| My work explores the connections between technology and semantics, delving into the boundless flux among natural and programming language. The comprehension of this duet led me to develop methods and machines in the form of software-based installations, Internet art projects, video games, and other computer/digital media, addressing social, political, and philosophical issues. |  |
Yucef Merhi
My work explores the connections between technology and semantics, delving into the boundless flux among natural and programming language. The comprehension of this duet led me to develop methods and machines in the form of software-based installations, Internet art projects, video games, and other computer/digital media, addressing social, political, and philosophical issues.
Since the beginning of my artistic practice, the use of computer hardware and software, as well as various electronic components, has been crucial in the development of my work. The translation of poetry (natural language) into Java, C++, Flash ActionScript or Assembler (programming languages), turned out to be not only a challenge, but also a procedure to deal with the core of digital technology.
In my projects the machine is an extension of the poem, which expands the potential of words and extends the limits of language. At the same time, poetry appears as a prolongation of the employed technology, providing an emotive and meaningful presence. The machine-poem relation that I outline attempts to redefine the role of the poet/coder and our experience of written poetry in our present. This condition is reflected in the installation Super Atari Poetry, exhibited at the Orange County Museum of Art (California) in 2005, the Science World British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in 2008 and, more recently, at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival (Massachusetts).
Super Atari Poetry is a multiplayer game installation comprised by three Atari 2600 consoles, joysticks, self-manufactured Atari cartridges, and TV monitors. Each one of the game cartridges contains a database of verses that can be interchanged using a joystick. The reading of the sentences printed on the 3 screens produces a coherent text that players can manipulate to create hundreds of different poems.
In the words of Christiane Paul, author of the book Digital Art and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Super Atari Poetry explicitly explores the relationships between language and technology. In the language of electronic literature and poetry it is what is called a ‘programmaton,’ a poetic object that is both literary language and the language of code. One could see Super Atari Poetry as an homage to the history of gaming and electronic poetry that highlights the connections between hardware, software, play and text.”
