I ♥ E-Poetry

This piece is a minimalist language and poetry generator that assembles words and organizes them into lines of poetry of varying length from two bigram datasets, and assigns them a generated title, beginning with the word “the.” The image above is a sample of its results: mostly recognizable words, creating phrases that may or may not have semantic coherence, forming lines that could be metrically described as amphimacic monometer (/ _ /).

More importantly, by shaping the output of this program to fit poetic conventions and offering its result as poetry, it promotes reflection on the nature of poetry, its social function, and our own willingness to accept the results of a program as poetry.

• To what extent are we willing to play along with the word juxtapositions that seem to make no sense, if we know that they are the product of random processes and not a human mind that intended to communicate something?
• Then again, can the poems generated by “ppg256” be attributed to Nick Montfort, who obviously made carefully considered choices in programming this piece?
• What about readers who encounter one of these poems without knowing the context or its author(s), will they become unknowing participants in a Turing Test?

These are timely questions worth thinking about, as Mark Marino has in a detailed Critical Code reading “The ppg256 Perl Primer: The Poetry of Techneculture.”

Ah, what a lovely, playful poem this is, streaming across the screen, captivating our field of vision and mind as we read a long line of text, mostly a single line that can be read in multiple ways as words that move at different rates hover over each other, forming multiple phrases and leading to potentially divergent readings, as divergent as the moments when the line splits into multiple ones taking different paths in the screen, crossing over each other, and rejoining at the end to continue as one, much as the reader explores the possibilities yet comes together to form a single thought in a moment when the mind says “Oh!”

When you encounter work by Mez, the first thing that jumps out is her idiosyncratic use of language, which she calls “mezangelle” and I can describe as a mixture of code, English, ASCII art, and phonetic and rebus writing. You don’t need to be able to read code to understand her writing, but it helps to recognize its basic structure, components, and conventions.

For example, the image above uses HTML tagging system to invent codes such as <tremor> <fracture> and <polymer>, organized visually with convention used for tables and lists, and concluding what seems like a painful moment by closing the tags </polymer>, </fracture>, </tremor>.

Mez has been drawing attention to language in digital environments since the mid 1990s and while her first-generation digital objects are humble text files distributed through listservs, blogs, and social media, they contain code designed to run in the most flexible processors available: human brains.

This seems like an amazing work because it allows one to fly or swoop through three-dimensional spaces full of poetic language that flows like rivers and waterfalls, spins in tightly organized hourglass tornadoes, and much more. This virtual world is a rich space that is complex in its organizational structure and explores the potential of language in these spaces.

I wish we could visit this virtual world and explore its textual riches, but unfortunately, the closest we can come to this is a small quicktime window with voiceover recording explaining the work as someone else explores this work. How frustrating!

This work is both an installation piece and a record of live writing performances at prestigious museum and gallery spaces that runs in your browser to provide an approximation of the experience. “Plaintext Performance” lends itself to be displayed as an ambient piece, and I would recommend dedicating a screen (the larger the better) to let this scroll and command a good portion of your field of vision and attention. Informed by vast knowledge of computing, networks, code, English, French, ASCII art, net.art and more, this piece does not require you to understand everything in it. Its effect is cumulative, rewarding your attention with snippets of legibility, art, and moments of clarity.

This narrative poem in 6 chapters is impressive in its ability to immerse its readers in interactive virtual environments that encourage play. The prosy narrative voices tell a story of three characters that keep going deeper into a mythical virtual space while one performs the text. Each chapter produces a new experience that integrates music, poetry, animation, and an interactive interface that rewards experimentation and curiosity with a highly aesthetic experience. The narrative itself is unchanging, fascinating, incomplete… and worth exploring further.

The lines of this poem cascade down the screen, describing a peaceful natural scene. Its pacing is meditative, reminiscent of some Gary Snyder poems. Its rhythm is mostly iambic with abundant trochees at the beginning of lines and occasional spondees to punctuate moments in the poem. The pacing of the scrolling lines doesn’t let you stop and look away, but won’t be too demanding, and once a line scrolls past visibility it is gone: you cannot scroll up or down. Live the moment in this poem for as long as it lasts, until you reach the end or realize what’s going on… whichever comes first.

The JavaScript engine for this poem inspired a number of variations on this poem by prominent writers in the e-lit and digital humanities community, available here.

This piece puts together a very basic interface with simple programmed behavior for its text with delightfully playful results. The letters are both letters and symbols (every pun intended) for people in an orderly urban environmen. Their movement when released from the building-like gray squares is chaotic yet rule-governed. Their flow responds to the elemental psychogeography of this symbolic urban space, resonating with Guy Debord’s Situationist “Theory of the Dérive.”

Some things to try after reading the texts:

• Place squares over other squares and click on them to overlay or combine texts.
• Create mazes, corrals, funnels, limit the exits, play pinball (pinword?).
• Click many times on the same square to stack huge amounts of text and release them in a lettristic explosion.

And don’t forget how letters are contained, constrained, disciplined into words, lines, sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, pages, windows, books, and screens. Isn’t it nice to set them free, once in a while?

Designed to be presented in The Cave at Brown University (an immersive virtual reality space) this manifesto poem is presented here in a greatly diminished form: a small Quicktime window without a fullscreen option. As such, rather than being a full on assault on the senses and aesthetic sensibilities, it seem like an harmless little annoyance, which is a pity, because it is a fascinating work.

When you look at the images keep in mind that this was created with a text editor, because you are looking a letterforms atomized beyond what even Lettrisme aimed for. Listen to the poem’s rhythms and mixture of poetic, manifesto, and technical language, punctuated by a series of “mother fuckers” spoken with a gusto worthy of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.