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Poetry printed with words of code

"Code {Poems}": a Collection of Poems in Code

Inspire

As a tribute to a new and dominant form of writing, the designer Ishac Bertran has launched a call for submissions to create poetry in cybernetic code.

Codes are generally used to store information. However, they can also be used to carry out an extroverted communication, for example in literary creation, even in its most sublime form: poetry.

The designer Ishac Bertran together with Jamie Allen, David Gauthier, Joshua Noble and Marcin Ignac took advantage of the niche offered by semantics in the digital age to launch a call for submissions for poetry written using any of the coded languages used by the webs, such as HTML, Applescript, Java, SQL, C++ and C#.

The invitation proved to be very successful and they received 200 poems from 30 countries. From those, Bertran and his editorial team chose 55 poems to publish in the collection “code {poems}”. The participants had to follow just two simple rules, to not exceed 0.5 KB and to compile them.

The theme was open and as a result the collection features love poems as well as poems on science, news, religion, mathematics, as well as those dealing with life, robots or even about poetry itself.

Code is poetry, and which can be translated into other artistic manifestations. Bertran is planning to mount an exhibition from the project with visual interpretations by various artists.

He has emphasized that the authors of the poems expressed the sense of pushing the limits of poetry in code while creating it. This fact sums up not only the creative process but also projects what is currently happening in terms of a new generation of social discourse and its various manifestations.

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