I really struggled with finding oones that I actually like so I wanted to share the ones I thought were particularly good.
This is a surreal piece about how women fit into the urban landscape:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywkP5L3D24&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D19D9Q2zE
Interesting idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwjUfPhGvy0&feature=related
I think this could have been more dynamic and the conneection between written word and visuals could have been more interesting. Still, this is a lot better made than most of the video poems I've seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6BZDSRhkmQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKASmayhb7k
I feel like people are trying too hard to be clever with all this post modern pretense. I've yet to see a video poem that reallly communicates emotion effectivvely...any kind of emotion, even utter boredom and apathy. Nothing. In my opinion, the above at least come close to redemption of humanity.
I will not give up though, because I think there must be good digital poetry out there and it deserves to be heard and seen!
Monday, October 29, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Random Poetry Generators
Is poetry only the domain of organic, meaning-making beings? Can only organic matter create original writing in response to input of information? Is it the same as poetry derived from human experiencce? Most of the time, the poetry that is created by generators is absurd and no more than an amusing curiousity, but some programmers developed more elegant and complex solutions over the past few years.
I found a few good generators online:
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
http://www.languageisavirus.com/automatic_poetry_generator.html
http://poetry.namegeneratorfun.com/
The following is a hilarious Gothic poetry generator:
http://www.deadlounge.com/poetry/created.html
You can change words and themes in this one. A lot to play with:
http://www.jelks.nu/poetry/dom/
and here's some information about a more ambitious project involving a program that can infer grammar and syntax rules based on internet texts. The program starts out as a blank slate, pulling words out of pieces of writing and using the rules that govern language to compose its own poetry:
http://www.alpha60.de/poetrymachine/poetrymachine.html
Enjoy! :D
I found a few good generators online:
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
http://www.languageisavirus.com/automatic_poetry_generator.html
http://poetry.namegeneratorfun.com/
The following is a hilarious Gothic poetry generator:
http://www.deadlounge.com/poetry/created.html
You can change words and themes in this one. A lot to play with:
http://www.jelks.nu/poetry/dom/
and here's some information about a more ambitious project involving a program that can infer grammar and syntax rules based on internet texts. The program starts out as a blank slate, pulling words out of pieces of writing and using the rules that govern language to compose its own poetry:
http://www.alpha60.de/poetrymachine/poetrymachine.html
Enjoy! :D
Friday, October 12, 2012
Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman is a contemporary experimental poet who writes eloquent and succinct comentary about poetry in his blog. He regularly posts links to interesting documentaries, projects, and poetic movements and theories. This is an invaluable resource to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry, how it came to be what it is and what it might become.
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/
For the sake of convenience, I am also posting this on the side in my links section.
I've had a chance to look through the film section and watch some of the films and the trailers and I thought that, for the most part, the section is well set up. There is a variety in the content and all the videos are embedded within the posts. In some cases, the videos are accompanied by a synopsis and sometimes he even offers his own thoughts on the execution and the story of the films he chooses.
Some of the spoilers irk me. I think that it is not necessary to have a complete rundown of everything that happens within a movie. With blog technology and sophisticated features, it isn't difficult to figure out how to post a basic synopsis and link to an extended posts that includes in-depth commentary for those who have seen the movie and are looking for opinions about it.
I also don't like that several of the links are dead although the posts are still on the same page. I think that if a post has a video as its main point of interest, it's a sign of respect to the viewer to ensure that everything works properly. Otherwise, it may be better to just offer commentary. Nevertheless, most of the videos work and offer thought provoking material. Silliman goes out of his way to discuss both merits and weak points of the movies he is discussing.
Ron Silliman keeps to the consistent theme of art and poetry related posts in his film section. He also remains true to his focus on contemporary poets. So much of what is posted in blogs on the internet -poetry related or not- is a tangle of random information that can be difficult to process because of its lack of structure and general purpose, but I think that Ron's readers have a good idea of what they'll find while clicking through the pages of his blog.
While the film page has a clear focus, it is full of little-known work and interviews that nobody would think of looking for online.
I probably enjoyed Chris Marker's atmospheric movie the most. Such early experiments in production fascinate me because based on what I've seen in the paast, I think that in the infancy of film making, people felt more free to experiment and there were less inflexible expectations from audiences and production studios. This movie only reaffirmed my initial impression. Although directors were more technologically limited, they found ways to be innovative in their sequencing, narration styles and soundtrack choices/creation.
Of course, now we look back and see the limitations: the jagged movement, the slow and awkward transitions, all of those things that would make us ask for a refund in a modern-day movie theatre. To me, this was the painful labour of film making, of an industry which has matured immensely. There is something poetic about how the images float and I wonder if the changes in transitional rhythms are intentional or just the result of technological limitations.
Although this blog is supposed to be about cutting edge, avant garde experimental poetry of today, it's always fun to climb backwards through the tunnel of time and witness the meagre beginnings of what later evolved in million-dollar film production. I only wished Silliman had shown us more experimental and low-budget, low key experimentation that is happening all around us right now thanks to broadcasting services such as Youtube and Vimeo.
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/
For the sake of convenience, I am also posting this on the side in my links section.
I've had a chance to look through the film section and watch some of the films and the trailers and I thought that, for the most part, the section is well set up. There is a variety in the content and all the videos are embedded within the posts. In some cases, the videos are accompanied by a synopsis and sometimes he even offers his own thoughts on the execution and the story of the films he chooses.
Some of the spoilers irk me. I think that it is not necessary to have a complete rundown of everything that happens within a movie. With blog technology and sophisticated features, it isn't difficult to figure out how to post a basic synopsis and link to an extended posts that includes in-depth commentary for those who have seen the movie and are looking for opinions about it.
I also don't like that several of the links are dead although the posts are still on the same page. I think that if a post has a video as its main point of interest, it's a sign of respect to the viewer to ensure that everything works properly. Otherwise, it may be better to just offer commentary. Nevertheless, most of the videos work and offer thought provoking material. Silliman goes out of his way to discuss both merits and weak points of the movies he is discussing.
Ron Silliman keeps to the consistent theme of art and poetry related posts in his film section. He also remains true to his focus on contemporary poets. So much of what is posted in blogs on the internet -poetry related or not- is a tangle of random information that can be difficult to process because of its lack of structure and general purpose, but I think that Ron's readers have a good idea of what they'll find while clicking through the pages of his blog.
While the film page has a clear focus, it is full of little-known work and interviews that nobody would think of looking for online.
I probably enjoyed Chris Marker's atmospheric movie the most. Such early experiments in production fascinate me because based on what I've seen in the paast, I think that in the infancy of film making, people felt more free to experiment and there were less inflexible expectations from audiences and production studios. This movie only reaffirmed my initial impression. Although directors were more technologically limited, they found ways to be innovative in their sequencing, narration styles and soundtrack choices/creation.
Of course, now we look back and see the limitations: the jagged movement, the slow and awkward transitions, all of those things that would make us ask for a refund in a modern-day movie theatre. To me, this was the painful labour of film making, of an industry which has matured immensely. There is something poetic about how the images float and I wonder if the changes in transitional rhythms are intentional or just the result of technological limitations.
Although this blog is supposed to be about cutting edge, avant garde experimental poetry of today, it's always fun to climb backwards through the tunnel of time and witness the meagre beginnings of what later evolved in million-dollar film production. I only wished Silliman had shown us more experimental and low-budget, low key experimentation that is happening all around us right now thanks to broadcasting services such as Youtube and Vimeo.
The Xenotext Experiment - Encoding Poetry in DNA
Here is a video in which he explains his project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCQfBZwRPA&feature=relmfu
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole process: Christian Bok's project involves encoding poetry in DNA of bacteria. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy because mutations in organism may be unpredictable when a foreign genetic code is introduced. I'm sure that it's just paranoia on my part exacerbated by the fact that I'm reading Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' at the moment. The scientists who are working on the project with Christian Bok surely know what they are doing and would destory any life forms that can infect other organisms with viruses.
The dangers are there of course, but I can understand why conducting such an experiment is incredibly tantilizing. For a long time, poetry has been largely the domain of mystics, romantics, sentimentalists. None of these are necessarily negative worldviews to express through poetry, but there is a negative byproduct that is also partially a result of how we conceptualize science as unemotional and dispassionate. The by-product is that our emotional world is tied up in myth and an almost obsessive involvement with the subjective self.
Most people don't think of science as having anything to do with poetry, and it's a shame. While reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I was struck by how poetic some of the paragraphs appeared to me, especially ones pertaining to slow time. Science can be poetic, and poetry can be scientific. A poetry anthology discovered in the school library confirmed my sentiments - the volume contained a selection of poetry inspired by the scientific discoveries of the past years.
I appear to be contradicting myself now, but I am not -- most people, from my experience, do not even know that such things exist. To them, poetry is still largely associated with Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. Again, this is not a bad thing to be unaware of new poetry. It does not reflect purely on a person's character because everyone has different interests, but it does unfortunately mean that this growing trend of seeing the poetry within scientific processes is largely left unnoticed and not many people experience the benefits of seeing the beauty and mystery contained in something that they probably wanted to forget about after passing grade 11 science.
Christian Bok takes this new poetic interest in science a step further by using incredibly profound and beautiful processes of DNA encoding to create a container for poems that may even outlive our civilizations. That is what he is hoping for and he also talks about extraterrestrial communication using this method of encoding linguistic messages.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about experiment is that his hope for mutation and spontaneous generation of poetry has been realized last year. His poem caused the bacterium to write its own poem in response to the original piece. This means that we can not only store poetry for indefinite periods of time (using this process) but also use it to generate new poetry.
I am, however, a little skeptical about that last part. Such poetry generation is coded to be constructed much like the poetry generated by computers, and the bulk of that turned out to be gramatically correct but meaningless, because meaning is more than the sum of obeying syntax and grammar rules. Sometimes meaning is more profound when these rules are disobeyed (as in concrete poetry), so it's not sufficient and not necessary for creating meaning.
It appears that the beauty of Bok's poetry is in the process itself; in the integration of something that is often overlooked as a subject of admiration lies the poetry of the possible implications.
I'd have to see more than a line or two from this project and I am going to remain open minded about the content of the poetry resulting from this experiment. It's refreshing to see people trying to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of emotions. Christian Bok talks about his project as an attempt to extend poetry beyond the confines of a book and thus prolong its life and infect the universe with its explicit and implicit meanings.
If this possibility is not as poetic, I don't know what is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCQfBZwRPA&feature=relmfu
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole process: Christian Bok's project involves encoding poetry in DNA of bacteria. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy because mutations in organism may be unpredictable when a foreign genetic code is introduced. I'm sure that it's just paranoia on my part exacerbated by the fact that I'm reading Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' at the moment. The scientists who are working on the project with Christian Bok surely know what they are doing and would destory any life forms that can infect other organisms with viruses.
The dangers are there of course, but I can understand why conducting such an experiment is incredibly tantilizing. For a long time, poetry has been largely the domain of mystics, romantics, sentimentalists. None of these are necessarily negative worldviews to express through poetry, but there is a negative byproduct that is also partially a result of how we conceptualize science as unemotional and dispassionate. The by-product is that our emotional world is tied up in myth and an almost obsessive involvement with the subjective self.
Most people don't think of science as having anything to do with poetry, and it's a shame. While reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I was struck by how poetic some of the paragraphs appeared to me, especially ones pertaining to slow time. Science can be poetic, and poetry can be scientific. A poetry anthology discovered in the school library confirmed my sentiments - the volume contained a selection of poetry inspired by the scientific discoveries of the past years.
I appear to be contradicting myself now, but I am not -- most people, from my experience, do not even know that such things exist. To them, poetry is still largely associated with Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. Again, this is not a bad thing to be unaware of new poetry. It does not reflect purely on a person's character because everyone has different interests, but it does unfortunately mean that this growing trend of seeing the poetry within scientific processes is largely left unnoticed and not many people experience the benefits of seeing the beauty and mystery contained in something that they probably wanted to forget about after passing grade 11 science.
Christian Bok takes this new poetic interest in science a step further by using incredibly profound and beautiful processes of DNA encoding to create a container for poems that may even outlive our civilizations. That is what he is hoping for and he also talks about extraterrestrial communication using this method of encoding linguistic messages.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about experiment is that his hope for mutation and spontaneous generation of poetry has been realized last year. His poem caused the bacterium to write its own poem in response to the original piece. This means that we can not only store poetry for indefinite periods of time (using this process) but also use it to generate new poetry.
I am, however, a little skeptical about that last part. Such poetry generation is coded to be constructed much like the poetry generated by computers, and the bulk of that turned out to be gramatically correct but meaningless, because meaning is more than the sum of obeying syntax and grammar rules. Sometimes meaning is more profound when these rules are disobeyed (as in concrete poetry), so it's not sufficient and not necessary for creating meaning.
It appears that the beauty of Bok's poetry is in the process itself; in the integration of something that is often overlooked as a subject of admiration lies the poetry of the possible implications.
I'd have to see more than a line or two from this project and I am going to remain open minded about the content of the poetry resulting from this experiment. It's refreshing to see people trying to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of emotions. Christian Bok talks about his project as an attempt to extend poetry beyond the confines of a book and thus prolong its life and infect the universe with its explicit and implicit meanings.
If this possibility is not as poetic, I don't know what is.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Integration of Technology in Poetry - First Impressions
The integration of technology in poetry is a fairly new concept for me, especially as it is approached in the 21st century. Although I am awar of the integral role that new technology always played in liberating poetry from its past limitations of form and syntax, I was not aware that a huge body of such experimental poetry existed before the 70's, or that it has burgeoned and expanded in different directions as it has.
The other night, my search for experimental poetry yielded a myriad of different poems, among them interactive pieces and poems in which an attempt has been made to follow a basic structure of simple web coding. It was a little overwhelming to try and trace the origins while getting a general idea of how each is developing its own branches and establishing a place for itself in the minds (and maybe hearts?) of poetry readers.
It's a little intimidating to just begin writing about a topic when I know next to nothing about it. So far, my blogging endeavours focused on topics of familiarity but alll of a sudden, I have to blog about something new and very complex. It's kind of like coming upon a spiderweb and having to find its centre and where it begins. It's impossible. Maybe it's not even necessary. Maybe a more holistic and open ended exploration will leave me with a deeper appreciation of how artists have used technology to build and enhance their works of art.
After all, a majority of such experimental poetry is a deprarture from linear thought and conventional structure. It's meant to be taken in as little bits and pieces of thought and reassembled within the mind of the reader. It's an invitation for interpretation and dialogue. Sometimes its unnerving even - maybe an invitation to step back from what grade school teachers drilled into our minds regardng proper models of self-expression.
All in all, it's an invitation to play and engage the imagination. The format is different. The words often collide and create unexpected reactions. How can I expect to tackle this topic in the usual way? I suppose I could write reflection poems and essays and indulge in reading long theoretical papers that analyze the function of technology in poetry but I don't think any of these things alone would do the topic justice.
Besides, this is all very new to me and I don't feel that I have covered enough ground at this point to be able to expound on this topic in an engaging way.
I can only hope that you will join me in exploring the possibilities of integrating technology in poetry in meaningful ways.
My initial impression of poems that explore this relationship between poetry and technology is that there is a certain playfulness about these pieces that cannot be accomplished without the technology that is utilized but then the poems hold all meaning in playing with structures of language but onten the resulting texts don't offer meaning of their own in the traditional sense.
What is actually written on the page takes a back seat to how it is written and how individual readers react to the pieces. Many of the poems are not even written in the language that we customarily reserve for poetic expressions. It's hard to pin point what it is that is lacking from many of these poems but its an issue of lacking fluidity in establishing relation between the different parts. It's as if a child deconstructed something beautiful and forgot to reassemble it, as if mankind has grown tired with its ability and drive for creating meaning and conceptualizing beauty.
This is the case with most of the interactive poetry games that I've seen and a lot of concrete poems that I found over the last few days. Perhaps I have not yet cracked the codes of these poetic forms and that's why I can only see the surface play of reflections...I like to think that there might be a deeper meaning and I am still open to it, but I feel that the greatest meaning of poetry as always been the relationship between the lyrical qualities of a poem and its inner and outer layers of meaning.
This important interplay between the elements of a poem is not completely lost in video poems, which I will probably dedicate a whole post to! For now, I'd recommend taking a look at the video poems in the link on the side bar of my blog for an idea of how moving images can add new dimensions to poems. Not all of them are good by any means, and good is a subjectivve and vauge assessment, but the few included do offer something in terms of content and the seamless integration of technology within poetry.
I'd like to remind you that his is just an initial reflection, and is not meant to be a serious commentary on a subject that I am not qualified to write about in any serious way. This will probably end up being more of a database of experimental poetry and maybe a home to some of my own experiments at some point.
Happy Long Weekend!
The other night, my search for experimental poetry yielded a myriad of different poems, among them interactive pieces and poems in which an attempt has been made to follow a basic structure of simple web coding. It was a little overwhelming to try and trace the origins while getting a general idea of how each is developing its own branches and establishing a place for itself in the minds (and maybe hearts?) of poetry readers.
It's a little intimidating to just begin writing about a topic when I know next to nothing about it. So far, my blogging endeavours focused on topics of familiarity but alll of a sudden, I have to blog about something new and very complex. It's kind of like coming upon a spiderweb and having to find its centre and where it begins. It's impossible. Maybe it's not even necessary. Maybe a more holistic and open ended exploration will leave me with a deeper appreciation of how artists have used technology to build and enhance their works of art.
After all, a majority of such experimental poetry is a deprarture from linear thought and conventional structure. It's meant to be taken in as little bits and pieces of thought and reassembled within the mind of the reader. It's an invitation for interpretation and dialogue. Sometimes its unnerving even - maybe an invitation to step back from what grade school teachers drilled into our minds regardng proper models of self-expression.
All in all, it's an invitation to play and engage the imagination. The format is different. The words often collide and create unexpected reactions. How can I expect to tackle this topic in the usual way? I suppose I could write reflection poems and essays and indulge in reading long theoretical papers that analyze the function of technology in poetry but I don't think any of these things alone would do the topic justice.
Besides, this is all very new to me and I don't feel that I have covered enough ground at this point to be able to expound on this topic in an engaging way.
I can only hope that you will join me in exploring the possibilities of integrating technology in poetry in meaningful ways.
My initial impression of poems that explore this relationship between poetry and technology is that there is a certain playfulness about these pieces that cannot be accomplished without the technology that is utilized but then the poems hold all meaning in playing with structures of language but onten the resulting texts don't offer meaning of their own in the traditional sense.
What is actually written on the page takes a back seat to how it is written and how individual readers react to the pieces. Many of the poems are not even written in the language that we customarily reserve for poetic expressions. It's hard to pin point what it is that is lacking from many of these poems but its an issue of lacking fluidity in establishing relation between the different parts. It's as if a child deconstructed something beautiful and forgot to reassemble it, as if mankind has grown tired with its ability and drive for creating meaning and conceptualizing beauty.
This is the case with most of the interactive poetry games that I've seen and a lot of concrete poems that I found over the last few days. Perhaps I have not yet cracked the codes of these poetic forms and that's why I can only see the surface play of reflections...I like to think that there might be a deeper meaning and I am still open to it, but I feel that the greatest meaning of poetry as always been the relationship between the lyrical qualities of a poem and its inner and outer layers of meaning.
This important interplay between the elements of a poem is not completely lost in video poems, which I will probably dedicate a whole post to! For now, I'd recommend taking a look at the video poems in the link on the side bar of my blog for an idea of how moving images can add new dimensions to poems. Not all of them are good by any means, and good is a subjectivve and vauge assessment, but the few included do offer something in terms of content and the seamless integration of technology within poetry.
I'd like to remind you that his is just an initial reflection, and is not meant to be a serious commentary on a subject that I am not qualified to write about in any serious way. This will probably end up being more of a database of experimental poetry and maybe a home to some of my own experiments at some point.
Happy Long Weekend!
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