A Platform Poetics: Computational Art, Material and Formal Specificities, and 101 BASIC Poems
My digital art is highly computational, or process intensive—it is more about code and symbol manipulation, and less about data, the visualization of data, or multimedia effects. But beyond this, what I do often explores specific computer platforms. In this essay I describe how my project 101 BASIC Poems is part of a platform practice engaging the Commodore 64, the Apple II series of computers, and the BASIC programming language. My project 101 BASIC Poems is an initiative to develop just more than a hundred computational artworks, each one not just a digital text but also a computer program that can and should be run. On the computational end of things, a major inspiration is 101 BASIC Computer Games, a collection of BASIC programs that fired the imaginations and scaffolded the programming ability of many people in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I hope you have a sense of how my own artistic and literary practice is not just a computational one, not just one in which I share the software as art, but also one specific to particular computer platforms. ... My work is a way of reflecting on these systems, not mainly as components of my individual past and the home from which I came, but as culturally significant developments, intentionally made to widen access to computing.
