[-empyre-] Computational Poetics

[Alan Drury <ADrury@dmu.ac.uk>]

Aleksandra in  her first post has opened up a series of fascinating
discussions, but the chief one is, obviously, to determine what
'computational poetics' offers that no other poetics can; that it is not
just delivering a variant on existing practice by other means. In trying to
define an unknown we are limited in our thinking by the knowns we use to say
what the unkown is not, and the true nature of the beast is often hit upon
by structured serendipity. The totally defined practice is the dead
butterfly pinned to the board.

Central to Aleksandra's first post was the idea that braiding is possible
because the work springs directly out of and responds to a community. Her
later description of  current approaches to shadow puppetry suggests this is
a state of prelapsarian bliss, probably suggested by Artaud's solipsistic
romanticism. Although any live theatrical performance has elements of
braiding, (apart from 'Les Miserables'), true braiding as being talked about
here can only result in work springing from a social rather than a purely
commercial context.

In trying to fit 'computational poetics' into a theoretical overview and
quoting authorities, we are putting the cart before the horse. If we accept
'computational poetics' as defined by the example of shadow puppetry, we
should be asking what community it is drawn from and responding to. From
whence can its braiding come? We won't know until it does, and since
community is one of the most devalued current cant terms, I'm not hopeful.
There is certainly no real community in cyberspace per se.

Alan Drury.

PS: This is my first post. I'm a playwright, director and amateur conjuror.
What Svoboda was being quoted as inventing in 1958 was being done in a
simpler form by vaudeville illusionists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A
less sophisticated form of braiding is happening as I write in pantomimes up
and down the UK, mainly outside of London.