Art Metropole

#11331

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Date

2014

Format

Artists' Books

Size

14.5 × 22 cm

Length

309 pages

Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter

10 PRINT is a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, published in November 2012. Book purchases support the nonprofit organizations The Electronic Literature Organization (to which all royalties are being donated) and The MIT Press, the book’s publisher.

This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.