aisyalam

Amidst a really exhausting day of working on a bunch of texts (10, in fact), I took time out to read a newly published lengthy essay by Dan Hoy titled “The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens when Poets Spend Too Much Time Fucking Around on the Internet,” which is relevant to the research and some of the artwork I’ve been involved lately (if not for years). While I don’t have the time to go into it deeply (you can read it in Jacket 29 (http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html), Hoy frowns on the use of Google to make poems (which he accurately sees as collages), on many fronts. In brief, he has difficulty with “the uncritical use of corporate algorithms as a generator of poetic chance and catalyst for engaging the Other,” and thereby seriously contests Google’s viability as a tool with which to make poetry (“a breeding ground for some bad habits and a utopian view of the Internet’s impact on the poetry community”). I can empathize with his perspective, although I don’t happen to agree with it. When I first heard of Leevi Lehto’s Google Poetry Engine, on the heels of writing a 90 page historical survey on text generators for my Prehistoric Digital Poetry book, I became intrigued by it as a heuristic device. So I began to use it (as I have programs like Merz, TRAVESTY, and MOOs in the past), employing various approaches and levying various processes to make text. By now, the more I use it, which is fairly frequently, the less amount of text emitted by the program is actually used (although a large percentage of the text is still from the search strings, now altered and appended to, usually rather drastically). The information on a subject, place, idea, question, etc. is created, processed, re-processed by both the computer and my brain so that a strange but alluring and provocative cyborgian poem (poetic imprint?) emerges. The pieces I’ve been working on lately, some of which will be included in the database project ("13 States of Malaysia"), are going through at least 7 phases, some machine, some human (including the addition of “original” passages). As far as I (& my brain & eyes) can tell, this isn’t taking the easy route! Of course, it is not for everyone, and I wish I could say that all of the texts were terrific but they aren’t—they’re still very much in Process. By the end my hope is not necessarily that they are stunning and flawless, but rather representative, informative, and engaging at the same time. The jury will be out for awhile, but I’m enjoying the challenge. Anyhow, I’m glad to have Hoy’s piece to bounce off of in more formalized articulations anon..

A little bit of testing on the CD-ROM and some student consultation were the only other things I was involved with today besides sculpting modulated machine poems for Bangsar, Batu Caves, Boh Tea Plantation, Cameron Highlands, Chinese New Year, Dragon Fruit, Kuala Lumpur, Pasar Putrajaya, and Pulau Redang—which were more than enough to keep me occupied (and slightly hallucinating by late afternoon).