[D66] Moonbit

[A. OUT]

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/moonbit/
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oavhzd0feye6i36/Dobson_Mosteirin_Moonbit_EBook.pdf

Moonbit goes deep into the heart of textual mystery to illuminate what
was once lost, forgotten, obscure. Through their linguistical and
anthropological uncovering of the Apollo Code, Rena J. Mosteirin and
James E. Dobson restore our humanity by reviving this potentially lost
world of a truly miraculous syntactical feat. Moonbit is a fascinating
plunge into the poetics of thought and control and execution; language
can indeed land us in other worlds. In this case, Moonbit is a new world
that makes manifest the poetics of revival and syntax and debris. This
poetic exploration is an exercise in how we imagine and partake in
creation and possibility, showcasing how very delicate our worlds and
our words can be. Memory, this book reminds us, is a thing that can be
saved. Dobson and Mosteirin have saved it for us, revealing how we
humans are creatures of terror and hope no matter the medium. Code is
poetry and poetry is code and both contain what and who we are as
people. I am so grateful for witnessing, in this text, how miraculous is
the fall out and debris.

~ Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing
Life, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, and The Body

This is a fascinating book that exists in that magical space where human
and machine collide. Come for the poetry, stay for the code.

~ Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
Moonbit

by James E. Dobson, Rena J. Mosteirin

Published: 07/20/2019
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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.
About the Authors

James E. Dobson teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of
Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of
Illinois Press, 2019) and Modernity and Autobiography in
Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication
and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017), as well as essays and
book chapters on intellectual history, American literature, and
computational methods.

Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press,
2008), selected for the Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Award by Lydia
Davis. Her work has been featured in the anthologies code {poems}
(Barcelona: Impremta Badia, 2012), The Waiting Room Reader II (Fort Lee:
Cavankerry Press/UPNE, 2013), and a wide variety of places in print and
online including New York Magazine, The Puritan, Poetry Crush, Ozone
Park, and elsewhere. Mosteirin is a graduate of Dartmouth College and
the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an editor at Bloodroot Literary
Magazine.
Genres: Cultural Studies+Critical Theory, Fabulations, Media+Technology
Tags: Apollo 11, computer code, computer engineering, critical code
studies, cultural studies, cybernetics, digital humanities, digital
poetics, erasure poetry, experimental poetry, Friedrich Kittler, history
of computing, informatics, jokes, Lev Manovich, machine reading,
Margaret Hamilton, MIT Instrumental Lab, Moon landing, N. Katherine
Hayles, NASA, Richard Grusin, Rita Raley, scatology, software, T.S.
Eliot, technology, Watts riots, Wendy Chun, William Shakespeare, Winnie
the Pooh.
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