Writing Façade: a Case Study in Procedural Authorship

1. INTRODUCTION The essence of the computer as a representational medium is procedurality — the ability of the computer to engage in arbitrary mechanical processes to which observers can ascribe meaning. Computers do, of course, participate in the production of imagery, support communication between people via the mediation of long-distance signals, control electro-mechanical devices, and support the storage and interlinking of large quantities of human-readable data. Many tools are available that allow users to engage these various capacities of the computer, such as image manipulation or web page authoring, without requiring users to think procedurally. But it is precisely the computer's ability to morph into these special-purpose machines that highlights the computer's procedural nature. These special-purpose machines (e.g., tools) are made out of computational processes; the computer's ability to engage in arbitrary processes allows it to morph into arbitrary machines.