[SIGCIS-Members] Book Announcement: Moonbit (Apollo 11 AGC Code & Critique)

[James E. Dobson]

Dear SIGCIS,

Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, 
punctum books has published Moonbit, a book of experimental poetry 
created from  the Apollo 11 AGC code and a critical account of the 
computer and its software co-authored by James E. Dobson and Rena J. 
Mosteirin.

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/moonbit/

We gave a joint reading and talk about this project at SIGCIS 2018 in St 
Louis and HaPoP 2018 in Oxford.

The book is open access (we used Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0) and free 
from punctum books. There is also a paperback available for $20 via Amazon.

Punctum provides a short description of the book:

Moonbit is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical 
theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an 
extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of 
computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a 
singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the 
“AGC.” Moonbit re-marks and remixes the code that made space travel 
possible. Half of this book is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as 
the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its 
functional purpose.

When we think about the 1960s U.S. space program and obscure scientific 
computer code, we might not first think about the Watts riots, 
Shakespeare, Winnie the Pooh, T.S. Eliot, or scatological jokes. Yet 
these cultural references and influences along with many more are 
scattered throughout the body of the code that powered the compact 
digital computer that successfully guided astronauts to the Moon and 
back and in July of 1969. Moonbit unravels and rewrites the many 
embedded cultural references that were braided together within the 
language resources of mid-century computer code.

Moonbit also provides a gentle, non-expert introduction to the text of 
the AGC code, to digital poetics, and to critical code studies. 
Outlining a capacious interpretive practice, Moonbit takes up all manner 
of imaginative decodings and recodings of this code. It introduces some 
of the major existing approaches to the study of code and culture while 
provide multiple readings of the source code along with an explanation 
and theorization of the way in which the code works, as both a 
computational and a cultural text.

I hope you enjoy the book and thank you again to all in St. Louis for 
your invaluable comments and feedback.

Best,

Jed & Rena


-- 
James E. Dobson, Ph.D.
Dartmouth College
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jed