#residentgeeks

A programme funded by the Australia Council for the Arts: a Geek in Residence is installed to deliver dynamic digital initiatives across an organisation and its community.

The idea being that the techies provide the "skills, information and connections needed to succeed in the digital era". The project appears to be in abeyance currently but I wonder why. It is funny how everyone has become a geek these days so maybe that is it.

But I am still waiting to see some of the really useful filtering/predictive text - multi-thread poetry, Boolean verse, 3D structural holographic towers of words and I wonder who is actually working on this stuff now. Rather than just getting scored up on a really good tweet - of course that is fun too - but...

The old news story is here http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/news/media-centre/media-releases/new-geeks-in-residence-for-arts-organisations/

And yes there is still just a really small part of me that would be happy if I could open my front door electronically at the press of a button...

Computer works 01: Diana Syder's String

Diana Syder is a poet and artist and her book String (Smith/Doorstop Books 2007) is still a rare thing. The result of a residency in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, funded by an award from the Leverhulme Trust.

Coming from a programming background, we might define string as, a sequence of characters (a data type storing a sequence of data values) and this book contains a poem on Boolean logic. Just the fact of that is enough to delight a programmer! Boole's inspiration is also the poet's


If a great idea is a pin of light
or a highlight placed carefully in the pupil,
it makes of our heads some racing,
slight-rigged thing with sails skin-tight....


and is much more pleasing to think of
than molecules hauling luke-warm cargoes
through plasma in the sticky dark;
noradrenalin, acetylcholine, gamma aminobutyric acid -
even their names are supertankers
that cannot manoeuvre quickly.


Boolean logic Diana Syder


Having spent a lot of time whipping cards in and out of computers, the observational poem Look Inside a Computer is less evocative for me.

But of course this is not the only card up Syder's sleeve, her string is superstring theory - the idea that the smallest entities in the universe are made up of strings (rather than points) which vibrate at resonant frequencies. And to simplify, differently scaled resonance would effect a variety of fundamental forces. This idea would imply the existence of perhaps up to ten dimensions to work theoretically.

These poems inspire a real Donne-like excitement at the world of computing and physics; still recommended. Look forward to pointing out a few more informatic-informed works in the future...





String, Smith/Doorstop Books £7.95 available from: Smith/Doorstop Books, Bank St., Arts, 32-40 Bank St, Sheffield S1 2DS or Amazon etc.