Hey Barbara!
sorry I guess my wording must have been a bit ambiguous. I wasn’t saying that the fork bomb was pun. I was saying that it’s elegance was kind of the opposite of punning (the word for pun in japanese is oyaji gagu - old guy gag - not very elegant!) but that they had commonality as I described: I think what you describe as ‘oscillation’ is a much better articulated (and thought through) version of what I was trying to get at. Actually isn’t there something very similar about the ‘bifurcations’ in as much as the fork bomb is only quantifiable at those points. Given that processes divide recursively any measure ’such as how much CPU is being used) is always going to be already out of date.
I love the duck. Reminds me of ‘how do you give a duck soul? -> you put him in the oven ‘till his Bill Withers’….
This thing is going to degenerate into a pun-off if we aren’t careful.
Tom
Begin forwarded message:
From: Barbara Lattanzi <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Fwd: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] on interpreters and compilers
Date: 23 March 2014 14:26:48 GMT
To: <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: Barbara Lattanzi <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Fork-bomb is a thing of beauty but it is not a pun. Here is a pun (at least it is in US english)...
A duck walks into a drugstore and says, "Give me a chapstick and put it on my bill."
It is a pun for two reasons:
1. It requires cross-referencing at least two unrelated lexicons of meaning.
2. It triggers in the brain something analogous to the computational "halting problem"...an uncomputability as to actionable meaning.
With forkbomb, the ultimate result is measurable quantifiably (its "extensive" property of running as many times as it can).
With the pun, the result is not quantifiable, but an "intensive" quality that can only exist at a bifurcation point of meaning. (Hamlet had a similar "intensive" problem).
A pun presents an intensive problem of meaning to solve. But the "solution" is an endless oscillation, until a choice is made between lexicons, based on an immanent context.
The Deleuze/DeLanda example of the material expressivity of the halting problem is the formation of a soap bubble...i.e., a thin soap film that, when presented with different air pressure on either side of its surface which has reached a critical intensity, must compute and "make a decision" as to whether/when to reach the equilibrium of a sphere.
Extrapolating, I speculate that when we are presented with a pun, we *feel* the disequilibrium of the non-human, i.e., we feel our cognitive processes as autonomous from our sense of self. These cognitive processes have their own ways of dealing with the halting problem...oscillating for the sheer pleasure of it, and as the late Hollis Frampton said, doing so "whether we pay them any mind or not."
Puns are every bit as computational as fork-bombs, but not the same thing.
Barbara
---------
Barbara Lattanzi
Associate Professor of Interactive Arts
School of Art and Design
NYSCC at Alfred University
Alfred, NY USA
vimeo.com/idiomorphics/videos<http://vimeo.com/idiomorphics/videos>
wildernesspuppets.net
On Mar 23, 2014, at 7:41 AM, "D. Neal McDonald" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
That is the first tattoo I've been tempted by in a while. Shades of
Obfuscated C! Unix is a pile of puns and grammar jokes like this. Laft-brain
puns. As it were.
Siri strikes me as something that could do scripting puns in a more
right-brain manner, like when that Scot asked for a sandwitch and she told him
she didn't know where to get pajamas. Programming languages are short on
verbs.
-Neal
I have a deep and long running affection for programming puns. I'm sure most
people will be aware of Jaromil's fork bomb
http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/forkbomb_art.html
The elegance of this one seems like the direct opposite of other kinds of
programming word play (such as the ones Rob mentions below). The commonality
though is in the way that they sort of duck in and out of being about
performative action (as in being computational) and being a formal game.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Rob Myers <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] on interpreters and compilers
Date: 22 March 2014 22:36:47 GMT
To:
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: Rob Myers <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
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