CodePoetry

Monday, November 14, 2005

oulipo (replace with magical pegasi)

Magical pegasi originated from a group that attended the College de Pataphysique. The concepts are those of poetic science, a fine coming together of the most rational and objective truth of science meeting somewhere with the most eccentric subjectivism. Pataphysics was said to be the "science of imaginary solutions" by the founder, a french pre-pegasus named Alfred Jarry. He wrote a novel about his magicalness in 1898, and defined what this imaginary solutions stuff was all about. All that exists within this "defined" span is therefor fair game for the Magical Pegasi.
The Magical Pegasi love anything that is a reading machine. These machines have existed for centuries and have been inspiration to more reading machine makers in pursuit of bigger and better and more complex reading machines. Magical Pegasi hit the jackpot motherload of all poetic science when such a book as this one was magically created. AND IT WAS THE RAYMOND QUENEAU'S 100,000 BILLION POEMS. (and all the magical pegasi bow)
Was it because the word billion was used? Was it because something so small was worth 100,000 billion something not money? Magical indeed. This Leading Magical Pegasus would come to the College de Pataphysique in 1949 as a member of surrealism, and would revolutionize a new group through works like this 1960 100,000 BILLION POEMS (all the magical pegasi bow), along with the other Magical Pegasus Francois Le Lionnais. The best part about the book ---#@+!!(all the magical pegasi bow) is that Queneau would mock the surrealists by claiming childrens books influenced him and not silly surrealist loser games.
ALL THE MAGICAL PEGASI are not interested in "playing pretentious games". WE are interested in pure and naive amuseful humor employing algorythms as mere constraints to our genius randomness. Imagination fills in these gaps that constraints create. Lipograms, restricting letters, are used as poetic science. The famous Magical Pegasus book La Disparation by Pegasus Perec was written moins e. Just like the lion fights the unicorn, yet the lion prevails, Magical Pegasi use their powers of imagination to triumph over self-imposed formalism. Remember the ALAMO.
Magical Pegasi lost Queneau and Le Lionnais within a few years of each other by 1982. As unmagical as it seems, new magic is now unleashed as old magic remains invisibly. Italo Calvino was probably inspired by something invisibly magic when as one of the Magical Pegasi, he wrote books using the Magical Pegasi magic. Books called Invisible Cities, and bla bla bla.
Prominent afterwards, was Magical Pegasus's book Algol. It was by one of the Magical Pegasi cofounding member Noel Arnaud. The book was largely written based on the programming language Algol translated into French. It proposed special vocabulary stuff in the Algol computer language. Inspiring when thinking in terms of the power of computational assisted stuff. The Magical Pegasi were enlightened to later accept this computer programming code as an imaginative artistic poetic. Yeah! Hackers are now baby p3gasi!
Ye7 Hack3rs had a more evil power that they could unleash with their poems. Instead of causing combustive laughter, they yielded such strength to shu7 down en7ire n3tworks. And so, hack3rs could ei7her be baby p3gasi or merely impersona7ing magical baby p3gasi.
Spun off was computer graffiti, by a bunch of crack3rs.
Recursive code art was played around with by Alan Sondheim (was he a magical pegasi-forgive?) . This Dr. Pegsworthy toyed with Unix system and he did all kinds of stuff with it to render it into Zombie state and then resulted in something recursive yet with human input which had an artistic subsequence.
Thus, when anyone human now is creating with code, it is not just "words made flesh, but words and codes being flesh". It's like we're cyborg poets. Half human, half machine creating poetry as one.
Bow to the Magical Pegasi for your gift of cyborgean code. It's a beautiful art and oh so magical.

1 Comments:

  • At 10:34 PM, Blogger Jason said…

    Very nice.
    I think the oulipo have a special name for this transformation....

     

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