string-code

This poem, together with 'Square 01', is part of an ongoing series of interactive, experimental and generative poetic texts to generate visual compositions, which fill the viewable space in time, with a growing pattern triggered by sound and silence. If the sound is loud the letters become thicker and bigger. As in many of my pieces, the poems don’t exist until the viewer interacts with them. String_code is the visual representation of the code in Square 01, this is why I am presenting both as a pair. In all poems, the three communication systems converge: image, writing and code. Square 01 is formed by the western alphabet. All the letters appear lineally, in rows, superimposed over each other, until they eventually become an indistinguishable blob. It was my intention to explore the tradition of concrete poetry, its formal representations and production processes using the programming language of Processing. Taking model in Hansjorg Mayer’s alphabetenquadratbuch poem, its minimalist visual form of multiple layers, the desire to escape from the linguistic through the obliteration of the letters and the encapsulation in it by the square. Quality which is even more emphatic in the generative poems, due to the added quality of time engendered in their generative form. This kind of textuality has the impact of a visual artwork, provoking other senses and emotional states as well as open meanings. The shifting from the visual to the linguistic and viceversa to create that in-between state of verbal-visual energy is itself the poem.