for me; even after a few permutations, the result isn't particularly great, but still very interesting to look at:

10 REM The Man and His Lost Love
20 LET vows$ = "whispered"
30 LET light$ = "tender"
40 LET loss = TRUE
50 LET wander = TRUE
60 LET echo = TRUE
70 LET darkestNight = TRUE
80 LET husband$ = "loving"
90 IF loss THEN PRINT "In shadows cast by veils of " + light$ + " love's embrace,"
100 IF wander THEN PRINT "A man once held in " + vows$ + " arms of gentle grace,"
110 IF echo THEN PRINT "As echoes of his love in silence calls,"
120 IF darkestNight THEN PRINT "Their love, a beacon in the darkest night,"
130 PRINT "His husband's love guides him, a beacon through."

I share for your consideration these slides from a lightning lecture I gave last October, on how data science would do better if it took lessons from drag. I was inspired by a Wednesday evening visit to Hamburger Mary's in West Hollywood. My drag emoji doodle was inspired by a particularly epic ghost look of @themistyviolet 's that night.

I'm an assistant professor of computer science. I had been to drag shows before, but when I left that night I experienced a newfound sense of, I want to work here. Realizing I have no transferable skills to the drag scene, I wondered what exactly was missing from my work life that was so joyfully salient there. I decided it was the honesty.

Sources:
1. https://www.yelp.com/biz/hamburger-marys-west-hollywood-west-hollywood
2. The History of Drag (Part One) | Town Hall: A Black Queer Podcast
3. The History of Drag (Part Two) | Town Hall: A Black Queer Podcast
4. The Power of Drag | Cheddar Gorgeous | TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

EDMOND CHANG: Let’s start with a short exercise: as you are reading this (or perhaps even listening to it), for a minute, think about what you are doing, feel what you are doing and thinking, and take in your circumstances and surroundings as you think, feel, and do. Are you seated, standing, laying down? Where are your hands? On a keyboard, mouse, mousepad, perhaps cradling your phone? Is the computer warm on your lap or the screen glowing brightly against your skin? What is going on around you, what catches your senses, is there movement, sound, smells? Are you distracted, multitasking, waiting, rushing, irritated, amused, engrossed, excited?

I wanted to open the forum (and the week) with this little meditation as a way to think about our relationship to the digital, to code, to our bodies, and to others’ bodies. How might code be queer(ed) is one of our questions this week, and how might code be embodied is another?

Jason Boyd and Bo Ruberg in “Queer Digital Humanities” remind us that digital technology is “not only tangible but sensual, luxuriant, and pleasurable. Queerness is invested in identity, representation, and history but also in erotics” (70). They ask us to develop modalities and practices to understand how “information might be conveyed and interpreted through a sense of touch and closeness” (71).

JARAH MOESCH: As we sit with our bodies, our embodiments, our phenomenologies, we can orient ourselves (a la Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenologies) within spacetime to think about how realities are formed and created both for and by us. Cultures and matter are entangled- neither exists without the other.

For example, when I woke up this morning, I found my way into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. On the way, I stopped for a moment to reach over and hit the ‘power’ button on my laptop, letting the computer ‘boot up’ while I stirred a bit of sugar into my mug, and then settled-in in front of my screen, ready to begin my day researching, writing, drawing, and corresponding. With these few actions I set into motion entire histories and re-inscribed racism, colonization, and genderism by the mere touch of a button.

No system is neutral. The hardware, the code, and user interactions are framed by how humans understand themselves and each other. And not just any humans, but specific humans, who are, amongst other things, aged, gendered, classed, raced, sexualized, nationalized, disabled, and educated in particular ways.
The materiality then, is in the interactions- of executing code (execute!? I mutter to myself as I type this) that is already inscribed with these (violent) histories.

How do these culturally inscribed categorizations get replicated, translated, mutated, opposed, restructured, dissolved within code? What happens to these categories as they shape the 'web' or software? How do top-down hierarchical frameworks reify and normalize social constructions and embodiment? What does it mean to be queer within these structures? What does it mean to be a queer who codes?

EDMOND: Yes, what does it mean to “queer code?” Or perhaps “code queerly?” I guess I would start with Kara Keeling’s delightfully provocative “Queer OS,” which argues:

Queer OS names a way of thinking and acting with, about, through, among, and at times even in spite of new media technologies and other phenomena of mediation. It insists upon forging and facilitating uncommon, irrational, imaginative, and/or unpredictable relationships between and among what currently are perceptible as living beings and the environment in the interest of creating value(s) that facilitate just relations. (154)

Keeling goes on to think through the ways that “Queer OS ideally functions to transform material relations” (154) from race, gender, and sexuality to code, platform, tool, and practice. How might we extend these initial questions, connections, and possibilities to other domains, other transformations?

JARAH: Following Keeling, the authors of QueerOS: A User’s Manual created an intervention that “seeks to address what we perceive as a lack of queer, trans, and racial analysis in the digital humanities, as well as the challenges of imbricating queer/trans/racialized lives and building digital/technical architectures that do not replicate existing systems of oppression.” While this is a user’s guide, and not executable code, it also claims “iterative failure, with no permanent solutions.”

This failure is ultimately queer.

EDMOND: Of course, this brings to mind J. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure that asks and argues,

What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods…And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. (3)

For me, my favorite definition of queer comes from Eve Kosofsky Segwick’s “Queer and Now.” They argue that queer is

the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures… (7)

Both definitions invoke contingency, messiness, and polyvocality resisting clear, coherent, perfectly legible order and communication, which Donna Haraway names “the informatics of domination.”

JARAH: Queer has multiple meanings - it can be queer bodies/people, it can be odd, a theory, a practice. One useful way to think about queer is that queer tries to subvert, to go against, and to be outside of normative ways of life. This can look like outright refusal, and it can be a quiet inflection (or something else entirely). As I mentioned before, queer can be failure, though I’d argue that J. Halberstam’s failure is only the beginning.

As I’ve written about before, in The Queer Art of Failure, J. Halberstam frames the argument of the queer politics of failure through the “desire of living life otherwise,” of “getting outside the ‘conventional understandings of success,” “…into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing” (Halberstam, 2011, 3). This situates the queer politics of failure as being against that of U.S. white heteronormative success, placing failure in opposition to, yet still within the framework of success. Additionally, Halberstam claims: “if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run, and offers different rewards” (Halberstam, 2011, 3).

How is failure easier than success? How do we know when we have failed successfully and when we haven’t?

If we have achieved success with our failing, Halberstam offers us many rewards:

[F]ailure “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” …“[F]ailure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy from childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers” (Halberstam, 2011, 3).

What does it mean to “escape punishing norms”? If we choose to fail at heternonormativity (and homonormativity), do we escape from the pressures themselves, or just the norms? Once applied, do we ever gain relief from the pressure? Do the norms just simply ‘give up’ on trying to make us change? Is “disappointment, disillusionment and despair” along with the ability to somehow ‘use’ these to ‘poke holes’ in contemporary life as our rewards enough? While investigating future possibilities, Halberstam doesn’t take it far enough, as failing is not failure. You cannot fail purposefully if what you need is a job, or health insurance, or a home.

Conversely, if you don’t need or want those things, then ‘failure’ is no longer failure, but becomes something else entirely. Unfortunately, though The Queer Art of Failure discusses alternative ways of being, or not being, as a way to refuse, circumvent, avoid, rebel, push back against, and move outside of normative modes of being (frameworks), it does not take us outside normative frameworks simply by situating failure as possibility. Failures always lie within and against successes. If you live within a particular normative society, in this case the white heterosexist, patriarchal U.S. society, you cannot be outside of it.

As we turn to code (since we are in a critical code forum), is code written by queer people automatically queer? Is it always inflected with queerness just by being written by queer bodies? Here I mean in the sense of ‘born digital’- objects, artwork, literature that were created with digital output as only form, is there a born queer code? If not, then what is queer code? What can it do, beyond failure? If queer code can’t escape punishing norms, (or pressures, or norms), how might we work within to subvert and rewrite code bases? Is it a bot? a worm? a virus? Here the though of virus brings up interesting correlations with bug chasers. So many interesting theoretical ties- so what could the actual, functional code look like?

EDMOND: I am not sure if anything is “born” anything, but I know what you mean. One of the ways I have tried to think about queer(ing) code is through trying to grapple with writing it. My essay “Why are the Digital Humanities So Straight?,” which riffs on Tara McPherson’s essay “What are the Digital Humanities So White?,” is an academic essay-as-BASIC-program-as-text-adventure-game. I picked BASIC because it was more readable on the page (and because it is the only language I know well enough to pull off an executable program). I wanted to demonstrate how algorithm and code are usually hidden from readers, users, and players, and that code itself is often normative, hierarchical, and embedded with racist, sexist, phobic constructions, mechanics, and meanings. In the essay-as-code-as-game, the reader/player can navigate through three sections on Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, and Purna Jackson (who is a video game character).

In the Turing mini-game, you are sitting in a small room before a teletype machine, recalling of course Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” essay and the oft cited “Turing Test.” The reader/player must navigate how to get out of the room or move on to the next section by exploring what they can or cannot do. Those constraints, those limitations, even as reader/players can have fun with the experience, are part of the text’s argument about the technonormativity of code–you cannot do anything that isn’t already in the accepted and acceptable actions. Below is the code for the very limited command parser for Turing’s mini-game:

5100 REM Alan's Only Choices
5102 REM The correct commands are predetermined but give the illusion of choice.
5103 REM Unable to see the code, the player's commands are arbitrary and contained.
5105 IF Action$="look" THEN GOTO 360
5110 IF Action$="sit down" THEN GOTO 5160
5111 IF Action$="sit chair" THEN GOTO 5160
5112 IF Action$="sit" THEN GOTO 5160
5114 IF Action$="stand up" THEN GOTO 5180
5115 IF Action$="stand" THEN GOTO 5180
5116 IF Action$="get up" THEN GOTO 5180
5118 IF Action$="read" THEN GOTO 5200
5120 IF Action$="read text" THEN GOTO 5260
5121 IF Action$="read message" THEN GOTO 5260
5122 IF Action$="read teletype" THEN GOTO 5260
5124 IF Action$="read paper" THEN GOTO 5260
5126 IF Action$="look teletype" THEN GOTO 5260
5128 IF Action$="look paper" THEN GOTO 5260
5130 IF Action$="open door" THEN GOTO 5210
5132 IF Action$="look console" THEN GOTO 5260
5134 IF Action$="type" THEN GOTO 5220
5136 IF Action$="use teletype" THEN GOTO 5220
5138 IF Action$="remove name tag" THEN GOTO 5230
5140 IF Action$="remove tag" THEN GOTO 5230
5142 IF Action$="hit switch" THEN GOTO 5275
5144 IF Action$="stop being gay" THEN GOTO 5300
5145 IF Action$="come out" THEN GOTO 5300
5146 PRINT "You are constrained by the limits of the room and its design.  Try again."
5148 PRINT "You cannot "; Action$; " here."
5150 GOTO 368

The main idea here is that unless you can see the code there are missed opportunities: first, to talk about the ways that the code deeply constrains the player, and second, the missed queer opportunities like the commands “stop being gay” or “come out.” Now, whether this code is queer(er) because I as a queer person of color wrote it is something to think on.

JARAH: Here, I think it is also worthwhile to bring up Zach Blas’ transCoder, a Queer Programming Anti-Language, a coding language that does not work / execute the way it ‘should’ for it do ‘work’ within our current world of code. (Mark Marino has written about this anti-language in relationship to critical code studies). Because it is an anti-language, and does not work, it very much exists outside the normative values of our coded worlds. This queer code has its place as subversion, outside of normativities.

Both this, and the QueerOS mentioned earlier are examples that point towards subversion, towards refusal. And these have a place within queer code, and create a space outside of normative code. Being outside is good. However, when we go to use our everyday normative systems, the code is heternormative still, and we are back inside those normativities, straining against them as we are constrained by them.

I posit that since we live in this heteronormative (& homonormative) world, there is a need to break these systems open, to write anew, to queer the code.

I imagine that queer code, just like queer bodies, is functional within its space(s). As queer body is always in spacetime, so too the code: it is written and executed in functional spaces. Sometimes queerness (and queer code) needs to be hidden, sometimes it is outright, subversive, deviant.

• What would it look like to write this kind of functional queer code? Is that even desirable?
• How might creative, artistic, even everyday interventions allow for queer(ing) code?
• How might we create code that changes the very structures of normativity?
• And what does that mean for queerness if it changes normativity?

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology, Duke University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jk6w

Barnett Fiona, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and
Margaret Rhee, “QueerOS: A User’s Manual,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/e246e073-9e27-4bb2-88b2-af1676cb4a94.

Blas, Zach. “Queer Technologies,” https://zachblas.info/works/queer-technologies/

Boyd, Jason and Bo Ruberg. “Queer Digital Humanities,” The Bloomsbury Handbook to the
Digital Humanities, edited by James O’Sullivan, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 63-73.

Chang, Edmond Y. “Why are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” Alternative
Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, Punctum Press, 2021, pp. 203-241.

Halberstam, Judith. “Introduction: Low Theory,” The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University
Press, 2011, pp. 1-26.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge, 1991, pp.
149-181.

Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 152-157.

Marino, Mark C. “Disrupting Heteronormative Codes: When Cylons in Slash Goggles Ogle
AnnaKournikova,” UC Irvine: Digital Arts and Culture 2009, retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09q9m0kn.

Moesch, Jarah. Designing the Sick Body: Structuring Illness in the Techno Material Age. Diss.
University of Maryland, College Park, 2016.

The following text reproduces the poem as it appears in _Gaze Back (Ethos Books, Singapore, 2018) with two changes:_

1. This forum automatically adds line numbering to the code -- this numbering does not appear in the book.
2. A typo ] in the book on line 8 of the code is eliminated here.

C:\Users\marylyn.tan\UnDocuments\Queer Bodies

   LBTcircuit.py
   queerfemalebody.py
   ignore.py
   freshmeet.txt

>>>open ("LBTcircuit.py")

potential_queer_lovers = ['Doc Martens Girl', 'Cute Bartender', 'Bleached Pompadour Dancing Alone', 'Unsure if Hipster or Lesbian', 'National Hockey Player', 'Gender Panic TA']

potential queer_lovers.append('freshmeet.txt')

>>>open ("queerfemalebody.py")

if w in potential_queer_lovers:
    run rules_of_lesbian_attraction_SG

def rules of lesbian attraction_SG:
    for item in (gender presentation):
        if hair length < 10cm:
     ]
            "MASC" = +1
        if hair length > 10cm:
            "MASC" = -1
        type (footwear):
            if ("boots", "brogues", "oxfords") = True:
                "MASC" = +1
            if ("heels", "pumps", "wedges") = True:
                "MASC" = -1
            if ("flip flops") = True:
                "ATTRACTIVE" = -1
            else = True:
                "UNCLASSIFIED" = +1

        type (clothing):
            if ("binder", "too_tight_sports bra", "button down"):
                "MASC" +1
            if ("cargo shorts"):
                "ATTRACTIVE" = -1

    type (language):
            if "anglophone" = True:
                "EDUCATED".append()
            if "sinophone_local" = True:
                "HELICOPTER".append()
            if "sinophone_china" = True
                "PRC".append()
            else:
                open("ignore.py")

        type (colour):
            if "pale":
                "ATTRACTIVE" = +1
            else:
                "ATTRACTIVE" = -1

        type (body):
        calculate("freesize")
        if "freesize" = True:
            "NORMAL WEIGHT" = +1
        else:
            "FAN_TONG" = +1
            append.FOOD_AS_SIN()


        type (sexual orientation):
            if "instances_contact_penis" < 1:
            "GOLD STAR" +1
            else:
                if "bisexual":
                    "ATTRACTIVE" = -1
                    "FICKLE-MINDED" = +1
                    "LIKELY TO-CHEAT" = +1
                    "WILL LEAVE FOR MAN" = +1
                if "trans_woman":
                    if pre-op:
                        "ANYTHING BUT PENIS" = -1
                        potential_queer_lovers.remove()
                if "trans_man":
                    "ANYTHING BUT PENIS" = +1
                else:
                    lesbians_who_have_sex_with_men.append()
        type (race):
        if ("chinese"):
        "ATTRACTIVE +1" = + 2
          elif ("malay", "indian", "other"):
                    open ("educational level check.py", "economic_prospect_check.py")

attraction_score = len("MASC" + "ATTRACTIVE" + "NORMAL WEIGHT" + "EDUCATED") / len(total)

if attraction_score > 0.5:
            open("allow_drinks_bought.py")
else:
    potential_queer_lovers.remove()
    for (random excuse) in ("excuses").randomize():
        print (random_excuse)

The essay and full playthrough video is part of the Electronic Literature Organization's ELC4: https://collection.eliterature.org/4/why-are-the-digital-humanities-so-straight

As I noted in the [PROMPT] post, the provocation of the essay is pretty simple: why is code normative, why are algorithms constraining, and is code always "straight"? Or as one section of the essay argues (I am using the 80-character line version of the program; the printed book version is only 42 or so characters, which caused a major headache during copyediting):

976 PRINT  "     Computers are encoders of culture, culture is the encoder of computers.   "
978 PRINT  "The digital is infected with technonormativity, technonormativity is embedded  "
980 PRINT  "in the digital.  As explored and experienced above, the digital humanities has "
982 PRINT  "imported, copied, saved, and replayed the gendered and sexual codes and con-   "
984 PRINT  "straints of computer history, practices, and technologies.                     "

For this [CODE CRITIQUE] I suppose I want to look at the ludic parts of the essay, the gamic innards of the code to think about the affordances and limitations of our understandings of computers, code, and games. In my other work on queer game studies, I really do wonder at whether or not these very binary, very structured, very contained technologies can be queer(er) or be made queer(er). That said, I do think there are ways to have fun with the limitations of code and computers, to play with the structures and to reconfigure our understandings and engagements with boxes, switches, edges, bits, and bytes. In a very, very limited way, I think my code-as-essay-as-text game tries to unsettle expectations for a scholarly piece, to throw a little camp into the digital humanities, and to goof with a programming language I haven't (most of us haven't) seen since the 1980s.

Once you are past the essay proper, the march of all of the PRINT statements, you get to the guts of the text game, which opens with the following:

4000 REM Set Starting Variables
4002 REM The player must assume the computer and the playing field are leveled.
4004 RANDOMIZE(999)
4005 LET Sit$="0"
4010 LET Alan=0
4015 LET Ada=0
4020 LET Purna=0
4025 LET JustRead=0
4030 LET Teletype=0
4035 LET Message=0

Variables are set to zero. PC BASIC has a Randomize command which invokes the RND function to generate "a sequence of numbers that appears randomly distributed, so they can be used to simulate things like shuffling a deck of cards or producing different behaviours every time a program runs" (Random Number Generation). Already, randomness is not really randomness--just the illusion of randomness.

The biggest surprises are the "easter eggs" in the code that the player would really have no way of ascertaining save for sheer blind luck or hacking. These surprises are meant to reveal the arbitrary yet consequential nature of the program; in a game, nothing is possible that isn't already there. If the game does not "imagine" it or have code for it, then it cannot exist within the game. Granted, there are glitches, exploits, unintentional things that happen with games and in games, and players can bring all sorts of paratexts and modalities when playing or addressing the game.

Here's the code for Alan's parser, what commands actually work when you are trying to puzzle through this little section of story:

5100 REM Alan's Only Choices 
5102 REM The correct commands are predetermined but give the illusion of choice.
5103 REM Unable to see the code, the player's commands are arbitrary and contained.
5105 IF Action$="look" THEN GOTO 360
5110 IF Action$="sit down" THEN GOTO 5160 
5111 IF Action$="sit chair" THEN GOTO 5160 
5112 IF Action$="sit" THEN GOTO 5160
5114 IF Action$="stand up" THEN GOTO 5180
5115 IF Action$="stand" THEN GOTO 5180
5116 IF Action$="get up" THEN GOTO 5180
5118 IF Action$="read" THEN GOTO 5200
5120 IF Action$="read text" THEN GOTO 5260 
5121 IF Action$="read message" THEN GOTO 5260 
5122 IF Action$="read teletype" THEN GOTO 5260 
5124 IF Action$="read paper" THEN GOTO 5260 
5126 IF Action$="look teletype" THEN GOTO 5260
5128 IF Action$="look paper" THEN GOTO 5260
5130 IF Action$="open door" THEN GOTO 5210
5132 IF Action$="look console" THEN GOTO 5260
5134 IF Action$="type" THEN GOTO 5220
5136 IF Action$="use teletype" THEN GOTO 5220
5138 IF Action$="remove name tag" THEN GOTO 5230
5140 IF Action$="remove tag" THEN GOTO 5230
5142 IF Action$="hit switch" THEN GOTO 5275
5144 IF Action$="stop being gay" THEN GOTO 5300
5145 IF Action$="come out" THEN GOTO 5300
5146 PRINT "You are constrained by the limits of the room and its design.  Try again."
5148 PRINT "You cannot "; Action$; " here."
5150 GOTO 368

Here's Ada's choices (or lack thereof):

5600 REM Ada's Only Choices
5602 REM The player's commands are constrained by narrative, expectation, and code.
5603 REM Narratives, expectations, and code often produce gendered choices and commands.
5605 IF Action$="look" THEN GOTO 552
5610 IF Action$="sit down" THEN GOTO 5660 
5611 IF Action$="sit bench" THEN GOTO 5660 
5612 IF Action$="sit" THEN GOTO 5660
5613 IF Action$="sit loom" THEN GOTO 5660
5614 IF Action$="stand up" THEN GOTO 5680
5615 IF Action$="stand" THEN GOTO 5680
5616 IF Action$="get up" THEN GOTO 5680
5618 IF Action$="read" THEN GOTO 5700
5620 IF Action$="read message" THEN GOTO 5870
5621 IF Action$="read weave" THEN GOTO 5870
5622 IF Action$="read cloth" THEN GOTO 5870
5624 IF Action$="open door" THEN GOTO 5710
5626 IF Action$="look handkerchief" THEN GOTO 5730
5628 IF Action$="take handkerchief" THEN GOTO 5760
5628 IF Action$="drop handkerchief" THEN GOTO 5780
5630 IF Action$="look loom" THEN GOTO 5745
5631 IF Action$="look weave" THEN GOTO 5745
5632 IF Action$="look cloth" THEN GOTO 5745
5633 IF Action$="open windows" THEN GOTO 5795
5634 IF Action$="use loom" THEN GOTO 5820
5635 IF Action$="finish weave" THEN GOTO 5820
5636 IF Action$="weave cloth" THEN GOTO 5820
5637 IF Action$="weave" THEN GOTO 5820
5638 IF Action$="work" THEN GOTO 5820
5639 IF Action$="become famous" THEN GOTO 5704
5640 IF Action$="help babbage" THEN GOTO 5704
5645 PRINT "A voice beyond the door admonishes, 'You cannot "; Action$; " now.'  Finish your work."
5650 GOTO 566

And here's Purna Jackson's possibilities:

5900 REM Purna's Only Choices
5901 REM The illusion of choice and control is the interactive fallacy.
5602 REM It presumes that code is genderblind, colorblind, and queerblind.
5904 IF Action$="look" THEN GOTO 752
5906 IF Action$="look floor" THEN GOTO 5977
5908 IF Action$="look button" THEN GOTO 5980
5910 IF Action$="look buttons" THEN GOTO 5980
5912 IF Action$="look panel" THEN GOTO 5980
5914 IF Action$="sit" THEN GOTO 5975
5916 IF Action$="sit down" THEN GOTO 5975
5918 IF Action$="press O" THEN GOTO 5990
5920 IF Action$="O" THEN GOTO 5990
5922 IF Action$="o" THEN GOTO 5990
5924 IF Action$="press C" THEN GOTO 5992
5926 IF Action$="C" THEN GOTO 5992
5928 IF Action$="c" THEN GOTO 5992
5930 IF Action$="press A" THEN GOTO 6000
5932 IF Action$="A" THEN GOTO 6000
5934 IF Action$="a" THEN GOTO 6000
5936 IF Action$="call" THEN GOTO 6000
5938 IF Action$="open doors" THEN GOTO 5990
5940 IF Action$="1" THEN GOTO 6010
5941 IF Action$="press 1" THEN GOTO 6010
5942 IF Action$="2" THEN GOTO 6010
5943 IF Action$="press 2" THEN GOTO 6010
5944 IF Action$="3" THEN GOTO 6010
5945 IF Action$="press 3" THEN GOTO 6010
5948 IF Action$="4" THEN GOTO 6010
5949 IF Action$="press 4" THEN GOTO 6010
5950 IF Action$="5" THEN GOTO 6010
5051 IF Action$="press 5" THEN GOTO 6010
5952 IF Action$="6" THEN GOTO 6010
5953 IF Action$="press 6" THEN GOTO 6010
5954 IF Action$="7" THEN GOTO 6010
5055 IF Action$="press 7" THEN GOTO 6010
5956 IF Action$="8" THEN GOTO 6010
5957 IF Action$="press 8" THEN GOTO 6010
5958 IF Action$="9" THEN GOTO 6010
5959 IF Action$="press 9" THEN GOTO 6010
5960 IF Action$="10" THEN GOTO 6010
5961 IF Action$="press 10" THEN GOTO 6010
5962 IF Action$="11" THEN GOTO 6010
5963 IF Action$="press 11" THEN GOTO 6010
5964 IF Action$="12" THEN GOTO 6010
5967 IF Action$="press 12" THEN GOTO 6010
5966 IF Action$="13" THEN GOTO 6010
5967 IF Action$="press 13" THEN GOTO 6010
5968 IF Action$="FeministWhorePurna" THEN GOTO 6200
5969 IF Action$="Feminist Whore Purna" THEN GOTO 6200
5970 PRINT "You try valiantly to "; Action$; " but to no avail."
5972 GOTO 766

Again, if you want to access the whole program-essay-text, you can download the .txt file from ELC4: https://collection.eliterature.org/4/why-are-the-digital-humanities-so-straight

Thoughts? Questions? Comments?

• Title: Love Letter Algorithm
• Author/s: Christopher Strachey [1916-1975]
• Language/s: Unkown
• Year/s of development: 1952/1953
• Software/hardware requirements: Ferranti Mark I Computer

Dears <1>,

Welcome to our code exploration thread focusing on the Strachey Love Letter Algorithm. The idea for this thread was whispered to me by @valerieschafer and @markcmarino on @edmondchang 's amazing thread.

Please feel free to join the discussion and share your thoughts, as I only became aware of this historical code a few hours ago. Therefore, I will do my best to present to you the code and some research questions that I have, but expect this part to be a work in progress that I really encourage you to jump into. Please correct me if any information is wrong !

For those unfamiliar, the Strachey Love Letter Algorithm, devised by Christopher Strachey [1916-1975] in 1952, aimed to generate personalized love letters using a set of rules and variables.

I’ll start with a little bit of context – you can teach code to a historian but not get the historian out of the coder – before introducing a reconstruction of the original code. Then, I'll review some modern implementations of the algorithm and start the discussion with some questions that I have.

A love letter from the University of Manchester

Christopher Strachey's Love Letter Generator, possibly one of the first work of electronic literature, generated love letters using random operations on the Ferranti Mark I Computer in 1952 (Sample 2013). This led to the appearance of a short love letter on the Notice Board of the University of Manchester's Computer Department in 1953 (Link, s.d.). The letter used random word selection to create poetic, yet nonsensical, expressions of affection:

DARLING SWEETHEART
YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS >FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING.
YOURS BEAUTIFULLY
M. U. C.

(Link, s.d.)

Strachey was a pioneering computer scientist and one of the early visionaries in the field of artificial intelligence (Gaboury, 2013). His algorithm aimed to generate personalized love letters using rudimentary computational techniques (Link, n.d.), showcasing early experiments in computational creativity and natural language processing.

Illustration 1 – By John Michael Boling

His love-letter generator, although humorous and somewhat parodic, served as a critique of normative expressions of love, offering a queer perspective on the intersection of technology and emotion (Gaboury 2013). Through Strachey's work, we glimpse the beginnings of computational art and its potential for exploring identity and expression.

Recomposition of the code

The original source code of the algorithm was lost, but I'll propose a reconstruction here based on the work of David Link, translated by Gloria Custance (n.d.).

The algorithm itself was described in a letter written by Christopher Strachey to his friend and colleague, Robin Popplestone, in 1952 (Ibid).

Dear <1>,
You must be <2> again.
I will always be <3> to you.
Yours <4>,
M.U.C.

In this code, placeholders such as <1>, <2>, <3>, and <4> are replaced with specific terms depending on the desired output. The algorithm allows for the generation of personalized love letters by substituting appropriate terms based on the context.

The template seems to follow a structured format for composing love letters, with placeholders indicating where personalized information should be inserted. It's worth noting that Christopher Strachey, the creator of this love-letter generator, utilized Roget's Thesaurus (Sample 2013) – which can be found here.

Modern implementation

PHP implementation

https://github.com/gingerbeardman/loveletter

Thesaurus used by GingerBeardMan :

salutations1   | salutations2 | adjectives     | nouns          | adverbs       | verbs
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beloved        | Chickpea     | affectionate   | adoration      | affectionately| adores
Darling        | Dear         | amorous        | affection      | ardently      | attracts
Dear           | Duck         | anxious        | ambition       | anxiously     | clings to
Dearest        | Jewel        | avid           | appetite       | beautifully   | holds dear
Fanciful       | Love         | beautiful      | ardour         | burningly     | hopes for
Honey          | Moppet       | breathless     | being          | covetously    | hungers for
               | Sweetheart   | burning        | burning        | curiously     | likes
               |              | covetous       | charm          | eagerly       | longs for
               |              | craving        | craving        | fervently     | loves
               |              | curious        | desire         | fondly        | lusts after
               |              | eager          | devotion       | impatiently   | pants for
               |              | fervent        | eagerness      | keenly        | pines for
               |              | fondest        | enchantment    | lovingly      | sighs for
               |              | loveable       | enthusiasm     | passionately  | tempts
               |              | lovesick       | fancy          | seductively   | thirsts for
               |              | loving         | fellow feeling | tenderly      | treasures
               |              | passionate     | fervour        | wistfully     | yearns for
               |              | precious       | fondness       |               | woos
               |              | seductive      | heart          |               | 
               |              | sweet          | hunger         |               | 
               |              | sympathetic    | infatuation    |               | 
               |              | tender         | little liking  |               | 
               |              | unsatisfied    | longing        |               | 
               |              | winning        | love           |               | 
               |              | wistful        | lust           |               | 
               |              |                | passion        |               | 
               |              |                | rapture        |               | 
               |              |                | sympathy       |               | 
               |              |                | thirst         |               | 
               |              |                | wish           |               | 
               |              |                | yearning       |               |

Online version

2014 re-implementation by Nick Montfort

Pioneer in NPL and links to ELIZA

The Strachey Love Letter Algorithm, despite its simplicity, marked an important milestone in the history of computing (Sample 2013). It demonstrated the potential of code to mimic human emotion and creativity (Gaboury 2013).

In the Queer History of Computing, Gaboury link the Love Letter Algorithm to the ELIZA project (2013) :

In 1952 Strachey developed a love-letter generator that ran on the Manchester Mark using a random number generating algorithm, predating the ELIZA natural language processing program by twelve years. The project is considered by many to be the first example of algorithmic or computational art, though such claims are always highly contested.

Research Questions

Please take into account that this is a work in progress.
- How does the Strachey Love Letter Algorithm challenge or reinforce normative expressions of love and affection?
- What does it imply that the love letters are signed by M.U.C. as an institution in this context of having fun around heteronormative expressions of love?
- How does the randomness of the love letters created disrupt and challenge the normative expectations of how love should be expressed linguistically?
- What can this code tell us about the notion of coherence or meaning in the communication of love as it challenges the issue of authenticity and sincerity?
- Can we link it to existing chatbots in dating apps? Can a computer program generate love?

Bibliography

eddeaddad. 2010. « 2 Strachey Love Letters ». Gnoetry Daily (blog). 13 juillet 2010. https://gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/2-strachey-love-letters/.

Gaboury, Jacob. 2022. « Queer Affects at the Origins of Computation ». JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61 (4): 169‑74.

Gaboury, Jacob. 2013. « A Queer History of Computing: Part Three ». Rhizome. 9 avril 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/09/queer-history-computing-part-three/.

Link, David. s.d., translated from German by Gloria Custance. "There Must Be an Angel: On the Beginnings of the Arithmetics of Rays"

Link, David. 2012. « Programming ENTER: Christopher Strachey’s Draughts Program ». Resurrection 60, mars, 23‑31.

« David Link Hearings Digitale Kunst 2007 - YouTube ». 2010. Consulté le 7 février 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=sfdPqYZZYh4&embeds_referring_euri=https://gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo.

Sample, Mark. 2013. « An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing ». Billet. de.hypotheses (blog). 2013. https://de.hypotheses.org/72951.

Strachey, Christopher. 1954. « The “Thinking” Machine ». Encounter, octobre 1954. https://www.unz.com/print/Encounter-1954oct-00025/

Illustration :

Illustration I : Boling, John Michael. 2009. « Loveletters (1952) - Christopher Strachey ». Rhizome. 7 janvier 2009. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/jan/07/loveletters-1952-christopher-strachey/.