Danny Snelson’s EXE TXT is the attempt to make a database of texts theorize itself. The project makes use of the texts accessible as textwarez on Textz.com, a website run by Sebastian Lütgert between 2000 and 2004 that hosted around 831 text files “[r]anging from experimental poetry and cyberpunk fiction to media theory and political tracts” (Daniel Scott Snelson, “Variable Format,” 19). Snelson used a Python script on this corpus to extract sentences containing variants of the strings “text” and “software” (including their translations) to find out “how text might meet software within the works that Textz hosts” (Ibid., 181). Snelson edited the output inserting line and chapter breaks, but retained character encoding errors and misreadings. The result “queries a latent theorization of executable text within the works once hosted by Textz.com. Generally, it might be identified alternately as a scholarly edition, a fugitive collection, or a poetics of computation” (blurb on the back cover).

EXE TXT consists of the print-on-demand book available as paperback and hardcover as well as a plain text file of its content, the Python script, and a text file containing the whole collection of texts hosted on Textz.com. The latter starts with the works of Theodor W. Adorno, for whose digital publication on Textz.com Lütgert had to face a lawsuit and arrest warrant due to copyright infringement. This collection of files enables the readers to recreate the production process and “select their own terms for rearticulating this corpus” (blurb on the back cover).

This work is also an appendix to Snelson’s dissertation thesis “Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database” for which he theorized his experimental approach and its failure to work as a chapter by itself. This is the only Gauss PDF edition with an ISBN.

The project is cataloged by the Library of Congress, including the print-on-demand publication as well as the ASCII text file.