Once the project A Hand with Myriad Digits involved the use
of the computer in both the generation of (computer) poems and the
presentation of texts in general, such as 40-character-wide
short notes.
Later it was confined (again) to 'Motion Poems', a computer poetry program.
In Vincent van Mechelen's paper
Computer Poetry you
find a brief, early history of computer poetry in general and the motion
poems of A Hand with Myriad Digits in particular.
Originally written in BASIC for an AMSDOS operating system and, 47 years
after the end of the Second World War, in GW-BASIC for an MS-DOS operating
system this interactive program for generating 'motion poems' was
(partially) translated into TURBO PASCAL and further improved.
The one- to forty-character lines move across the screen as they are being
produced, with or without interaction of the reader.
At this place you can only link to motion poems that have already been
generated on a computer elsewhere.
They are presented here in a trailer, in different types of screenshots
(partial stills) and in complete stills.
IN A TRAILER
This site offers two motion poems which can be made to move across
the screen in a trailer:
IN SEVERAL SCREENSHOTS
The 47 aSWW version of the GW-BASIC program displays black letters on a
grey background and the poem scrolls automatically across 24 lines (the
reason to call it "a motion poem").
The 25th line is used to display technical data or may be left empty.
The most important drawback of this presentation is that it uses only 24
lines for scrolling, whereas QBasic uses all 25 lines.
Therefore, the GW-BASIC program has been partially converted to be run with
QBasic instead.
At the same time it has been made to display (25 poetic lines of) green
letters on a dark background, which is closer to what used to be the case
when the motion poems were created.
You can see and read several black-on-grey and green-on-black screenshots
of the following five motion poems:
- Digits Dull, My Foot!
- Five Fingers Grasping
the Earth
- A Finger of Value
- The Middle Finger
- A Finger of Flesh and
Blood
IN A COMPLETE STILL OF COPIED TEXT
A motion poem still is a static copied text of a motion poem on a screen
or on paper.
Motion poems can be distinguished from one another by the set of specific
data they make use of.
A still is complete if all the data of such a 'database' occur in it.
But every part of such a complete still is a (partial) still in itself,
certainly when it corresponds with a whole 'canto', as the subdivision
of a motion poem may be called.
You can also see and read the complete stills of all five motion poems:
- Digits Dull, My Foot!
— computer poetry with a digital diction
- Five Fingers Grasping The Earth
— a poem about the natural environment
- A Finger of Value
— a motion poem with ideals that matter
- The Middle Finger
— a motion poem about the new paradigm
- A Finger of Flesh and Blood
— a computer poem about erotic drives
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