Eyecode is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of its viewers' eyes. Each clip is articulated by the duration between two of the viewer's blinks. The unnerving result is a typographic tapestry of recursive observation.
In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images. While I do not believe that Dickinson necessarily had any direct awareness of Lovelace’s writing (which she termed “poetical science”), these computational concepts enable new readings that provide insight into some of the more puzzling aspects of Dickinson’s work. Moreover, through exploring these similarities in poetry and programming at the dawn of the age of computation, I articulate relationships between the lyrical and logical that are more evidently realized in the contemporary genre of electronic literature.
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
This video project explores Norwegian folk histories that return as fragments in light of ongoing volcanic eruptions. The project was recorded in Bergen following the disruptions caused by the activities of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. A folk history of disaster is set against slowly revolving images set in a contemporary landscape. This is the first of a series of works recorded in Norway that juxtapose folk histories and contemporary events to explore narrative and associative characteristics of cultural anxieties and collective memory. The project was researched and filmed by Roderick Coover in 2010 thanks to a distinguished-scholar-in-residence award from the University of Bergen.
My tagline for literary works that employ high degrees of recursion, or recursive-like structures, is “how solipsistic?” since my sense is that truly recursive linguistic practice nearly entirely decimates any of the common expressive characteristics of language — there is no possibility of a lyric “I,” no fiction of witness, no documentary content, no pretense to the poem being somehow a charting of the play of the mind (as poets such as Robert Creeley and John Ashbery have described their practice), no politics, etc.
One could say that a recursive poem is pure structure, but that structure would be quite meaningless if the poem did not have some qualities that we associate with normative signification
The ultimate recursive work that I know of is called “2002: A Palindrome Story” by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie.
This video project explores Norwegian folk histories that return as fragments in light of ongoing volcanic eruptions. The project was recorded in Bergen following the disruptions caused by the activities of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. A folk history of disaster is set against slowly revolving images set in a contemporary landscape. This is the first of a series of works recorded in Norway that juxtapose folk histories and contemporary events to explore narrative and associative characteristics of cultural anxieties and collective memory. The project was researched and filmed by Roderick Coover in 2010 thanks to a distinguished-scholar-in-residence award from the University of Bergen.
Direction: Roderick CooverWriting: Scott RettbergTranslation by: Daniel Apollon, Jill Walker Rettberg, and Gro Jørstad NilsenVoices: Gro Jørstad Nilsen and Jan Arild BreisteinCo-producers: Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg