Recursion
“Progress depends on our changing the world to fit us and not the other way around.”
"What exactly are we calling 'artificial' languages?"
It was the first question levied at a group gathered for Tilt West's most recent roundtable, a dialogue centered around "Art & Language: Codes and Translation." And if you've ever wondered what it might be like to sit with linguists, humanities professors, journalists, artists and art critics, programming engineers, and hip hop performers to discuss the nuances of what we consider "natural" vs. "artificial" language—no? that's just me?—let me tell you, it was glorious.
Oddly, and unplanned, coding turned out to be a repetitive theme for me this month.
Which made this quote from Cameron Howe, the brilliant but elusive coding phenom from the show Halt and Catch Fire—a series I binged early this month—even more fitting: "Recursion [is] where a specific function calls upon itself repeatedly in a program. So to solve the big problem, it uses the same small problem over and over as the solution to increasingly complex issues. That, my friend, is how my software runs.”
Do you see it? Cameron refers to her mental and emotional patterns as "software." That would have been a fun metaphor to throw into the conversation the other night. Though, of course, I will be the first to push back on anything that positions humans as machines (I've read too much Wendell Berry for that), but I am nothing if not a lover of metaphor. A prime example? I can't hear the definition of recursion, a term about computer programming, and not jump immediately to the world of ecology. Because damn if that doesn't sound just like fractals and emergent strategy.
God, I love language.
Even coding can be poetic.
