Brackets are symbols that wrap around words, phrases or sentences in a piece of writing. They mark what should be considered a separate organ to the main body of text. Most machinic screen readers will gloss over them, meaning a. they will just leave the brackets including their contents out, or b. they will read the contents without hinting to the existence of the brackets, all that (in text) is hugged in by the brackets then swims (in speech) in the same soup as the remaining text.
It’s not just machines though, because a human translator from text to speech encounters the same issue. [To open and close brackets, or not to open or close brackets? (In speech, that is.)]
No beauty for the profane. In mathematical operations, brackets determine the order of those operations, meaning brackets are algorithmic devices. When brackets are nested, the rule is that you must work from the inside out. Some birds work differently, often dropping stuff into a chosen tree, relying on spider silk and saliva to make it stick. As we know, trees grow leaves, but so do brackets. At least that is one possible scenario in the not-so-distant future.
Hence, brackets do (sprout, grow, shape) matter. Imagine for a second the Bed (PC), or the (Bed) PC, or (automatic) drawing vs. automatic (drawing), or synthetic (organism) in relation to (synthetic) organism. Though you can’t really continue this exercise indefinitely, because madness will overtake meaning, which is a good sensation in general, but only in moderation.
Consider these brackets, the green foliage of a plant yet to be discovered:
(Oh the joy of working on a warm body)
52.511343580883555, 13.395318379788897: {a viral medium that undergoes mutation and reproduces itself like a symbiotic culture of…}
{a painting reaches for the handle of a window, opens itself into its surrounding, oh! it spilled a living organism all over the ground, hope no one minds}
34.04929626162093, -118.35784986105523: [leave society, leave all of it behind, the need to not sleep where you eat or not to eat where you fuck or not to play where you build a castle in the sky that is on the ground that is on a mattress that is in your own grind, just switch the way you think about it]
<Like brackets, a capsule encloses something. It preserves something in a stable environment by cutting it off from another. It remains to be seen whom or what this tendency serves. Escape fear, escape hope!>
Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.
(Tbc.)
