IF ( ) THEN ( ) by Jutta Steidl
If computer language becomes
poetry, can poetry be programmed? They call themselves code poets, code
workers, net.artisans, digital artisans or software artists, and they all
have one thing in common: they work with source codes, network protocols
and program scripts. In this way they write and produce digital poetry.
For computer languages are languages. They posses all the elementary
components characteristic of language: their own syntax, a defined
lexicon, semantic rules. So can this language, originally conceived as a
medium of communication between humans and machines and converted
ultimately into orders, also tell of the abysses of human life and how
human souls fall between zero and one?
I have nothing
to
make a poem
a whole language
a whole life
a whole mind
a
whole memory
I have nothing
to make a poem
Ernst
Jandl
If you surf through those corners of the Net devoted to the
arts, you will find – and that is the only place you will find it; not in
any of the classical literary venues, libraries, or other places where
literature or recipes for literature are produced – countless examples of
digital poetry, which have quite definite parallels with classical
literary forms. Links with concrete poetry, in particular, are very
striking.
Create.Object
That language, once
removed from its context, becomes concrete, is a phenomenon well known
from concrete poetry. This literary form is self referential: it is
concerned with words, letters and punctuation marks. Thus concrete poetry
is mostly reduced to a few words and characters, reflecting speech as a
medium in itself. The roots of concrete poetry stretch back to Classical
Antiquity. A special form of this genre is the figure poem. The
arrangement of words, letters or signs forms a picture which has an
immediate relation with the content. A forerunner of this was the
so-called Carmen Cancellatum of late Christian Antiquity. Examples can be
found in the grid poems of the monk Hrabanus Maurus in his ”liber de
laudibus sanctae crucis.” Or later, from the baroque period, the figure
poems of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. If we look at these figure
poems today, they need to be interpreted step by step, using the
principles of hermeneutics, just like modern concrete poems and digital
texts. Obviously, given the crucifix shape, the content of Catharina von
Greiffenberg’s work consists in a celebration of the cross, the
resurrection of the dead, the redemption of the soul.
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sin (
) (the Fall of Man, or Sinus and Cosinus) Can the works of
today’s digital poets be placed directly in this context? From texts
reminiscent of free prose, to digital figure poems, right up to
text-generating haikus – the range of these digital works is very large.
And, even within these categories, their own individual stylistic
peculiarities make it possible to identify differences in the
”handwriting” of the programmers concerned. At hackers’ parties in
gymnasia, or among circles with literary pretensions on the Net, a series
of competitions is regularly held to decide who can write the ”most
beautiful” or ”most elegant” code. The criteria involve successful
composition, stringent complexity, elegance, stylistic assurance and, last
but not least, technical perfection. One of these competitions is
”The international obfuscated C Code contest.” Let us look at one of the
prize-winning codes, www.ioccc.org/banks.c, a little
more closely. It was written in the ANSI C computer language. Form and
content are a unity. Thus we can already call it literature. Or is it a
technical game? Once compiled and executed, it is a three dimensional
wireframe flight simulator. The aircraft is a subjective view, and the
scenario being explored is read from another file. if ( )
else ( ) Neither programming as an art nor digital poetry are
new phenomena. Alan Sondheim, the performance artist, art critic and
aesthetic theorist, has been occupied with linguistic artefacts on the
Internet since the 1970s. Inspired by computer viruses, many of his poems
and other works cannot be deciphered without a knowledge of computers. The
program code is the poem. And, at the same time, the poem is the program
code. This is a characteristic feature of many of Sondheim’s cocalled
”codeworks.” The texts can be read as poetical texts and are there to
provide inspiration or contemplation. But, once interpreted by a machine,
the poem serves to generate a further text. And thus, through interaction
with the computer, it fulfils its programmed order. Sharon Hopkins
has trodden a quite particular path within digital poetry. She was a
pioneer of Perl Poetry, to which she gave a vital stimulus during its
initial phase, at the start of the 1990s. In the computer language called
PERL (practical extraction and report language) traditional poems can be
translated into computer language. The texts show evidence of immanent
poetic structures, and here too some are so programmed that haikus or
limericks can be generated from them. The first Perl poem of all was
composed by Larry Wall in 1990 and was written as a haiku.
Print STDOUT q
Just another Perl hacker
Unless $pring
perl haiku untitled, Larry Wall, 18 March 1991 The
haiku is the shortest poetic form in world literature. Its three lines are
composed of five, seven and five syllables respectively. A haiku describes
a brief moment; it records an event; it paints a picture in words. Haikus
always refer, either directly or indirectly, to a season of the year. In
Wall’s Perl haiku, the word needed for the season (in Japanese ”kigo”)
comes in the third line: ”spring.” This Perl poem fulfils all the criteria
of the classical haiku form when it is read aloud. Then the letter ”q”
becomes ”queue” and the $ sign becomes the two-syllable word ”Dollar”
(giving this line five syllables). Phonetic reproduction of
digital poems poses a particular challenge, one not be underestimated or
ignored, since it is either necessary for an understanding of the work, or
adds a completely new dimension to it. For example, the recitation of the
”I love you” source code by the group epidemiC at the Venice Biennial in
2000. (
www.epidemiC.ws/love.mp3) Poems sound more familiar, however,
if their characteristic style sounds like ”free speech.” Many works by
Sharon Hopkins have no need to fulfil any further program function apart
from their poetic garb. Yet the author herself says that the greatest
weakness of these poems is exactly this: the final limits of program
language. To do justice to the rules and regulations of the program
language, it is necessary to insert a large number of parentheses,
revocations and special definitions. Despite the 250 words and more which
are defined in PERL, the vocabulary remains limited when it comes to
describing moods, feelings and interior landscapes. So what can you write
about? Or, to ask the question a better way, how can you order a machine
to have sex, love and death? ‚Love was’
&&
‘love will be’ if
(I, ever-faithful),
do wait,
patiently;
“negative”, “wordly”, values disappear,
@last,
‘love triumphs’;
join (hands, checkbooks),
pop champagne-corks,
“live happily-ever-after”.
“not so” ?
tell me: “I
listen”,
(do-not-hear);
push (rush, hurry) && die
lonely if not-careful;
“I will wait.”
&wait
# Sharon Hopkins, June 26th, 1991 # rush (a perl poem)
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SoGetFile
Libraries of prize-winning programs,
source codes for viruses and documents of software art already exist, both
on the Internet and in private analogue collections. The languages in
which these works have been written are called Assembler, PASCAL, C++,
Visual Basic and PERL. Some works have literary pretensions, some are
successful self-executing programs. Authors of viruses occupy a special
area. Poised between program art and craft, by no means all viruses are
destructive. Perhaps only a fraction of them. The virus programmers’ scene
includes so-called crackers, hackers, black hats, white hats and script
kiddies, depending on the group of programmers to which they belong. Just
as in real (analogue) life, there are ostensible goodies and baddies,
plenty of opaque shades of grey, and niches for the creative mind.
Onel de Guzman (”Spyder”), author of the ”I love you” virus
certainly does not think of himself as a poet, rather as a creative author
of viruses; nevertheless, the source code for that virus, which caused the
greatest financial damage the world has ever seen, can be ”read” in an
almost touching and dramatic way.
rem barok – loveletter (vbe)
< I hate to go to school >
rem by: spyder / ispyder@mail.com /
GRAMMERSoft Group/ Manila, Philippines
On Error resume next
Dim fso,
dirsystem,dirwin,dirtemp,eq,ctr,file,vbscopy,dow
Eq=””
Ctr=0
Set
fso = CreateObject (“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Set file =
fso.OpenTextFile (Wscript.ScriptFullname,1)
Vbscopy =
file.ReadAll
…
Introduction to the I love you source
code
Author: Onel de Guzman (Spyder)
It only remains to answer
one question: which is the decisive thing – what the machine does, or how
you program and interpret the machine or its language system? Where does
the source code end? And where does poetry start? In one way or another we
must approach the inside of the computer. The hermeneutics of source code
do exist. Only when we can read the original, the primal text, will be
able to recognise, through the very soullessness of our computers –
something which may cause us some astonishment – the true beauty of human
language; will we able to see, however dimly, the emptiness of these
intermediate spaces between zero and one.
rem
The code is shimmering everywhere. In children’s bedrooms, where
sit adventurous hackers. In virtual literary salons, where the
self-elected digital bohème gathers. In the libraries on our hard disks.
In the networks of industrial companies. And, last but not least, in our
heads. Nothing can be more certain. Not even literary history and
criticism.
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