perl

This poem is the result of two creative collaborations: Max Dunlop’s poem “orbital: a postcard to space travel” and Neil Jenkins’ generative engine that creates an entirely different experience of the work. A conceptual link is that of human communication across space. The idea of a postcard is very tied to travel, since they can be sent through a postal service anywhere on the planet to a physical address. This paper-based model of human communication doesn’t work well when people leave the planet, requiring technologies that work with electronic signals. During a time of digital networks, packets are still being sent from one address to another, but they are digital sequences sent to numerical IP addresses, translated into more natural language by DNS servers. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This literary game which can be equally used to create prose and verse is a tribute to the Surrealist parlor game known as the “exquisite cadaver” and the paper-based Mad Libs created by Roger Price and Leonard Stern in 1953 (for more details, read Montfort’s introduction to the Literary Games issue of Poems that GO). This program originally created in Perl allows people to create texts and tag words to become “dreamfields.” When someone blindly fills in the dreamfield, it reconstructs the text with the reader’s input. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)