Raw brain-heart processes, analogous to bits and byte-streams of the body that often may seem like nonsense and hallucinations to our high-level conscious-identity interfaces, have historically been rich fuel for poets. Contemporaneous with Duchamp's introduction of a toilet into a gallery, Hugo Ball and Kurt Shwitters at the Cabaret Voltaire introduced guttural grunts, growls, yelps, and streams of imaginary languages into their poetry performances. Manipulations of graphic elements followed, --the page evolved into arbitrarily lush turbulent horizons. Eventually under the glandular deconstructivist contortional physics of postmodernism, poetry became whatever we call poetry. Into this expansive atmosphere, in the mid-80's, Ray Kurzweil (a renowned programmer instrumental in developing speech recognition software, the first CCD flatbed scanner, etc….) launched Cybernetic Poet, a computerized mathematical modeling system which emulates a diversity of poetic styles as it spontaneously improvises new creations. Essentially, it exists at the interstice of a new field of creation where collaboration becomes analogous to initiating the genetic form of a programmed process (software) which then develops work independently of its creator. This perpetual motion would have delighted renaissance theoreticians. This type of software constitutes one feature of an evolving nascent AI landscape which will probably soon supercede the creative output of all humans.

Antiorp's verbal play on the listservs is clearly a more-traditional human-centric evolutionary offshoot of concrete poetry. Resonant comparisons could be made to b.p. nichol or "Wind" by Eugene Gomringer. The twisting of context so that words require effort to be decoded as both visual elements and as signifiers is the primary contribution made by the concrete poetry school. Analogous to this dispersion of immediate meaning (in subtle defiance of the ease of gratification favoured by the products of our entertainment manufacturers ), computer code often moves in convulsive ways challenging our notions of its linearity.

Example, after signing up to Antiorp's email list, I received an email which began:

Virtuosic deluges of messages of similar style intercut with long samples of her computer code (interspersed with occasional bitter spasms of political invective) provoked her banishment from several listservs. She fulfilled the typical model of the manic artist, the babbling obsessive, burning so brightly with fevered incandescence of inspiration that online communities occasionally reluctantly turned against her: she was keeping everyone awake to too large a spectrum of reality. Her diffusive non-linearity imperiled the concentrated topics to which technical listservs are dedicated. From the linguistic evidence, Antiorp would seem to have some personal knowledge of poetically-extreme states (a subtle clue in her exclamation: "- ! juzt forget 2 eat.").

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