LAOB The Language Art Observer

*LOAB The Language Art Observer* is an emergent Platform Utopia founded on another existing Platform Utopia which is [Observable](https://observablehq.com). The already existing platform is an infrastructure for live-codeable notebooks, flexibly addressing current web technologies. *LAOB* will be the first platform for the development, management and realization of a utopian web-based publication venue for computationally innovative language art. This Platform Utopia will be constituted and animated by artist-made notebooks. In internet real time, the notebooks themselves will generate and animate works published as the *LAOB*’s public-facing website, a language art review, the contents of which will link back, seamlessly, to the very notebooks that are animating or otherwise dynamically manipulating what their readers experience.

* *LAOB The Language Art Observer* will commission, edit, and publish language art that is made and documented in Observable. *LAOB* will house, introduce, and promote embedded outcomes and also link back to contributors’ notebooks. In practice *LAOB* will not restrict submissions or commissions to works made in or with Observable. Standalone web apps will also be welcomed, although even these would be linked back to live-codeable notebook documentation of such pieces. The *LAOB* will also accept language art that is more or less devoid of programmatic computational affordances, but, in this case, only so long as it is prepared for publication using an Observable notebook, with some artist-authored commentary. * Commissions and submissions will be considered if their primary compositionally integrated medium is language, and the chief criteria when considering commissions and submissions for publication will be language-art aesthetic. * A founding board member will provide initial modest seed-funding for the project from university-based research funds. Initial set-up and organization will be operated on a gift-economy model at the outset and then we will apply for grant funding in order to cover minimal operating costs and modest fees for commissions and published works. Setting *LAOB* up as a non-profit is anticipated. * Submissions, commissions, and actual publication of individual works will all be on a rolling basis.