Inner Workings: Code and Representations of Interiority in New Media Poetics

'Inner Workings' addresses itself to the methods, properties and practices of writing systems, including human writing systems, whose very signifiers are programmed. What does programmed signification tell us about the inner human writing machine? John Cayley's essay participates in relevant metacritical and metapsychological discussions - reexamining Freud's Mystic Writing Pad in particular - and is specifically sited within the context of debates on code and codework in literal art. Rather than revealed interiority, code is the archive and guarantee of inner workings than reside beneath the complex surfaces of poetics in programmable media.