screenless worlding

chapters/01_entry_points.md

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ Researching languages, formats and approaches of code documentation to broaden p
     2. Welcoming writing
     3. Docs as gardening
     4. Getting startled
-    5. Code companion```
+    5. Code companion
 ```
 
 ### 1.1 "Natural" reader

chapters/02_backdoors.md

@@ -9,7 +9,6 @@ Politics of participation & representation
     from transfeminist servers to queer motto api to 360 degrees of proximity
     from alt-text poetry to p5js inclusivity guidelines to soupboat
 Aesthetic practices
-    uxn ecosystem: introspective programming
     the screenless office and chimeric worlding
     aesthetic programming and software studies
 
@@ -99,8 +98,17 @@ the readme of the API offer an understanding of the various technical process in
 
 errors, service availability, consent and refusal, tokenism, all the terms neutralized by the normativity of everyday tech are here reactivated as powerful narrative devices
 
+
 2
 
+
+SI16 API
+
+
+3
+
+
+
 ```note
 the concept of service could be link with 360 degree of proximity
 ```
@@ -141,8 +149,6 @@ e.zn
 
 ```
 
-
-
 #### from alt-text as poetry to the discussion about accessibility in p5js to the soupboat
 
 alt-text as poetry is a project by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan
@@ -187,7 +193,6 @@ create / claim new spaces for participation, validate participation
 
 ### Hello worlding
 
- the screenless office read through tiger dingsun's chimeric worlding
 
 ```placeholder
 tiger dingsun chimeric worlding is a text on graphic design used for worldbuilding
@@ -201,22 +206,61 @@ During the preparation phases, I started versioning the readings we were trying
 
 Here the (versioned) author
 
-```placeholder
+---
-the screenless office by brendan howell is a project to re imagine computing away from the visual interface of the screen
+
-screen seen as catalyst of capitalism
+The Screenless Office is an _artistic operative system_ to reimagine personal computing away from pixel-based displays, using radically alternative forms of everyday human interaction with media.
+
+Similarly to other operative systems, the Screenless Office can be used to read news, browse websites and interact with social media. What's different here is that the surface where all these exchanges happen is not a screen, but rather an articulated ecosystem of thermal and laser printers, barcode scanners and other interconnected physical devices that can be plugged in or printed at need.
+
+The first interaction with the Office prints a menu that lists the available commands, in the form of a list of functions with description and relative barcode. From here one can scan the barcode to read the news, for example, and receive a web-to-print feed with the latest stories. Each post in the feed is a small preview of an article scraped from several online sources, and can in turn be barcode-scanned to get a print of the complete version.
+
+In an interface culture dominated by few corporate players and cristallized on touchscreen glass, the project offers multivarious gestures for interaction, in contrapposition with the single act of scrolling. Instead of sitting in front of a screen with a singular, centered, and linear perspective, the user displaces the office all around through printers, scanner and printed materials. Code documentation plays a key role in the orchestration of all these different interactions.
+
+The system is written in Python, and its code documentation consists mainly of _docstrings_ and comments written directly in the source.
+
+A _docstring_ is a piece of text written at the very beginning of a function to document it. Unlike normal comments, that are usually stripped out from code at runtime, _docstrings_ are preserved, and can be consulted with interactive help systems or used as metadata. Many programming languages support this pattern, that is often used to produce automatic pieces of documentation by simply collecting and listing all the functions and relative descriptions.
+
+
+```python
+class Humor(Bureau):
+    """
+    This bureau entertains the modern worker and provides colorful
+    bons mots for managers who need to warm up an audience.
+    """
+
+    name = "Department of Humor"
+    prefix = "HA"
+    version = 0
+
+    def __init__(self):
+        Bureau.__init__(self)
+
+    @add_command("joke", "Fortune Cookie")
+    def print_fortune(self):
+        """
+        Prints a clever quip.
+        """
+        jux = str(subprocess.check_output("/usr/games/fortune"), encoding="UTF-8")
+        self.print_small(jux)
 ```
 
-weave the two together with the main concept of worldbuilding as a way to create alternative to capitalism
+![The Screenless Office menu printed during a workshop at XPUB](../img/2022-04-04-brendan_humor.jpg)
 
+In the project these are used to create a world around the code and its structure: in the initial menu, for example, they are used as scenography for the Screenless Office. Reading it we discover how the office is organized in different _bureau_, each dedicated to a specific task. The _Pubblications Office_ deals with daily news and weather forecast, the _Public Relations_ department manage exchanges with social platforms, the _Audio Service Dept._ provides for playback soundtrack, and so on, with the _Inhuman Resources bureau_ keeping track of them all.
 
 
-- the screenless office
+- versioning tiger dingusun and the chimeric worlding
-- open
+- (chimeric api, chimeric code documentation)
+- syntesis between conventional mythos and personal mythos
+- code documentation accessible to others, conveying meaning but also producing more vague and interpretable affect, with deeper unkknown meaning
+- paradox coexistence of clarity and poetic ambiguity and opennes of interpretation
 
 
-- - -
+- provincialize code documentation
+- multivarious contradictory ambigous poetic structures
+- open source worldbuilding
+- fork of the screenless office in the soupboat
 
-fork of the screenless office in the soupboat
 
 ####  aesthetic programming as a bridge between software studies and creative coding