SFPC Week 0: A Love Letter to Juxtaposition
“I’m going to the School for Poetic Computation.”
“Cool!”
“Wait, what is that?”
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Enthusiasm, then wonder. Each time I announced my plan for the coming weeks, I received a response in this sequence. Poetic computation sounds so good, no one talks about it like that, I like this… even if I don’t really know what it is. After having completed week zero (for folks who have never touched code before) I offer some initial observations.
Poetic Computation. What drew me to this juxtaposition is the suggestion that these crafts can, and should, learn from one another.
First, what poetry and computation have in common: a dedication to simplicity (via surgical precision).
“Whenever you see yourself repeating code, that’s a sign you can make your life easier.” This was our mantra as we learned the building blocks. Like Russian stacking dolls, we learned first about variables, then functions, next arrays, and finally objects. An object can be imbued with meaning, with instructions containing functions and variables and so on. Instead of typing a variable 1,000 times, you type an array once. These elements are arranged logically; specific syntax employed to get the desired effect. (I’ve already fallen victim to forgotten semi-colons and curly brackets). Whenever our instructor, Zach Lieberman, saw just a few lines of code, he’d stand up and say, “This is the code I love!” The point is not to have to dig through extraneous lines to get what’s going on.
Likewise, when writing, the question is, “How do I make myself clear?” While at lunch with an SFPC alum who is now finishing up his MFA in Poetry, we talked about why (arguably) writing is more torturous act than other art forms. I credit this to the backspace key on the computer — it allows for immediate judgement and self-doubt. Writing is inherently hard because it’s about judgement: what to omit, which word is just right, where to place the semi-colon. Wallace Stevens called this “passion for restraint.” The point is not to dig through extraneous words to get what’s going on.
Ok, so the making of poetry and computation are rooted in striving for simplicity. What can they learn from one another?
Participation
One of the first thing we learned while working in OpenFrameworks this week was a command that links action to the mouse, whether it be a click or its position on the screen. Immediately, we could invite someone to participate in whatever we made. They could change the color of a sine wave, or initiate a thousand balls bouncing on a screen, or guide a bumble bee across a field. I suppose this is why so many people love playing video games.
Being an expert in neither computation nor poetry, my hypothesis is that poetry could be more participatory. Revisiting the anxieties of writing for a moment, there is a great pressure to make someone feel something, to impart emotions onto another. It is more a gift than an invitation; here are the images I’ve crafted for you. I suppose participation in poetry happens within the reader over time — I read a poem today and feel one way, I revisit the same poem later and perhaps feel something else. Could poetry be more dynamic? Would that get more people engaging with poetry?
We can learn about analog participation from Oswaldo Guayasamin’s paintings, which he painted across multiple panels; these paintings could be rearranged by the viewer to create hundreds of permutations. This creates a new way of seeing. What is the artist’s message? Now, what is my message? As much an activist as a painter, Guayasamin often represented the poor and forgotten; he demanded that each person’s voice be heard. This ethos is exemplified in his execution.
Which brings me to what computation can learn from poetry: execution for feeling.
Feeling
In her essay, “On Sentimentality,” Mary Ruefle digs into the duality of the word “sentiment,” and how it includes physical feeling (sensation) and mental feeling (emotion). We see this in the word itself, sen for sensuous, mental for mind. Good poetry gives you pleasure, but also makes you think.
Do our digital products give us pleasure? Do they make us think? They could. I’m not sure this is the norm but I witnessed some really beautiful examples this week.
Can you feel a book through sound? I did. Hannah Davis created a musical interpretation of A Clockwork Orange, and just like the book it was frenetic, joyous, and malevolent all at once. She mapped the author’s style, syntax and grammar to emotion ratios which were then mapped to sounds. My body understood what the sounds conveyed (without ever hearing this song before); I thought about how much can be communicated (and how quickly!) without any direct exchange of words.
What does a digital book look like? I saw one (and it’s not to be mistaken for an e-book). When designing the Poetic Computation reader, Taeyoon Choi and HAWRAF wanted to honor the wonderful things about holding a book while also making the information in the book as accessible as possible. They chose to focus on how a book feels, rather than how the book looks. In fact, you can change how the book looks based on your own aesthetic (or even dyslexia). My favorite feature of this digital book is the flippable pages — you can visually understand where you are in the chapter, based on how many pages you see “underneath” the one you’re on now. It’s a pleasure to flip through and feel progress.
I argue that more of our digital products need to thoughtfully consider how they make people feel. A cheap, yet relatable example, is one of the infinite scroll. How icky* is it to feel like you’ve wasted time? Endlessly consumed? What if our digital products were as considerate of our feelings as poets are? *That is not to say that we should avoid negative feelings, if they are productive (my mind immediately goes to Escape Your Bubble, a Facebook plug-in that shows you views opposite of your own).
Simplicity, participation, feeling. These are the themes I plan to explore over the coming weeks.
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Ok, so what did I actually make this week? How am I putting this into practice?
Here is an animation that you can control the color of by moving your mouse, using variables, functions, and objects.
