Tuesday, September 1, 2009

English transformation art: a conversation between artist and client

The enterprise of English Transformation Art is by its nature a conversation between the artist and the client. All the words shared between those two participants go toward establishing an agreement about the fundamental principle of the art that just one word has the power to move and inspire, and that one's use of all words is affected by this principle.

The graphical instrument of the art is a different scene of action for words than is the form of the letters. Reading is not the object. It is more about occupying space.

Is Batek Binary a searchable entity?

It occurs to me there is a puzzle regarding my binary code for English, Batek Binary. How will it be treated by search engines?

Let's take an example.

|| | || ||| ||| | || ||| || ||| | || || ||| |||

I will not give the word this represents in English. That would make possible a search for the English version and I don't want to allow that.

I could also give the ASCII code for a word. That too is a puzzle. But Batek Binary is a different puzzle. It is arguably a self-evident representation of a word. Does the formula for Batek Binary constitute a searchable text?

Now obviously, since Batek Binary is not a popular concept in the limit of not being popular, the system is not going to appear in any search engine's computations, and words represented that way have no possible way of occurring in a search result. This is even true of art using the code. But is there something pathological about this omission?

ASCII, it can be argued, is not a colloquial construction. It occurs in computer applications on the inside end, not a part of public language traffic on the outside end.

But Batek Binary occurs on the outside end, at the very least as art, even though it is currently unpopular. For this reason I would argue that excluding it from search engines is pathological.

If I could type into a search window the code I created in the above example, and the search engine returned this blog entry, I would call that a healthy process. I suppose there is a chance this could happen just because of string identity.

Let's see. I'll publish this post now and after a while, when it has been scanned by the engines, I'll do such a search and see what happens. I'll use quotes around the code.