This is a reading performance of the book named Articulations. The poems in Articulations are the output of a computer program that extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their similarities. By turns propulsive and meditative, the poems demonstrate an intuitive coherence found outside the bounds of intentional semantic constraints.
The title of this book, pronounced “shebang,” consists of the first two characters of most files containing scripts or interpreted programs. The “shebang” tells the system to use whatever follows to run the file — that the file is a Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or other program. “Shebang” also means “the entire universe of things that is under consideration,” as in “the whole shebang.” The book is a contribution to conceptual writing, published by a small press, most known to readers by word of mouth or via independent bookstores. It is an essentially subversive offering; having no words, letters, or even numbers in the title is, thus, appropriate.
(Source: Nick Montfort at http://http://nomnym.com/successes.html)
#! (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, 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 constrained 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.
