Procedural Rhetoric

w/r/t our upcoming discussions of Galloway's Protocol, Golumbia's The Cultural Logic of Computation, and Drucker's Speclab, anyone interested in the relationship between code, representation and rhetoric could do worse than to check out Ian Bogost's book, Persuasive Games, in which he introduces the notion of "procedural rhetoric":

...[procedural rhetoric is] an argument made by means of a computer model. A procedural rhetoric makes a claim about how something works by modeling its processes in the process-native environment of the computer rather than using description (writing) or depiction (images). (gamasutra)

Earlier this year, Bogost posted an excellent summary of some of the key ideas from Persuasive Games (and his later book on Object-Oriented Programming and Videogame Criticism, Unit Operations) on Gamasutra: Persuasive Games: The Proceduralist Style.