‘Computation Is my Main Artistic Medium’

Many poems of yours seem to lavish in the constant and infinite flow of language. Does it mean generative poems run counter to analogical language, striving to find a new computer-compatible mode of expression?

My computational poems include ones that run endlessly (boundlessly, infinitely), and it can be provocative to develop and present these. These are not the only sort, however. My work as a computational poet is most generally an exploration of computation, language, and what they can do together. So, for instance, computer programs can use pseudorandomness or they can be deterministic, producing the same outputs each time. I have computational poems of both sorts. Programs can run endlessly or terminate. You might imagine that any program that produces an infinite amount of text would have to employ pseudorandomness, but this isn’t the case. In my work Round, the digits of pi (a fixed but infinite sequence) are the basis for the text that is presented. Similarly, some of my work is interactive, while some of it isn’t. Some of it involves sampling repeatedly from a distribution, while in a few cases I present exhaustive output. In a few cases I use multimedia capabilities of the computer, but I often don’t.
Several works of mine that you can find online, and very many that have been displayed in exhibitions, produce text continually. But I also present computational work in book form. Ultimately, computation (which is, concretely, code) is my main artistic medium, and the screen, the book, and so on are ways this work can manifest itself.

Does your work bear the stamp of mutant poetry like the Oulipo or technopaegnia creations? Can we say that Nick Montfort’s poems animate calligrams with algorithms? Or would this view be too reductive?

The work of the Oulipo and the concepts that underlie concrete poetry (much more than picture, pattern, or shape poetry) are important to me. Of course, I am not just trying to do what any existing movement or avant-garde has already done. I also don’t think I am trying to extend the project of the Oulipo in a computational way – the group Alamo already has done some work on that. Nor am I just trying to add computing to concrete poetry. But ideas such as potential literature, constraint, innovative form, lines of force, poems that are a word rather than words, structures rather than pictures… certainly, these are things I have in mind when I write computational poems.

The red thread of your work seems to be the search for a new language and the question of its arbitrariness. Are your recent poems (such as Digital Ream or Autopia, 2020) still playing with the randomness of language? All along the way, how have linguistic mutations (on the web or on the page) influenced your work?

I don’t think language is random at all. I hope that for some readers (viewers, etc.), Autopia shows that it isn’t. Is it random that we have motor vehicles in the United States named ‘Explorer’ and ‘Pathfinder’? Or ‘Grand Cherokee’? These names were chosen because they embody an idea about freedom of movement that the automobile is supposed to provide. Autopia puts these and other names together into headline-like sentences where the meaning is harder to overlook. Yes, it’s a distributional system, but that doesn’t mean the language it is working on is in any way random.

Progress (2022) exhibits different semiotic codes combined. Is the poem defending the universal creation of a multidirectional language? Are imaginative readers the essential key of your poetry?

While I don’t find it useful to offer too many answers of my own about the poem, I think you are onto something when you ask about ‘imaginative readers’. There is a spectrum of engagement a reader can have with a text. The degree zero is not knowing anything about it or looking at it, but even a reader who does visually apprehend a text, or hear someone read it, can ignore almost all of its aspects – sound, sense, intertextual reference, etc. To appreciate a literary work or even a work of language art, you have at least to read it, not just view it, and get something out of it. The ‘imaginative reader’, as you say, is one who might be able to fill in those things suggested by a text. Perhaps this reader even ‘overreads’ and comes up with notions, interpretations, and ideas not at all intended by the author or justified by the social and cultural context of the work. I would say, great! We have a name for the most skilful ‘overreaders’, who bring their own adaptive readings into the way they develop texts: poets.

Chris Funkhouser deals with generative poems as disjunctive but readable texts. Do you think your poems correspond to this idea?

Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry is a very important book that offers a great perspective on this early work. While it’s impossible to generalize over all the work that has been done, generated texts and digital poems are almost always readable. (Some of them, as with non-digital poems, are made to be illegible.) Many of them are disjunctive, and it’s worth knowing how to deal with that, but I don’t see this as a necessary aspect of all such work.

In your poetry, are readers experiencing their cognitive limits?

That seems like an extreme way of putting it! As far as I can tell, readers are not actually pushed to the limits of their minds and their thinking. However, I do hope that my work challenges conventional ways of reading and requires new ones. Sometimes this may mean new ways of ‘surface reading’ and dealing with what is on the screen or page. Sometimes this may mean bringing some skill and background as a programmer to the understanding of what my code is doing.

Alexandra Saemmer deals with the loss of direction or ‘the frenzy of the click’ to which readers yield when navigating through cyber poems. Do you agree? In other words, are most of your poems linear and unpredictable?

This concept seems highly specific to poems you click on, hypertext poems with links and lexia. I really don’t do this type of work. A few of my digital poems have a mouse-based interface. There is, for instance, my collaboration with Stephanie Strickland, Sea and Spar Between, which offers an expanse where it’s almost inevitable that a reader will get lost. On the other hand, Arf Magna is quite simple and welcoming. I suspect those who interact with it won’t feel lost or frenzied. And most of my poems aren’t interactive in the traditional sense. If you did want to interact with them, you’d modify the code.