Nick Montfort, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A Reading

The works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the first set of pages that I read seemed almost too abstract and random for me to be able to comprehend. But perhaps that is the point behind the written text. To me, the constant repetition of certain words or phrases brings along a different kind of creative expressionism to mind that’s not related to music but more related to poetry. I could not comprehend the meaning of some of the foreign words, but it’s interesting that a lot of words from different languages are used. It brings forth an interesting topic of discussion. Sometimes when you take words out of languages and use them in something like poetry to infer your own meanings, you do end up mixing up languages that sometimes may end up influencing their usage in future. It’s not that far of a reach to think maybe some sounds that we use while working on music end up getting used the same way. Several times, I have seen people using composition techniques used in comedy music, and somehow mutating them to fit something like horror music. I can also draw parallels with some of our previous Max assignments. Word joining and how similar that is to the repetition of words in the text. It’s something that makes me think. Nick Montfort’s poem is always fascinating to look at. The fact that it uses a large number of lines in the poetry seems to have something related to doing an action. It starts seeming like a call to action, sometimes. While I like the rather uniform way the lines seem to be generated. Something about it still seems very fixed to me. I wouldn’t personally call it very random. I have been thinking about how it would be better to have a self-generative poem that doesn’t necessarily need to have one or two lines on a different paragraph. What if someone wants to vary it? While I understand that there’s only so much randomness a system can take. I am fascinated by the consequences of making some systems so random they’re never the same at all. On re-examining the poem, I realize that the number of lines do change with every paragraph. Perhaps the concept of poetry being fixed in terms of lines and sentences is something that I don’t feel very comfortable

with. But at the same time, I do believe the concept of regenerative systems is an interesting one, not to mention efficient.

13/03/15 11:03 PM

13/03/15 11:03 PM