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| If
computer language becomes poetry, can poetry be programmed? more on computer & language: |
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Carmen
Figuratum |
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| The poem celebrates the god Hermes as the patron of rhetoric, ambiguity, metamorphosis and illusion. The text is read by alternating the first verse with the last, the second with the last but one and so on. | ||||||||||||
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| This poem is dedicated to the god Eros. The visual form of the text is suited to the meaning of its content. The wings of Eros (the exuberant adult divinity and not the infant Cupid) are visually evoked. | ||||||||||||
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| This poet was the first to introduce the Carmina Figurata into the Latin Literature of the 4th century. “Organ” is a rhetorical game similar to the poem “Egg” written by Simias. This Carmen is meant as an invocation of the Muse Clio. | ||||||||||||
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| This Christian late-antique form of a carmen figuratum is a so-called grid poem. A grid is laid upon a rectangular text block, highlighting an “in-text” with its own textual sense and corresponding with its iconographic meaning. Letters are used independently of their actual content. They are employed as pure signs, which create their own visual context. | ||||||||||||
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Catharina
von Greiffenberg's work celebrates the cross, the resurrection of the
dead and the redemption of the soul. |
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| Concrete
Poetry The roots of concrete poetry stretch back to Classical Antiquity. A special form of this genre is the figure poem. The arrangement of words, letters or signs forms a picture which has an immediate relation with the content. A forerunner of this was the Carmen Cancellatum of late Christian Antiquity. Examples can be found in the grid poems of the monk Hrabanus Maurus in his "liber de laudibus sanctae crucis", and later in the baroque figure poems of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. Looking at these figure poems today, we have to interpret them step by step using the principles of hermeneutics, like modern concrete poems and digital texts. Concrete poetry is a non-mimetic form of poetry that originated around 1950 following the lead of Concrete Art and uses linguistic and acoustic language materials. Concrete poetry forms utterances from letters, syllables and words that are dissociated from traditional contexts. Elements of text are arranged graphically on a surface to create a visual and/or semantic impact. Concrete texts are a means of communication in terms of forms and structures that only become complete with the creative collaboration of the recipient. Concrete poetry belongs to the tradition of Futurism (M. Marinetti's "Parole in Libertá") and of the programmatic and literary texts of Dada (Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters). |
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| Visual
Poetry Visual poetry is a variation on concrete poetry. Visual poems follow a tradition extending from Early Greek and Hellenistic visual poems (Carmina Figurata) via the Figurata of the Baroque into the 20th Century. |
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| The
"Calligrammes" are text-pictures or figurative poems in which
the most important element is the typographical arrangement of the words.
In most of the calligrammes the subject of the texts is revealed by their
graphic structure. Apollinaire's collection of poems, "Calligrammes", provided Surrealism with a major impulse. His poems combined avant-garde trends, such as the free use of grammatical and syntactical structures, the use of free metrical forms, unusual associations and montage and simultaneous techniques, with traditional literary motifs and forms. “Calligrammes are an idealization of poetry with free metre: a typographic precision in an era in which typography brilliantly ends its career and in which new reproduction methods like movies and phonographs… mark the beginning of a new age.” Apollinaire |
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| Schwitters breaks with the conventional sequence of the text and direction of reading and distributes syllables, sounds, words and groups of words freely over the surface. He operates with literary collages, nonsense poetry, number and sound poems and combines found linguistic elements in an associative and often provocative way. | ||||||||||||
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| Gomringer constituted his poems in a heavily minimalised language giving predominance to graphic and visual considerations. Gomringer even proposed poetry for shaping the environment and declared the text to be a utility item. According to this definition, poetry has to stand up to the test of the designer's eye for "good form", just like furniture or cups and plates. | ||||||||||||
The
aesthetics of generative code |
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| Sondheim has been working in New York since the 1970s as a performance artist, art critic and art theorist. He writes and posts poems every day on the Internet, and sees these poems as a practical experiment with various personas and physical identities in the web. In extreme cases, Sondheim's poems can hardly be deciphered without precise computer knowledge. | ||||||||||||
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| In the computer language called PERL (practical extraction and report language) traditional poems can be translated into computer language. The texts show evidence of immanent poetic structures, and here too some are so programmed that haikus or limericks can be generated from them. The first Perl poem of all was composed by Larry Wall in 1990 and was written as a haiku. The haiku is the shortest poetic form in world literature. Its three lines are composed of five, seven and five syllables respectively. A haiku describes a brief moment; it records an event; it paints a picture in words. This Perl poem fulfils all the criteria of the classical haiku form when it is read aloud. Then the letter "q" becomes "queue" and the $ sign becomes the two-syllable word "Dollar" (giving this line five syllables). | ||||||||||||
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| Sharon Hopkins has trodden a quite particular path within digital poetry. She was a pioneer of Perl poetry, to which she gave a vital stimulus during its initial phase in the early Nineties. In the computer language called PERL (practical extraction and report language) traditional poems can be translated into computer language. Poems sound more familiar, however, if their characteristic style sounds like "free speech". Many works by Sharon Hopkins have no need to fulfil any further program function apart from their poetic garb. Yet the author herself says that the greatest weakness of these poems is exactly this: the final limits of programming language. To do justice to the rules and regulations of this language, it is necessary to insert a large number of parentheses, revocations and special definitions. Despite the 250 words and more which are defined in PERL, the vocabulary remains limited when it comes to describing moods, feelings and interior landscapes. So what can you write about? Or, to ask the question a better way, how can you order a machine to have sex or talk about love and death? | ||||||||||||
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'Self'
is a poem which is at the same time a program. The poem is written in
the programming language Perl. The program is called „self.pl“.
It creates an empty file called “self”. “self.pl”
reads “self”, closes it and opens it again to write what
it has read. The content equals zero bytes. |
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| This
shell code (written in UNIX console instruction language) is a "fork
bomb“. It defines a function named “:” and executes
it. The function executes itself recursively into copies, which will do
the same. The process pool (the capacity of a computer’s operating
system to execute processes) of the machine gets filled after a while
and will therefore stop functioning. “:” is a graphic sign which means ‘explanation’: suddenly the thoughts grow uncontrolled. |
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copyright
© 2004 digitalcraft.org |
