Bits, Collected // Claude Shannon

Very excited to have an excerpt from a long poem called "Bits, Collected" in The Nervous Breakdown. It's the first piece of this that's out there in the world, besides at a couple of readings with projections.

The poem begins with the coining of the term bit by Claude Shannon (who is a weird, fascinating person and was the father of electronic communication) in 1948. He did that in a paper that founded the notion of information theory that year. (He called it communication theory.)

That 1948 paper was arguably the first time that someone attempted to quantify the idea of information. Weird, right? There was a point in time when information was not something you could quantify...

He was also super into cryptography, was instrumental in the development of binary code as a way to transmit information, built chess playing machines, attempted to build an electronic mouse that could navigate mazes...he's fascinating.

He didn't die until 2001. He died of Alzheimer's and never saw how everything he did in the 30s, 40s, and 50s laid the groundwork for us all to catch up to him a half century later.

Swoon's "Today I will be a compensated spokesperson"

The wonderful Marc Neys, aka Swoon, has posted a new videopoem that uses, as text, a poem of mine that was originally published in Opium titled "Today I will be a compensated spokesperson."

I really like what he did with it. It's a beautiful collage and soundscape that makes me think about the poem a little differently.

That's the scary thing about posting work to the Poetry Storehouse (see below) for anyone to remix. You don't know what will emerge from their work. It's out of your hands. You hope that it goes well, but passing off something you care about make you (read: me) instinctively believe that things will go terribly awry. This piece, for me, represents one of the great potentials that exists in that Not-Knowing: it might produces new associations, new juxtapositions to tease something different out of the text than how it existed on the page/screen. You might find something unexpected in your own work.

My poem was taken from The Poetry Storehouse, an platform for multi-media artists to find poems for raw material and remixing. I donea couple videos with other poets' work from there as well. It's a good place with good poems and good videos.

Today I will be a compensated spokesperson from Marc Neys (aka Swoon) on Vimeo.