Code Poetry

Sampled from the various languages of computer programming and the WWW, ted warnell uses fragmented alphabets, numbers, and miscellaneous other characters to achieve his particular brand of code literature, and the poems he creates -- a selection of which he shares below -- read like contemporary remixes of Vorticism.1
Like the Vorticists' myriad forms of visual, literary, and typographical audacity -- what "Manifesto - II" in BLAST I refers to as "insidious and volcanic chaos"2 (38) -- warnell's code poems concern themselves with dynamism, the modern world, and the machine age. Instead of automobiles, factories, and the tools of symmetrical warfare, though, warnell's "(vor)texts" focus on twenty-first century mechanisms: CPUs and the internet (img. 16), contemporary "digitality,"3 and the other information-distributing systems in our midst.