Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Jim Andrews re: Electronic Poetry

[Simon Biggs <simon@littlepig.org.uk>]

On 03.05.03 03:51, "Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com> wrote:

> How do you see the relation of a work like Babel to digital poetry, Simon? And
> what roles do you
> see programming playing in the piece?
-----
I think a previous post I just sent might constitute a response to your
question as to the role of programming in art in general.

Babel and digital poetry? Babel's subject is taxonomy and how we catalogue,
value and navigate knowledge (or not). It is also about people's point of
view and what happens when we can all see things from everyone's point of
view at the same time...the effects on identity as the interplay between
individual and collective, self and other, is disrupted.

In this respect Babel is one big association machine, functioning on at
least two levels (hopefully more), as above. Following from this, as
association is a fundamental of poetics then I regard Babel as poetic in its
strategies and hopefully its effects. Visually it is also composed of only
(Dewey Decimal) numbers, which are part of the alpha-numeric palette and
thus of language. For me it is a form of visual or concrete poetry, at this
level.

Babel also contains meta-coding that auto-generates code as required (using
the auto-text generator I developed for Great Wall of China but here applied
to the code itself instead of an output text for the viewer to read - mind
you, Great Wall also used meta-coding like this...why write the code when
the computer can write it for you as needed?). From my point of view
auto-generated meta-coding is poetry, but only for the computer to read
directly. The rest of us have to make do with the derivatives.

best

Simon


Simon Biggs

simon@littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
http://www.greatwall.org.uk/
http://www.babel.uk.net/

Research Professor
Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
s.biggs@shu.ac.uk
http://www.shu.ac.uk/