Machine Languages as Media Infrastructures
Machine Languages as Media Infrastructures

Summary/Abstract: This paper argues that through affording communications between machines and humans, machine languages become structures of media. To examine the argument, the paper selects a virtual city model of the Alphatown as a case study and draws on Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory, at first analyses how the metalanguage functions via the mediums of listing and navigation in the Alphatown, then looks at how the affects of boredom, being lost and strangeness arise from the media infrastructures based upon metalanguage, and analyses where the poetic function lies in the transmission of affects and how the sensual and the material aspects of machine languages emerge thus functioning as poetic. With analysing the metalingual and poetic functions in a diagrammatic thought of machine languages, different levels of machine languages can be considered as media structures, while media structures manifest themselves as material and processual in the meantime.

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