Description
Poetry. Media Studies. #! (pronounced "shebang") consists of poetic texts that are presented alongside the short computer programs that generated them. The poems, in new and existing forms, are inquiries into the features that make poetry recognizable as such, into code and computation, into ellipsis, into ways of representing ?, and into the alphabet. Computer-generated poems have been composed by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Alison Knowles and James Tenney, Hugh Kenner and Joseph P. O'Rourke, Charles O. Hartman, and others. The works in #! engage with this tradition of more than 50 years and with constrainted and conceptual writing. The book's source code is also offered as free software. All of the text-generating code is presented so that it, too, can be read; it is all also made freely available for use in anyone's future poetic projects.
Author Bio
Nick Montfort is an author or editor of fifteen books, which include books of poetry along with six from the MIT Press, several collaborations, and several artist's books. Five of his previous books are of computer-generated poetry and include THE TRUELIST (Counterpath Press, 2017), #! (Counterpath Press, 2014), 2x6 (a multi-lingual collaboration, Les Figues, 2016), and Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.
Author City: CAMBRIDGE, MA USA