‘Never Quite the Same Twice’

The generative poem Seattle Drift (1997) displays a mixture of control and hazard in its process and in the reader’s response. Similarly, it seems to me that Checking in 2 (2023) and Alchemical Cosmography (2023) are exhibiting a wish to combine control (panels) and randomness (in their effects and results). What is the place of hazard and control in your poetry?

As a poet-programmer and artist-programmer, the random is easily summoned and used as a compositional aid in cases where there are many choices and one is roughly as good as but not quite the same as another. This allows one to explore the full combinatorial range of a compositional space, when various of the parameters are randomized within carefully chosen ranges. The graphics are never quite the same twice but obviously of a body.
Seattle Drift is a bit different in its use of the random. The direction and magnitude by which each word moves, each frame, is random – though weighted in such a way that a given word, overall, ends up heading in a particular direction at a particular speed, more or less. In this case, the random gives the animation some variability between successive readings of the poem – but, again, they’re not so different from one another. I wrote an extended piece called Me and the Random1 in which I look at how I use randomness in my own art and at the idea and history of randomness in math and art.
And then there’s control. Just about all of my works are interactive. Just about all of them are works of art, though some of them are also tools, to some extent, like Aleph Null. In tools, one generally has a lot of control. In interactive works of art, not as much. One chooses how the story or thing proceeds, in a work of art, but one is not making it from scratch. A work such as Aleph Null offers controls to let the reader import their own images and more or less create from scratch but, by default, what you see is a work of art.

In Alchemical Cosmography and its mazes of words, figures, creatures and images, circles and numbers, how can readers understand or interpret the poem? Do we need new comprehension codes?

Alchemical Cosmography (‘cosmography’ in the sense of ‘pics of the cosmos’) is quite an extensive, years-long project, as you know.2 I don’t think of this so much as a poem as an online, never-quite-the-same-twice digital collage. Though if one were to think of it as a poem, I’d approach it like this. The letters of the poem are the underlying more than 200 images that are sampled. These images are mainly ninth-to-eighteenth-century publicly licensed images concerned with alchemy and/or cosmography. The words of the poem are the circles filled with random letters of the poem. The sentences of the poem are individual screenshots. The paragraphs or stanzas are the collections of screenshots we see.
The above looks at Alchemical Cosmography as involved in a generative grammar. In a generative grammar, sentences or works are produced by combining the atomic elements of the grammar according to algorithmic rules. That’s really what’s going on in Alchemical Cosmography.

You tell the reader that Alchemical Cosmography ‘generates looks [we]’ve never seen before’. Do you mean we can rely on our visual skills only to appreciate the unexpectedness of the visual poem?

No. If you look at it as a poem, you can think of it as involved in a generative grammar that generates a visual poem. There are undoubtedly other ways to appreciate the ‘unexpectedness’ of it.

Is the poem changing technology or is technology changing the poem? Is your poem in tune with the idea that human consciousness is behind the evolution of the universe (an idea implied by alchemical cosmology as a field of study)?

Well, the underlying images in Alchemical Cosmography are usually pre-evolution, even geocentric. So they are in tune with all sorts of non-scientific ideas. They’re often occult, magical. Of course, the Darwinian notion of evolution is important because it does not require human consciousness or God to generate the diversity of life on earth. But you’re talking about the ‘evolution of the universe’, not the evolution of the life on earth. Keep in mind that the project is ‘alchemical cosmography’, not ‘alchemical cosmology’. Quite different.

Are you willing to invent a new poetic language to generate emotions and unexpected understandings? Eduardo Kac deals with a ‘discontinuous syntax’ within a ‘semiological continuum’, N. K. Hayles relates to ‘flickering signifiers’.

My work does deal in the unexpected, I think. Aleph Null does invent a new poetic language of sorts. And some of my other work does too, I think.

On your vispo website, you wrote that Alchemical Cosmography is in between abstraction and representation. Can you give a further explanation?

It’s representational in that the underlying images, the ones from the ninth to eighteenth centuries, are representational. But it’s abstract in that Alchemical Cosmography creates successive ‘brushstrokes’, each of which is a circle containing a random digital collage of those underlying images.