The text that reads itself

The idea of a text that ‘performs its own reading’ may not be entirely new, but it presents itself in a vivid new form, now supercharged by technology. Animated text, Kinetic Typography, Motion Graphics are all facets of the same technological package that has radically changed reading and readerships. This chapter explores the divide that is opening up between conventional reading and a new and enhanced form of reading that could be described as ‘hypertextual’. This digitally encountered and experienced form of reading has generated all kinds of possibilities, directions and redirections for the contemporary reader, which, it will be argued, has not only changed reading, but may be changing the way we think

What Is an Interface and Why Does a Digital Poet Care?

The navigation, interaction with and exploration of digital content requires some form of interface. It is, in the simplest terms, the element connecting the human to the digital, an extension of the hand, eye, and ear. However, within digital poetry and writing, the interface is more than just a vehicle for content delivery. Instead, the interface is a critical literary component, as important to the creation and reading experience of a digital poem as the texts of words, images, sounds, animation, and code. Depending on the interface developed and how it is utilized, the digital poem changes shape, reconfigures meaning and becomes an interactive and responsive poetic/fictional creature. Since my first digital poem over a decade ago, interface has often functioned as the starting point, the generator of inspiration and driver of the creative process. This essay explores the role of interface in a number of my digital poems and fictions, explaining the origin and literary nature of particular interfaces. Additionally, it reflects on the methodologies for creating and mining code and software, as well as on the techniques needed to give birth to highly interactive and non-linear interfaces, such as game engines, infinite mo­saic generators, and other organic digitally created applications

Fragmented Flora: Digital Embodiments of Being in Time and Space

Fragmented Flora: Digital Embodiments of Being in Time and Space consists of the curation of a digital environment that utilizes the affective qualities of physical space; featuring an animated piece Still life with fallen fruit (2019) by Elisabeth Belliveau, the video We Weight on the Land (Winter) (2019) by Eve Tagny, interactive poem Fin (2018) and sound piece xi xi 息息 (2019) by Xuan Ye, and a live stream floral installation Flowers in Time and Space (2021) by Hayley O’Byrne. This work problematizes the ways in which humans interact with and act upon matter by conceptualizing the ways in which permanence and materialism are discussed and valued, as they intersect with the digital. The theoretical grounds of the project focus on the concepts materiality (as it relates to how matter moves through, exists, and transforms in space); temporality (as it relates to decay); and individuality (as it relates to senses and sensory triggers). The curatorial methodology engages the challenge of evoking the tangible and affect of qualities of physical experiences through an online exhibition

ByGPT5: End-to-End Style-conditioned Poetry Generation with Token-free Language Models

State-of-the-art poetry generation systems are often complex. They either consist of task-specific model pipelines, incorporate prior knowledge in the form of manually created constraints, or both. In contrast, end-to-end models would not suffer from the overhead of having to model prior knowledge and could learn the nuances of poetry from data alone, reducing the degree of human supervision required. In this work, we investigate end-to-end poetry generation conditioned on styles such as rhyme, meter, and alliteration. We identify and address lack of training data and mismatching tokenization algorithms as possible limitations of past attempts. In particular, we successfully pre-train ByGPT5, a new token-free decoder-only language model, and fine-tune it on a large custom corpus of English and German quatrains annotated with our styles. We show that ByGPT5 outperforms other models such as mT5, ByT5, GPT-2 and ChatGPT, while also being more parameter efficient and performing favorably compared to humans. In addition, we analyze its runtime performance and demonstrate that it is not prone to memorization. We make our code, models, and datasets publicly available.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023 (main track

‘A Stone Within’:Visual Poetry & Wellbeing in the work of Alec Finlay and Thomas A. Clark

Thomas A. Clark is a poet and visual artist, born in Greenock in 1944. His work is characterized by its concentration on form, its attention to the materiality of language, and its focus on the natural world. His visually innovative poetry has been associated with a variety of movements and genres including the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s and, more recently, the resurgence in writing about the environment referred to as the New Nature Writing. In addition to publishing more traditional page poetry, Clark produces work in a wide variety of media – from folded paper forms to large-scale installations, sound works and prints. Additionally, Clark and his wife Laurie were among the first artists to open ‘artist run spaces’ in Britain, having run the Cairn Gallery since 1986. One poet regularly displayed in the Cairn Gallery is Alec Finlay (1966 –), whose work, like Clark’s, uses innovative form as a means through which to encounter the natural world. In particular, Finlay works with variations on sets of objects over time: nest-boxes, cloth tape, and botanic labels all make an appearance in his work, alongside neon and new technology