Reverse Engineering Poetry

This spring, Israeli programmer, poet, and new
media artist Eran Hadas will be teaching at Caltech as an artist-in-residence
through the Israel Institute. Hadas, who is based in Tel Aviv, combines poetry
and computer science, creating software that writes poetry and text with input
from the Internet. His Wikipedia entry describes him as "an Israeli poet,
software developer, new media artist, and the author of seven books"—a set
of titles he embraces. "I always joke that I consider myself a poet, but
in order to be taken seriously, other people should consider me as a software
developer," Hadas laughs. "I once heard the saying, 'Poetry is the
R&D department of humanity.' I wish to augment it to 'the R&D
department of post-humanity,' but at the core of either is the decision to step
out of our particular selves and raise questions about our being." Hadas
will be introducing his Caltech students to computational literature, covering
the evolution of poetry and poets from the end of the Romantic era until 2045,
when futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted the singularity—the point at which
artificial intelligence and technology surpasses human capabilities. Hadas has
no concerns about the students' receptiveness to this new field. "Poetry
means different things to different people," Hadas notes, "and I'm
not going to impose my own views on the students but rather try to embrace
their feelings and backgrounds, and bind them to a poetic path. Having said
that, I find many similarities between poetry and coding. Poetry can be viewed
as a series of rewritings that modify form but preserve content. This process
bears resemblance to code refactoring, which is a process that coders often
experience as an impulse, much like an urge a poet might have.
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