Friedrich W. Block (2004), 'From Code to Screening and Vice Versa: Orientation in Digital Poetics between Concept and Perception' lecture notes, from symposium 'From Software to Software Art,' transmediale festival, Berlin (in preparation for the P0es1s exhibition, Berlin).


In attempting to understand the 'poetic' interface between language and the computer, Friedrich Block talks about 'productive irritation' (2004). One example is the Cramer's notion that the computer virus 'I Love You' might be considered as a form of digital poetry. This is an extreme example of poetry that simply cannot be realised in print. Block sees both print and screen-based forms as involving perceptual surfaces of projection. Work such as Cramer's perl love poem (sub merge{; my $enses;) and other 'code works' (such as Alan Sondheim) lie outside much interactive and multimedia practices in a more pure semiotic space of experiencing the work. Block sees this as largely ignoring the question of interface. For him, of more interest is the work of Jodi or the ASCII-Art-Ensemble investigating the differences between interface and code aesthetics. To him, it is in this intersection that digital poetics resides, without recourse to print or screen as such - an aesthetics of 'in-between', neither one nor the other. He is looking for media poetry that engages with the form of symbolic or medial differences. For him, the fundamental nature of binary code underpins the poetic idea of 'to be or not to be' making it clear that 'poetry, poesis, is the power to change from not being into being' (2004; quoting from Plato's Symposium).