Introduction
For William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, today’s world can be summarized with two terms: terror and ecstasy.
Using VR and poetry, I want to explore today’s human/machine continent, and understand what lies at the heart of this feeling of terror and ecstasy.
I also want to explore whether a digital specific language can be found, one that opens the door to a better exploration, analysis and understanding of the human/machine continent.
In fact, my goal is to find the equivalent of montage in digital art. What is montage when one creates digital worlds?
Why poetry?
Let me be a bit provocative and suggest that poetry is not fundamentally about the written word.
Poetry is a territory.
Poetry is a territory of emotions, a territory of the metaphysical, where we explore large, important questions about what it means to be human
But poetry is not the only territory.
Technology, finance, politics create territories.
The poetic territory has its own specificities however: Learning and inquiétude (disquiet).
The poetic realm allows one to learn complex emotional/social/metaphysical situations.
But poetry also adds ‘inquiétude.’
What is inquiétude? It’s the tension between Fate and Faith, the tension between life and death; love and solitude; beauty and terror.
In a great work of art, the inquiétude takes a life of its own. It emerges out of the layers of meaning and structure (syntax, colours, rhythm, etc.).
Digital language and human language: Software as co-creator
But the toolboxes between traditional poetry and VR poetry are not the same.
Human language is an algorithm. Writing is coding. Coding for meaning, coding for intention, coding for action.
But working with a program is not, essentially, working with language. It is working with a co-creator.
We don’t always know what software will render, how it will react, how it will display.
The poet in virtual worlds works and creates with the ‘machine’.
But the machine has ‘will’, abilities, ‘intentions,’ directions (it ‘wants’ to do something). This is what code is. It allows, permits, decides.
