N. Katherine Hayles (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

N. Katherine Hayles, in Writing Machines (2002), stresses the materiality of simulation: 'The engineers who design these machines, the factory workers who build them, the software designers who write programs for them, and the technicians who install and maintain them...' (2002: 6). 
All these players are situated in the material world and the social relations that arise from this. Media exists in an overall ecology of inter-relationships in which media exist like organisms (2002: 5; Hayles draws upon Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's idea of 'remediation' (1999) to describe the ways in which media are recycled into other media; for instance, the ways in which new media are made to look like old media, or vice versa). Writing machines operate in this interplay of representational and simulated realities, or printed and electronic texts, that are grounded in the materiality of the literary object. The tension is exacerbated by the mixed (semiotic) reality that literature engenders - between the reality literally at hand, the one evoked through imagination and the situation to which it applies - a play of signification in other terms. Interestingly, the book Writing Machines is 'attentive to its own material properties' through its form (a format partly autobiographical and composed in close collaboration with a graphic designer). Materiality expressed in this way follows a critical Modernist tradition as well as an engagement with cybernetics, both engaged with the technical apparatus - familiar to an analysis focussed on cultural production such as literary criticism or textual analysis. Hayles goes further than this, and adds the materiality of the text itself to the analysis in a similar way to those in the software critical community who consider code to be material (in addition to hardware). In this way, it is the materiality of writing itself that is expressed through the relationship between natural language and code - one tended towards control and precision, the other towards free form and expression (See Florian Cramer for more on this relation). Literature is both material and immaterial in other words. 

It s the interplay that is of concern for Hayles materialist position. The physical form of the work necessarily affects the production of meaning in the way that context does in general. When this is overt, she calls this as a 'technotext':
'When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive lops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence.'  (2002: 25; clearly this is close to other terms such as 'code literature'). A technotext brings into view the technical apparatus or writing machine that produces it. The materiality of text or code is verified by the property rights exerted on it - intellectual property would even cast ideas as material objects in this respect. For Hayles, this is synonymous with hypertext, and certainly there are strains of code literature' and literary non-executable code that come close to this association, but working with code goes further than this. The execution of code engages materiality and imagination through the possible and often unpredictable actions that result. If the code could be seen to be potential literature, this is enacted too. Perhaps in the terms of remediation, the code is remediated as running software and the text should be read as an interplay between these states. The materiality therefore requires attention to the technical apparatus, but also to the program - the activity of programming and the activity of the program once executed. 

The programmer or writer is intimately connected to the body of the writing machine - be it book or computer. Hayles is also interested in how the body in the narrative (she cites Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) or narrator's body (such as in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) is connected to the body of the author and reader, and speculates on how this operates in electronic texts (her example is Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, 2002: 38, 49; a more literal example is the way that html language uses <body> tags, 2002: 51). To Hayles, critical practice must engage with materiality: 'Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts. like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that other materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other.' (2002: 107)  These interplays of the body of the text, author and reader express embodiment and further emphasise how materiality is invested in hardware and software, in text and code. [This partly explains the forms that my work takes] 


note: a 'creole' is a new language, not an amalgam like 'pidgin', formed where two existing languages come into contact - clearly it is possible to imagine a creole consisting of natural language and code - imagine english and machine instructions (Hayles 2002: 50).