Code As Art: Vpoem 14 by Ladislao Pablo Gyori

by leelzebub

Vpoem 14 by Ladislao Pablo Gyori begins with an introduction to the thoughts of the artist as he was constructing his work:

"Assume the function of destruction and decomposition, but as an accomplishment and not as a negation of being'.

Is there any way you could respond to/interpret these themes in order to produce some virtual works?"

From there, the artist throws up a background of infinite darkness, and constructs a play of words upon it, twisting the viewer's perspective on many axis, even as our perspective of each word changes. The code here is not initially transparent, but the artist's idea reveals itself like an onion with a bit of applied thinking.

First we must consider the obvious: we see words being thrown around, suffixes attached, prefixes, sometimes two or more are cut-and-pasted, but always proceeding with an understandable connection. I was immediately reminded of a thesaurus, and, what's more, the synapses of the brain. Certainly, if you've ever uttered a non sequitur, you are aware that although your train of thought appears to be disjointed, there was something that bridged the gap between the thoughts. This unusual connection is how our mind can put unfamiliar thoughts together, and is a step in the learning process. The more connections you have between synapses, the easier your brain can access ideas--which reminded me of code. Essentially, codes are a relationship between one (usually obscure) thought to another. If they weren't, cryptographers would be unable to break them. Even if their relationship is trillions of steps apart (like in the Enigma machine), they are still related.

Secondly, the actual computer/program coding that went on behind the scenes of this video provides an intriguing layer to what is already interesting.

The way the artist created this video "poem" does provide semiotic value. Being able to visually consider the way each word interacted with the others provides valuable insight. If it had simply been a textual work (in the manner of mez.angelle, for example), the viewer would have lost some of the layering provided by the video formatting.

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This text, Code, Culture, and the Postmodern, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license, although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed.