First Screening: Computer Poems

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Description (in English): 

A suite of a dozen kinetic poems programmed in Apple BASIC. Later, as the first versions became inaccessible, the works were recreated in HyperCard in the early 1990s (after bpNichol's death), and then in 2007 recreated in javascript for the web, and simultaneously the original BASIC and Hypercard files were republished for download.

I ♥ E-Poetry entry: 
Technical notes: 

"The Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder has two 5 ¼-inch floppies with incomplete versions of First Screening on them (along with the requisite Apple IIe for viewing them). These beta-phase versions of First Screening not only differ from each other and from the published version (which is available online as an emulation of the software running on an Apple IIe) in content, but also in metadata (Katherine Wooler in: "from Apple Basic to Hypercard, or, Translating Translating bpNichol" (MLA-blog).

Contributors note: 

Recreated in various contemporary media by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi and Dan Waber.

Screen shots: 
The permanent URL of this page: 
Record posted by: 
Jill Walker Rettberg