Between Codes and Palimpsest: Stephanie Strickland's Dragon Logic

xCoAx, 2021

Codework, also known as code-poetry, is a variant of digital poetry, in turn, a subgenre of electronic literature. Codeworks are basically art that integrates computer code in its overall aesthetic. In its broadest sense, code-inspired visual art and livecoding could be categorized under this taxonomy. Livecoding is a creative technique by which it is possible to compose audiovisual works, interacting directly with the algorithms defined in a programming language, in order to obtain results “on the fly” (Wang 2008). Livecoding performance is permeated by FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) culture, since by definition in this artistic format, the source codes of the programs are usually shared publicly with the audience. The research presented below seeks to compose a view around these topics, using Alan Sondheim’s codeworks taxonomy in order to analyze them from a critical perspective. In particular, I seek to investigate the Latin American counterpart, where FLOSS and “art converge as an element of autonomy from the functional needs of the structure of code itself, while on the other hand, it attempts to historicize and politicize it by anchoring code in practices of Resistance’’ (Ledesma 2015).

2002

The proliferation of digital technology and the emergence of digital code as the new dominating medium of information storage are acknowledged to be of concern for social scientists and cultural theorists. The search for meaning in digital code tends to favor studies of how it is consumed in the contemporary context, and how contemporary actors construct meaningful experiences with it. Contrary to the intentions of its inventors, changes in society accompanying the proliferation of digital technology are often treated as undesirable and even accidental. Often ignored are the philosophical meanings intentionally embedded into and connoted by the code, and how the technical and philosophical attributes of digital technology come together to create the possibility of experience for the user.

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2018

As Steven Connor shows in his work on technography, poetry is intimately related to computation. In fitting together the sound, rhythm and meaning of words into structures, we rely on a kind of computational work in our poetic aspirations. In this paper, I will argue that the expressive power of poetry is predicated on its computational features. Lacan argues, in Seminar XX (1975), that poetry forces language into form, thereby allowing a proto-mathematical way of formulating ideas, one used by the pre-Socratics. However, poetry goes beyond formulation, as writing poetry involves a combinatorial game of composition. That is, poetry does not provide static formulae, but is rather a dynamic play on the matter of signs. In his Fichte Studies (1795-6), Novalis offers a post-Fichtean approach to Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis-a poetic calculus. Following Novalis, I will argue that poetry is expressive because it entails a dynamic interplay of the material combinations of signs and their resultant spaces of meaning, both in following formal rules and while breaking them. Poetic expression is the horizon of meaning opened-up in the combinatorial game of fitting words into patterns. By looking at how poetry is already computational, we can begin to think about the expressiveness of computer-generated poetry. On this view, computer-generated poetry is not merely an esoteric curiosity, but a new kind of poetry, created by the agents most suitable for the computational task. In order to frame our thinking about computer-generated poetry, we should first understand the degree to which poetry is already computational.

Digital poetry is simply poetry that extends outside the word borders and into the world of digital technology. Every device in digital technology is indeed a poetical device including motion, sounds, flashes, drawings and other kinds of temporalities. In the digital poem, every single element is a signifier and a medium and the viewer is not only a reader, as in the case of written poetry, but also most important a decoder. Jason Nelson is one of the outstanding digital poets whose craft lies in adding to this new genre of poetry rather than simply practicing it. His genius resides in incorporating mathematics, along with science, hand-drawings and other sorts of semiotics to create a never-ending stimulus effect that unconsciously infixes the reader in the context and incites him to action. Nelson manages to create a strong interactive medium through his unprecedented synergy of these three elements, mathematics, science and semiotics, and this is indeed the main core of study in this paper. The approach followed in this study is discourse analysis which is generally used in the analysis of written, vocal and sign language or any other kind of semiotic context. It is chosen, moreover, for it assists in revealing socio-psychological characteristics of the poet or the signified that, in the meantime, helps in deciphering many puzzling parts of Nelson's poetical works.

Electronic Literature Organization Conference, 2017

In 2013 I started my PhD journey with a simple and provocative question: can a computer write poetry? Initially, I thought that exploring an answer to this question would lead me towards the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence research, or to a speculative future populated by conscious, emoting, anthropomorphic computers.

2015

Software is it Poetry or Prose? It is part Poetry, part Prose. But it has much more in common with both forms of natural language, than usually admitted: software concepts, rather than defined by syntactic oriented computer programming languages, are characterized by the semantics of natural language. This paper exploits these similarities in a two-way sense. In one way the software perspective may be relevant to the analysis of natural language forms, such as poems. In the other way round, as its central message, this paper uses properties of both Poetry and Prose to facilitate a deeper understanding of highest-level software

EVAC Copenhagen 2018

In this paper, I explore the unconscious effects of computer code, by reading how it is renderedor 'negatively figured'in the work of the contemporary lyric poet Ben Lerner. Lerner's book of poems Mean Free Path (2010) provides clear indications of a relatively rare post-digital tendency in contemporary poetry: it is a literature that emphasises the instabilities and problems of digital age communication, even as it admits to the absolute saturation of contemporary experience in digital processes, and therefore the impossibility of writing (reading) outside of them. The presence and pervasiveness of computer code, I suggest, forces the heightened, personalised language of the lyric poet into a new awareness of their role as storing and yielding a expressive intent. What I call 'Glitch Poetics' is a form of reading and writing with error that is sensitive to contemporary language as a system. In this case, I observe that language is infected, perhaps compromised, by the temporalities and structures of computer code. This short paper is an example of the way that Glitch Poetics readings of traditional forms of literature can help explore what the digital means to us at this historical juncture.

Humanities

The quality of digital poetry or art-not merely as contained within our aesthetic reaction to digitally expressive works but as well our intellectual grounding in them-suggests that the digital's seemingly ephemeral character is an indication of its lack of an apparently material existence. While, aesthetically, the digital's ephemerality lies in the very fact of the digitally artistic enterprise, the fact is that its material substrate is what makes the aesthetic pleasure we take in it possible. When we realize for ourselves the role played by this substrate, furthermore, a paradox looms up before us. The fact is that we both enjoy, and in some sense separately understand the artwork comprehensively and fully; we also allow ourselves to enter into an ongoing conversation about the nature of the physical world. This conversation is not insignificant for the world of art especially, inasmuch as art depends upon the actual materials of the world-even digital art-and, too, upon our physical engagement with the art. Digital poetry and art, whose dynamic demands the dissolution of the line that would otherwise distinguish one from the other, have brought the notion of embodiment to the fore of our considerations of them, and here is the charm, along with the paradoxical strength, of digital art and poetry: it is our physical participation in them that makes them fully come into being.

THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An Exploration, 2020

Although there might not seem to be a clear link between Literary Studies and Computer Science, there have been extensive works in the field of Digital Humanities. This way, the purpose of this chapter is to foster the intersection between Literary Studies and Computer Science to cooperate with the solution of language and creativity issues in computer-generated literature. To meet this purpose, the origins of Digital Poetry and the pre-digital experiments that linked poetry to computing will be presented. Next, I will present a brief overview of computer-generated poetry, then, the system PoeTryMe and its variations – Co-PoeTryMe and the Twitter bot @poetartificial. Finally, we will analyze some of the poems generated by/with the use of the systems (during the development of the chapter), in order to point out some (aesthetic) aspects that could be improved from the point of view of the Literary Criticism.