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Synthesis: putting things together
When we observe the textual codedness of digital systems, there is of course the danger to generalize and project one's observations of digital code onto literature as a whole. Computers operate on machine language, which is syntactically far less complex than human everyday language. The alphabet of both machine and human language is interchangeable, so that ``text'' – if defined as a conglomeration of alphabetical signs – remains a valid descriptor for both machine code sequences and human writing. In syntax and semantics however, machine code and human writing are not interchangeable. Computer algorithms are, like logical statements, a formal language and thus only a restrained subset of language as a whole.
However, it is a common mistake in my opinion to claim that (a) machine language would be only readable to machines and hence irrelevant for human art literature and (b) that, vice versa, literature and art would be unrelated to formal languages.
One should not forget that computer code, and computer programs, are not machine creations and machines talking to themselves, but written by humans.3 The programmer-artist Adrian Ward suggests that we put the assumption of the machine controlling the language upside down:
http://www.p0es1s.net/poetics/start.html
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