Digital Poetry and Code

One of the most interesting things I encountered this week in the course was the concept of digital poetry. It first came up while I was experiencing the CAVE, and then again when Professor Cayley gave a guest lecture. During the simulation of the dancer, actor, and musician, it was a strange experience to have someone control what someone else ‘virtually’ was saying. Instead of only using 5-8 phrases, or however many there were, one could program many more different poetic words or phrases into the keyboard. In that case, it could be random in which the words and phrases are expelled in the simulation, creating new poetry every time. Then, during the lecture, when Cayley showed us the ‘speaking clock’ program, the concept of code intertwined with digital poetry was brought up again. Although the pairs of words weren’t necessarily random, they were generated by code to be a certain way.

I don’t know how I feel about such randomized poetry, in which you enter different codes to represent different words and then make them pair up and form phrases at random. I feel it take the creativity out of the art. I just hope in the future such things as poetry and art don’t get phased out entirely.