Forget insulation from the cold nagging existential doubt or refuge in stories comforting the General Intellect; a dark Forest of Things is foregrounded in exquisite_code, a radical constructivist experiment that hothouses a collaborative writing production.

Eight international writers will work eight hours a day for five days generating text-prompts, text and edit-software in unrelenting micro-sessions to create a cadaverous exquisite_code life-novel . Text will be produced in response to prompts conspired by the writers at the end of each session. But only after bespoke edit-software has wormed its way through it, cutting, chewing and spitting gobbets of their text into a dump from which the life-novel will be elaborated. This edit-worm is itself interrogated and re-written in scheduled code writing sprints by the writers. At all times all participants are available for public scrutiny and interaction, and all writing will be on live display whilst continuously extruded as hardcopy from line printers.

The event will culminate in a Saturday night exquisite_code Launch Party (7.30-11.30pm) on 20th February at E:vent Gallery. with extracts of the novel presented to the public through human-machine readings, performances and detournements made by participants from the week’s accumulated materials. Publication of all code, prompts and final text will be by way of print-on-demand publication in collaboration with Mute.

Leif Elggren [SWE] writer/artist/performer http://www.leifelggren.org; Mara Goldwyn [US] writer/performer http://maragoldwyn.wordpress.com/writing/; Dave Griffiths [UK/FI] artist/coder/performer http://www.pawfal.org/dave/; Brendan Howell [US/DE] writer/coder/artist http://wintermute.org/brendan/; Jonathan Kemp [UK] writer/artist http://xxn.org.uk; Laura Oldfield Ford [UK] writer/artist http://www.savagemessiahzine.com/; Eleanora Oreggia [IT/NL] writer/coder/artist/performer http://xname.cc/; Sabrina Small [US] writer/artist http://www.foodandfootage.com; with additional performances from Hannah Wen-Shan Shieh [TW/UK] W.Shieh@sussex.ac.uk, Martin Howse [UK/DE] http://www.1010.co.uk/org; Preslav Literary School [UK/DE] http://www.preslavliteraryschool.co.uk; and Ryan Jordan [UK] http://ryanjordan.org/