” … there is a fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made. Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials of poetry. … Generally speaking the material of the concrete poem is language …” (Concrete Poetry — A World View. 1968.)
“The Dadameter is a tool for the profiling of language at large scale and the historical tracking of artistic and literary movements. It brings about a new alliance between art, science and global finance.
We use up-to-date 2.0 trend analysis and data visualization technologies, neural networks, graph theory or quantitative structural linguistics in order to be able to predict the next artistic craze.”
Christophe Bruno (2002 – 2008)
Lilian Lijn, Sky Never Stops, 1965, Collection V&A Museum
Broken Jaw (2006)
Concrete, enamel paint,vinyl lettering. Sculpture: 70 x 60 x 50cm. Text dimensions variable.
“Ces arbres reposent sur une arborescence complexe composée des lettres de l’alphabet.”
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language crawls thru tree tunnels
unknotting calibrated moist
interfaces of cambium cognition
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The series attempts to break down our understanding of language and challenge our relationship to meaning. The languages referenced include an array of tongues from Ancient Hebrew to Mandarin. Each episode is 3 minutes in length including a short introduction.
Why does this img remind me of txt msgs?

- Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
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“One must free oneself from one’s ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality — which is an even greater illusion.”
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso Radical Thinkers edition, London, 2007, p. 50
1980s-1995: MIT Visible Language Group
“…literature is too multi-faceted, rambunctious, and iconoclastic to fit the limits of any definition… Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent and often wearied eye.…Thus, while narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the everyday appear often as elements that language poets think should be rejected, postlanguage poets such as Juliana Spahr, Susan Smith Nash, Jefferson Hansen, Liz Willis, Peter Gizzi, Chris Stroffolino, Jennifer Moxley, Joe Ross, Lisa Jarnot, myself and many others have been consciously using one or several of these elements in their work, without returning to the sort of naive justifications of those elements that continue to be a feature of more mainstream American poetry.”
The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.]
Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.[Aldous Huxley. Culture and the Individual. 1963, Playboy]
Crystalpunk: Meaning is to language what Soup is to a Fork
“Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game of Life, the origin of language and the origin of mind, the suspected but never-realised capabilities of mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost, the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs”
Piet Zwart Institute – Words Made Flesh
WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer
A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.
















