a poet-technologist
i have come to consider myself somewhat of a poet-technologist. i am not skilled enough to be an engineer or programmer, but i am smart enough to be able to dabble in the tech world. what gives me a different perspective and approach to technological production is that i take all my experience in the world of poetry and allow it to inform how i learn and practice with various technologies. i see technology and poetry as interwoven practices.
to elaborate more, i believe there are some important concepts and ethics to lay out for the poet-technologist:
technology is language: code, systems, and tools are read and written like stanzas; they have structure, rhythm, and a syntax that matters as much as their functions. technology allows us to express ourselves in thousands of nuanced ways.
poetry is infrastructure: metaphor, imagery, and cadence shape how people experience and inhabit technology; it becomes tactile, humane, and resonant. it is epistemological in nature and shapes not only how we see and experience the world, but how we come to know it.
making as composing: whether writing a program or a poem, the act is one of composition, attention, and attunement to patterns in the physical world. making is drawing on our collective history, collaging, cutting and pasting, and ultimately coming up with something new. a new composition. a new thing born from your mind, hands, and/or body.
a regenerative ethos: a poet-technologist resists extractive, mechanistic framings, seeking instead tools that heal, invite play, and cultivate wonder. tools embedded in nature that serve the natural world rather than extracting from and exploiting it. a poet-technologist creates within and for a system of care.
poetry and technology live in the same universe and dance cosmically and comically. i enjoy using technology to produce my poetics, and i enjoy embedding my poetics into my technological practices and withing techno-ideologies/philosophies (you may notice my love for solarpunk, for instance).
in the future, i hope to spend more time in this logbook, building on these ideas, and i will make it a goal to do so.
before i do, i keep wondering if there are any other poet-technologists out there? i hope there are, the world could use some more competent and capable ones than myself.