In the early 90s Antiorp was renowned for besieging listservs with ASCII poems, in some of her less parseable posts to listservs, Antiorp utilized a style that caused one commentator to compare her to Karl Schwitters' infamous sound poetry  (example: "Ursonate" ). She often playfully deletes random letters and replaces them with symbols (typically a 'y' will be replaced with a "!"); or the ASCII code for the letter may be substituted, or the word is condensed, or 'k' is used in place of 'c' ('korporat'). The morpheme-splicing entropic gymnastics of her idiosyncratic style are consistently astonishing. Turbulent disruptions in the conventional fabric of language decode into thick paradoxical helixes of nonlinear agility. It would be glib if the content were not so often radically involved with questions of gender, technology, armament-industries, korporat corruption. Ideologically perverse in its fanatical adherence to a fluidity which defies definition, to read some of the ASCII interspersed rants of Antiorp is to be introduced to neuronal clusters where language seethes below the level of normative consciousness.

Raw brain-heart processes, analogous to bits and byte-streams of the body that often may seem like nonsense and hallucinations to our high-level conscious-identity interfaces,  have historically been rich fuel for poets. Contemporaneous with Duchamp's introduction of a toilet into a gallery, Hugo Ball and Kurt Shwitters at the Cabaret Voltaire introduced guttural grunts, growls, yelps, and streams of imaginary languages into their poetry performances. Manipulations of graphic elements followed, --the page evolved into arbitrarily lush turbulent horizons.  Eventually under the glandular deconstructivist contortional physics of postmodernism, poetry became whatever we call poetry. Into this expansive atmosphere, in the mid-80's, Ray Kurzweil (a renowned programmer instrumental in developing speech recognition software, the first CCD flatbed scanner, etc….)  launched Cybernetic Poet, a computerized mathematical modeling system which emulates a diversity of poetic styles as it spontaneously improvises new creations. Essentially, it exists at the interstice of a new field of creation where collaboration becomes analogous to initiating the genetic form of a programmed process (software) which then develops work independently of its creator. This perpetual motion would have delighted renaissance theoreticians. This type of software constitutes one feature of an evolving nascent AI landscape which will probably soon supercede the creative output of all humans.

Antiorp's verbal play on the listservs is clearly a more-traditional human-centric evolutionary offshoot of concrete poetry. Resonant comparisons could be made to b.p. nichol or "Wind" by Eugene Gomringer (source: http://www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/p-theory.htm. The twisting of context so that words require effort to be decoded as both visual elements and as signifiers is the primary contribution made by the concrete poetry school. Analogous to this dispersion of immediate meaning (in subtle defiance of the ease of gratification favoured by the products of our entertainment manufacturers ), computer code often moves in convulsive ways challenging our notions of its linearity.

Example, after signing up to Antiorp's email list, I received an email which began:

Virtuosic deluges of messages of similar style intercut with long samples of her computer code (interspersed with occasional bitter spasms of political invective) provoked her banishment from several listservs. She fulfilled the typical model of the manic artist, the babbling obsessive, burning so brightly with fevered incandescence of inspiration that online communities occasionally reluctantly turned against her: she was keeping everyone awake to too large a spectrum of reality. Her diffusive non-linearity imperiled the concentrated topics to which technical listservs are dedicated. From the linguistic evidence, Antiorp would seem to have some personal knowledge of poetically-extreme states (a subtle clue in her exclamation: "- ! juzt forget 2 eat.").

Yet programming also (like some forms of formal poetry) requires an arduous logical concentration. Extreme clarity and absolute precision are necessary to perfect syntax and achieve optimized functioning. In this respect, the dichotomy that arises from Nietzsche's analysis of poets in terms of Apollonian and Dionysian streams must be resolved in the creative programmer: imaginative fervour and logical rigour  need to be synthesized. The quality and breadth of much programming is definitive proof of this resolved synergetic fuel: exploratory abstract imagination, and rigorous analysis leading to clarity of practice.

Analysis of programming in the early 60's "demonstrated that all programs could be written in terms of only three control structures" (Deitel & Deitel 61) First, the sequence structure: the next line of code is read after the previous line in sequential order; same as we read word to word, line to line on this page. Second, selection structure: a choice is made; for example, right now, do we continue reading? or do we go do something else? if we are bored or have an appointment, we quit reading; we make a choice between paths. Third, repetition structure; example: we may continue reading this paragraph until we understand it or until we get tired of the attempt; in other words, we re-read it until the condition of comprehension is satisfied or until we are tired. In pseudo-poetry-code this would be written as a type of cryptic pseudo-haiku:

go on

Basically these three control structures are fundamental conceptual models for approaching programming, or for approaching poetry (or even neurology). Sequential structure is fundamental to how readers construct narratives within the flow of an emotional-intellectual logic. Selection is intrinsic to the accretion of patterns into symbolic nets, resonant fields which yield meaning. Repetition is the chorus form, the refrain, repeated with a tiny shifting value. These minimal structures necessary for programming are remarkably consistent with literary analysis. Intuition can be understood as the coalesced excretion of similar reiterated subconscious pattern-recognition activities. Epiphanies are the ripe fruits our glands pluck from the orchards of structured intuition.

Peripheral to the development of these technical, formal structures, vast corporate structures of ownership coalesced around the productions of programming. These structures have yielded a typically-insane disparity of wealth. Adrienne Rich (poet, feminist, lesbian) says, "…if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a libratory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic injustice." (Rich 165). Richard Stallman, the infamous MIT programmer deeply involved in the open-source software movement who developed GNU, is one example of a renegade programmer deeply committed to activity that transcends the hegemony of materialism, and challenges the tyranny of copyright. Stallman began the GNU project in 1983 by announcing, on a listserv, his intention to create an alternative to the expensive proprietary UNIX operating system and give it away free. He invited others to help. While egocentric modes of behavior are certainly operative in almost all human endeavours, there is a conscious thread here of  openness toward unity, an explicit awareness that all beings  have a right to be involved in the production of their environment, and that important resources should be shared not wasted or hoarded. These ideological concerns are to some degree a prevalent thematic strand within the history of poetics and programming. As Stallman defines it, free software is

Stallman has been dubbed "The Prince Kropotkin of Software" ( a reference to the Russian anarchist) in an online biography by Nikolai Bezroukov . Akin (slightly) in appearance and philosophy to Alan Ginsberg, and comparable to Glenn Gould in hermetic-obsessive style, Stallman seems far from the sanitized logical technician stereotype of a scientist. Why not label his programming work poetry and call it art? It is socially compassionate, extraordinarily intellectual, and devotedly imaginative. In the way that a Bach sonata is constructed, so too these massive operating system programs are interleaved and interwoven symmetries evocative of structural beauty. Writing a work of the size of GNU is comparable to the achievements of Dostoevsky. And unlike the contemporary artistic model of individual authorship, the open source movement is a collaborative environment, these are truly creations of  collectives.

It is clear that in some cases, programming is poetry; it is an art; it involves a total commitment to language as a living energy, language as a crucially nutritive malleable living entity; language as capable of being expressive of the highest modes of awareness, language as an active presence which can modulate our world. In their physical actuality, acrobatic twists and plays of meaning shimmer through the surface of both disciplines. The words in each case become vessels of consciousness. Yet, will programming ever match the devout emotional commitment to raptures and the heart-centric luminosity of poetry? It is as if the descendant of a richly sensual creature  has withdrawn from the excesses of its ancestor, withdrawn in reaction into a harder rigid style of being. Logic without emotional intuition, reason without passion, order without grace: it is easy to stigmatize programming as a dry barren offshoot of a flourishing source. It is easy to say: logic is plundering the human soul of spontaneity, sterilizing the seeds of authentic creativity, burying the radiance of innocent spontaneity beneath an obscene avalanche of technological commodities. Nonetheless, amidst this turbulence, there is a slender thread where programming embodies the living essence of poetry, and that essence is mysterious, a river of words evoking worlds, --and perhaps this earth is among those worlds; and we are the semi-autonomous, self-replicating aspects of a vast fiction, a vast tangible poetical-programming project.