Computer systems produce an unprecedented wealth of text, only the smallest part of which is contributed by users. Protocols, listings, algorithms, programmes, source codes, universal binary codes – the background operations of the systems themselves write a massively larger share. These text units – produced, read and transmitted by computers – internalize transcodability and transliterality as the computer system’s basic underlying operating principle. The emerging forms of text take place between writing systems and text generators. They produce a new kind of analphabetism, as most of their consumers cannot read nor write them, yet they are involved in our thoughts and actions.
Vienna-based publishers TRAUMAWIEN perceives these new structures of text as literature — a system of virtualization in imagination, always describing breaking points in our perception of world.
TRAUMAWIEN considers the paradox of transferring late-breaking digital aesthetics into book form, as new media narrative snapshots of literary genres otherwise quickly lost in the immense output produced by web every second.
TRAUMAWIEN book publications help to highlight technological innovations while at the same time questioning imminent issues of text production in virtual space.
THRAUMAWIEN’s range includes networked texts, algorithmic texts, interfictions, chatlogs, codeworks, software art and visual mashup prose. They also research possible touch points between the book as an object and virtual space in the form of, for example, hybrid books (augmented reality) the first of which will be published in July 2010.
TRAUMAWIEN publications are understood as schemes in which the author remains, but already is marginalized as a producer. The author – in a prototypical trauma book – remains exchangeable by the form of possible writing, writing systems, generating genre.
![J. R. Carpenter GENERATION[S]](http://traumawien.at/gfx/CarpenterCover_sans.png)
Schema 2.1 J.R. Carpenter, Montreal / Generation[s]. Code Narrative
Schema 2.2 Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexiko / Git2Pod. Poetry
Schema 2.3 Audun Mortensen, Norway / Surf’s up (2010). Poetry
VIP schema2 / Barbara Anna Husar. Corpus Sublingual. Raw nd unplugged
Hybrid 1 Philip Hautmann / Yorick. Hybridbuch
http://traumawien.at/preview/