A Female Programer and Poet

Today I came across this blog about the biography of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace a lady from the XIX century who was a mathematician, a kind of programmer and a poet. Her life amaze me. For me It's very interesting  because of despite repression of women and lack of actual programming knowledge she was able to come up with the plan of how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. Another thing that I admire about her is her work on poetical science because she combine logic and poetry. So my Idea of Programing and poetry goes back to XIX century.

Poem and Technology

I could simplify the concept of poetry and technology, the former as human expression and the later as a tool. This way we can easily relate technology and poetry and say people have always used technology to make poetry. Since the invention of ink and paper, poetry and technology have gone through a long journey together; passing by the printing press, the typewriter and now the digital world. I would say that it is thanks to technology that poems have evolved into many kinds, with different depths and people can perceive them in different ways.

Ink and paper was one of the first means to capture poetry. However, with this technology poems were not able to be easily distributed, reaching only a very select audience. Later on, with the development of the printing press there was an improvement over ink and paper since with this technology poems were distributed to more people and it also discarded the problem of handwriting. However these two technologies were available to only a few poets so not everybody was able to share their poems. The next development in text technology was the typewriter and the photocopier. This piece of technology allowed more poets to share their poem and reach more people. All these technologies so far are limited to paper, which decays over time and cannot be modified . With the advent of the Digital World, every poet now has a huge range of devices that allow them to create, distribute and endlessly modify their poems and leave behind (to a certain point) the limitations of paper. Now poems can go beyond cultural, language, and distance barriers reaching even more people and different audiences.

         Technology and poetry, although they seem to be unrelated, actually have a common link. Technology has shaped the way that poetry is created and distributed through its developments over time. With today’s technologies poets can include videos, music, pictures, text in different colors and shape, changing the presentation of the poem and how people perceive it in infinite ways. All this is just another step in the evolution of poetry and technology. This leaves me to wonder: what and how could be coming up next?

code {poems} Is An Anthology Of Thoughtful And Moving Expressions Of Programming Language

I just read this blog by  "The Creators Project Staff" an interview to Ishac Bertran. This blog talks about Poetry and coding For me this blog is an "eyeopener" they explain in more details what I was thinking about this topic. I hope you enjoy it as mush as I did, I let you with a teaser :-)





interview of Ishac Bertran:

Hello world

C++

C

Java

Coding is the action of writing computer code. The images shown are code sources for a computer program in different languages. These pieces of code are the very first ones that most programmers use to learn to code in different languages, in our case C/C++ and Java. The code’s only purpose is to prompt “Hello world, I’m a C/C++/Java program” on the screen. This code is very short but at the same time it’s meaningful, saying so much with so little. This is poetry because it makes me think about a lifespan. It is like a creature is born with the only purpose of greeting us and introducing itself. This creature is only alive for a fraction of a second; it is a lifetime, lived out in a second, and during that time it manages to reach its goal. It’s conscious of itself and everyone else around it.

Programming & Poetry NOT Programing Vs Poetry

In class we have learned about illustrations (and all of its possible meanings), different techniques on how to manipulate text in order to change how a poem appears and how a sentence might have different meanings according to the reader. This principle can be applied to programing as well.  Though it is understandable how some may believe that programming and poetry are at opposite ends of the spectrum,I believe that we can bring them much closer. For instance in programming and in poetry  the writer must take care of syntax, language and structure otherwise the program or poem will not work.

As a programmer I feel that seeing a new way (more efficient and more effective) to code a program is like poetry, because there is a hidden meaning in the same way there is always a better way to code a program. To code, one needs creativity, to think out of the box one needs EXTRA creativity and most people would agree the same applies when one writes a poem.

During class I thought that I was the only person to think about these similarities and so I felt a little confused and doubtful about it because Programming and Poetry seem so different, making the chances of me being wrong very likely. However, Marilyn suggested a couple of times for me to research about this idea which I did and shall talk about further in my next post :-p

The Xenotext Experiment

In the spirit of these thinkers(Pak Wong,1 a cybernetic expert, Eduardo Kac,2 a multimedia artist, and Paul Davies,3 an astronomic expert), I have conceived of The Xenotext Experiment, a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S Burroughs, who declared “the word is now a virus.”7 In this experiment, I propose to address some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a “xenotext” – a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form.

In my research about this experiment on how to store text in the bacteria's DNA, I learned that it's simply amazing for several reasons:

1. It presents a storage device that might last longer than any other device currently used.
2.  It is a technological miniaturization accomplishment. 
3.  it is a new way of computer programming.
4.  It is a very different way to make poetry.
5.  It can be a creative technique to produce two different poems in the same "work".

Since my readers belong to my Poetry class I would like to go deeper in the last two points. We are used to traditional ways of making poetry; for example on some sort of paper or more recently on a monitor or display. However now we are witnessing a new way to make poetry, that is making poetry in life itself!!!. For me as a technologist Dr. Christian Bök's creativity in coming up with the idea of using this technology to transmit his thoughts is amazing. As well as how he figured the right genetic code out to write a poem and then the bacteria write a different poem as a response. However the most impressive of his work is how he accomplish to mix together the two end of the same spectrum, Science and Poetry.




Related Links
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.newscientist.com/

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