Mentioned: Dadaism; cut-up method; text-based; social dynamics; campfire.
An onchain machinery for generating poems that "don't make sense." Participants are invited to perform four actions to generate a strange poem made of cut-up pieces of different texts. In this way, as a process, what prevents us from replicating this beyond the digital realm?
Who can be a poet? To many Western mindsets, poetry is associated with intellectual elites and the beauty of verse. However, the notion of poetry as both a popular medium and a powerful psychological weapon is underlooked and underproduced. With all the load of the supposed hyper-intellectual medium associated with poetry, the reading and especially the production of poems by the masses is limited.
A major obstacle preventing poetry from becoming a widespread creative outlet for the masses is the pervasive belief that it must consist of only the most exquisite verses and that all writing needs to be wholly original. This fixation on the final product, rather than the process of creation itself, can be quite intimidating.
Blinded by the allure of the finished piece, we often overlook the significance and inherent beauty of the artistic practice as part of the artwork or even as the artwork itself. The audience, fixated on the result, rarely appreciates the intricate process, the meticulous craftsmanship, and the steps that breathe life into the final form.
So, with these considerations in mind and highly inspired by the cut-up method popularized by the writer William S. Burroughs and the manual on how “To Make a Dadaist Poem” by the poet and artist Tristan Tzara, I propose a small system (or set of instructions) for anyone to create unusual poems.
ElPoems brings together three central ideas: text-based visual, social dynamics that refer to the idea of a campfire circle of friends, and process (or the "invisible") as art.
Text-based visual: A relatively unexplored category in NFTs, the visual material comes in the form of text that resembles a piece of paper, with a green background and verses of up to three words that form your poem. The choice of a text-based output also comes from the restrictions I had with my current setup, which makes it difficult to render more complex visuals, and also from the amount of ETH I had available to implement the contracts that make up the artwork.
In the end, by relating the proposal to a simple poem, it created a compelling output that resembles a simple paper page.
Social dynamics: Taking advantage of the "social network" affordances that the blockchain itself offers us, and of a personal taste for collaboration and collective practices, ElPoems brings two mechanics/requirements as parts of the process of creating a poem:
You are required to invite another person to create the next poem by sending them one of your source materials.
In a slightly unintentional way, this mechanic is also quite reminiscent of the idea of token-gated experiences.
To finalize your poem, you must choose a friend whose name (or wallet address) will be used as a seed in an algorithm that will replace a number X of words in your poem with words from the word bag (in this case, zeitgeist words). Your friend will also be responsible for determining a name for your poem, thus finalizing it.
The process as artwork: Although the final product is a visual component, in this case, a poem that results from following the steps of the process, the artwork here is more about the process itself and the meaning of following the instructions to produce the final product than the product itself.
The contracts that form the artwork represent a type of onchain machinery used to generate "nonsensical" poems. The machinery, while operated by only one person (the participant who is creating a poem), requires the collaboration of at least one other person to produce the desired final result, that is, a strange poem. In a human-machine-human-machine collaboration.
The machinery is made up (technically speaking) of: a control board (a contract with the functions that the participants need to call); a system that generates poems that "don't make sense" (a metadata contract); source materials, aka chunks of texts from the wider culture, like famous quotes, passages from books etc. stored in arrays (a data contract + an ERC721); and the final strange poems spat out by the machinery (an ERC721 with the generated poems).
The operation of the machinery begins with a participant who received a source material (an NFT) from the participant who created the previous poem.
This participant needs to mint two more source materials to complement what they received from someone, having three materials now.
The participant then chooses one of their three materials to send to someone (who will then be the next to “operate” the machine and create a poem).
Next, the participant needs to add any piece of personal text, whether it be a piece of a letter, the lyrics of a favorite song, a part of a message they sent to a partner, etc., “their essence for the machine as essential fuel for the operation of the mechanism”.
Finally, the participant must invite another friend to be responsible for "pressing the finish button" to complete the operation of the machine so that it can generate a strange poem.
The machinery then takes over, cutting out the texts from the source materials and the personal choice and then assembling random sentences of no more than 3 words to create the pre-final poem. Then, the machine uses the identity (wallet address) of the friend who pressed the "finish button" and together with a random number generator determines how many and which words of the pre-final poem will be replaced by words from the bag of words (at this point the machine is operating with words of the zeitgeist). And finally, the system spits out the strange poem.
I like the idea of "this can happen at camp." Beloved friends gathered together in a circle around the campfire telling stories, laughing, and creating shared artifacts between the group members that will forever serve as a mental trigger for those lovely times. Because what I've just said is Ethereum, it's web3, it's what at the end of the day, in a mythological or philosophical way, we're all doing.
Materials:
A stack of materials (book pages, magazine articles, music lyrics, etc.)
Scissors
A 9-sided die
A bag for the word bag
A piece of personal text for each participant (letter, diary entry, favorite song lyric, etc.)
Instructions:
Choose or volunteer someone to be the "host." The host will have two responsibilities:
Choose a theme for the word bag (e.g., fruit names, zeitgeist words, religious terms, etc.) and fill the bag with several words of the selected theme.
Start the poem-making process.
The host takes 3 materials from the stack, chooses 2 to keep, and passes 1 on to the person next to them.
The person next to them then receives that material and takes 2 more from the stack. They then choose 2 to keep and pass 1 on to the next person.
This process continues until the last person in the group receives 1 material, takes 2 from the stack, and chooses which ones they will keep, returning the remaining one to the stack (or burning it if you are camping).
Each participant should then cut up their 2 materials and their personal text, put them all in a pile, and randomly select 9 pieces, placing them to form a new text.
Then, the participant should give their new text to a friend. That friend should:
Roll the 9-sided die and replace that many words in the poem with words from the bag.
Give the poem a name.
Voila! You have a weird poem that probably "doesn't make sense."
Let us go back to the old ways Kevin. We will treat the blockchain as our deity and pass along its myths and stories in the oral tradition.- CSA2D
I had some questions and ideas that were looming over my head while creating this work; this was how I found to work with them.
Can anyone produce a poem, in other words, who can be a poet?
Can “complete randomness” (just generating random numbers without any additional rules) produce text results where meaning can be found?
Can beauty be found in things that “make no sense” on the surface?
How can we produce artifacts that are simple enough to be replicated in a camp but are filled with a lot of “back meaning”?Random thoughts on how to use the EVM to create weird digital machinery.
