Poetry has a long history of vigorous experimentation. Because it exists at the periphery of society (and at the centre of language in its self-conception), poetry is free to explore formal terrain that is not permitted to prose. Innumerable analog (print) poetic movements have contributed or anticipated to varying degrees the emergence of theoretical concerns active in contemporary digital poetics. The Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettristes, Futurists, Concrete poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and OULIPO movements have each, in their own way, provoked radical recalibrations of the page, text and semantics. The Lettristes and Concrete poets created vivid visual knots of text, which are ancestors of the current developments in 3D text display and dynamic mobile text. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets posited engaged texts that dealt with the materiality of language as technology, anticipating the current dominant theoretical paradigm of digital poetics . Algorithmic poetry (on a computer) was anticipated by the OULIPO group whose systems of analog writing constraints constituted a sustained engagement with generative algorithmic literature.
My own practical inclinations are not theoretical. I find some degree of affinity with the views expressed by a marginal splinter group loosely grouped under the title of PostLanguage poets who advocate a poetry disengaged from formal theoretics, a poetry that is allowed to evolve according to the inclination and tendencies of the artist instead of a set of systematic ideological forms. In the digital poetic realm, the online works at BornMagazine reflect this aesthetic foregrounding. The following section will explore theorists and theories which have evolved around language in computational contexts; this literature review will hopefully form a foundation from which to situate digital poetic work that does not initiate from a theoretical foundation.
Many language poems are computationally tractable. The central features: disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains. One exemplary current digital poetics practitioner perhaps inadvertently replicates the LANGUAGE style using feeds from Twitter rss streams (tiny text messages that are migrating like starlings in public space among the pdas of conference goers). The patterned ecosystem of live realtime txts is mixed with video footage from a railway station, the twitter user icons, and flickr feeds. The writer is essentially replaced by the internet who steps aside and becomes information architect to the evolving dynamic undulant topological skin of data that is being twittered around. The effect is sporadically, like the best of LANGUAGE poetry, absorbingly hypnotic; the style is the same (disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains ) In the digital work, the live feed (the page) work never repeats. It’s written by no one and everyone. Repetition, accumulation, variation and redundancy ricochet through the network. Language constructs itself. The digital poet is a voyeur of perforated space, The Waiting, hovering zones where humans nourish their appetites for absorbing anonymous patterns (L'attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1 (2007) Gregory Chatonsky )
Labels: digital poetics, feed, language, rss, twitter, waiting
[+/-] Language quotations Human opinions are experienced as facts by those who hold them. Knowledge, or epistemology, is an ecosystem of phenotypic opinions.
Tomkins (vol iv, affect imagery consciousness, p.17): "Language is designed to be a transparent medium mechanism."
Walter Benjamin (One Way Street, p.112): "Language is thus the mental being of things."
If there is anything I learn its that each genius has a domain.
Labels: language
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of design science. Language is a technology. It converts sound and symbol into informational machines. Poetics is a design science that developed on the technology of language as a set of rules and 'best practice' regulations designed to increase the informational capacity of the technology. Rhythm, rhyme, beats, metre, and other design rules established by poetry operate as guides for writers, the technicians and operators of language.
The relationship between poetics and design science can be traced by considering parallels in their definitions. Design science in modern discourse refers to generalizable rules that lead to superior design; it also refers to the application of scientific principles to the design of technological artifacts. Poetics for millennium has been a terrain of schools, cabals, and styles each espousing specific principles which contribute to superior poetry; poetics is also the systematic study of the affective impact of crafted language (both sound and word) on the human mind. Each discipline is a set of rules that converge on a practice.
In the 3rd century BC, Aristotle wrote his 'Poetics'. It was an attempt to formulate and understand the principles underlying concise literary communication. It is a document of approximately 10,000 words, truncated by intervening millenniums. George Whalley, a contemporary translator of Aristotle, emphasizes the etymological roots of the word poetics which supports an argument for considering it a design science:
"Greek is capable of providing a wide range of cognate words on a single root: this allows for great variety of self-expository compounds, and also adds to the range of participial nouns which by altering their terminations can refer the root to a person, a thing, a product, a process, an intention even. Poiein, prattein aran, and mimeisthai are crucial instances in the Poetics. From poiein (to do or make) we have poiema (a thing made roughly our 'poem'); poietes (a maker roughly our 'poet' but poietria is not poetry but a poetess); poiesis (the process or activity of making only very roughly our 'poetry', and unhappily the eighteenth century fumbled the ball in allowing 'poesy' to become an elegant variant of 'poetry' when we badly needed a word for poiesis). From the noun poiesis, the adjective poietikos is regularly formed (to do with making, capable of making); and, since we have allowed the word 'poetic' to become merely the adjective of 'poet' and 'poetry', I should like to be able to use both the 'poetic' (in our sense) and 'poietic' (in the Greek sense)."
[Whalley, George(CM). Aristotle's Poetics. Montreal, PQ, CAN: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. p 11.]
At its root, poetics is concerned with making, more specifically, 'to do with making'. Design is the science concerned with making.
Poetry is the ancestor of design science.
"In 1965 [Buckminster] Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris. This was (in his own words) devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."[wikipedia ]
Computational poetry exists at the interstice of poetics and design science, concerned with crafting technological artifacts (language, interface, concepts, affective energy) for the benefit of humanity.
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of physics. [a few notes on an intriguing video about creative thinking....]
Murray Gell-Mann, renowned particle physicist, in a Google Tech Talk on March 14, 2007 in reference to his naming of the 'quark' particle: "People are always asking me why I chose that name? If you think about the sound, it's an obvious name for a fundamental constituent of atomic nuclei."
Poetry, and in particular transcendental or mystical poetry, is a research domain that embraced the relativity of time and space before Einstein.
"All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world."
Dhammapada
If universes are considered as clusters of orbital particles in intricate motion, arising and dissipating within an interconnected domain, then William Blake's infamous "universe in a grain of sand" suggests potential insight into the dark matter which supposedly composes 96% of our universe; if universes are in grains of sand,then they could easily be in the photinos that Gel-Mann used to satirically say to his astronomer colleagues comprised the majority of what they were studying.
Gel-Mann attributes Einstein's capacity to think of the Brownian motion equation (for which he won the Nobel Prize) as being due to his taking of the concept of molecules seriously. Simply put Brownian motion is randomized molecular collisions influencing the motion of particles larger than themselves. While this doesn't stretch as deep as William Blake's ideas, it is hoped in the poetry community that particle physicists will one day team up with astronomers to initiate a search for intelligent terrestrial intelligence using particle accelerators. Some poets, of course, concerned over the potential ethical implications of colliding universe's together at extreme velocity have already threatened to boycott the proceedings.
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A few other things Murray Gell-Mann said:
"We mustn't get the idea that any challenge to scientific orthodoxy is right."
"Keep asking: Why not? But realize there is generally a very good reason why not?"
"I believe that problem formulation is more difficult....What are the real requirements of this solution?" Only in school are problems formulated for you.
Book mentioned
James L Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Pub, 2001).
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] The book will b a cyborg When will the computer enter into the body meaningfully? BMI interfaces are proliferating. Functional prosthetics exist. The first performative networked performances have occurred; soon a wave of first adopters will jack in. The line betwen the species will blur. The line between fiction and fact will blur. The line between real and not real will blur. And we will see Borges there, deep in our glands controlling a switch which designates the quantum potential our body-projected from data will follow.
The I is an assemblage of potentalitites. Future art will be embedded in body; as we are embedded in body now, is not life already now the ultimate art? maybe life is art experiencing itself? Is all art not just simply a dampened residue of that initial resonance?
Environmental immersive illusion systems will be auto-corrected by cross-generational waves of human designers in a recursive feedback system. Culture breeding culture breeding culture. Innumerable people have said this and are saying this at all levels. It is the dominant myth of our time: cyborg species merger is underway.
Thought and sound had a child called language. We accepted that.
Labels: book, cyborg, language
[+/-] Function of Language Often in the age before networks and distributed computing, if an author were sedentary, influences were limited, imagination emerged internally uninfluenced, an inherited autonomic rite. After the papyrus and printing press, humans continue making marks, building up systems of symbolic representation, displaying themselves as language, but they do so within societies, large aggregates of minds.
Language performs several functions within society: it establishes rank, occasionally conveys information, and like the endless handshaking of IP network protocols constitutes noise that coheres society. Humans are often just gabbing; trading morsels of phenomenological trivia; verfiying that the network known as society exists. That is because humans are encapsulated organisms who carry time within them. Isolated from each other spatially, but sharing an enormous mass of similar sensors and processors, they use language to communicate concepts that touch cannot
