Introducing Versioning Poems

September 7, 2015

In London we have a fantasic group of people that discusses cutting edge ideas, the group is called the Palo Alto Supermarket test¹¹ It abbreviates as PST, maybe it is worth looking for an interesting acronym, e.g. Policy, Society and Technology. Please ping me on twitter if you want to join in.. A recurrent topic has been Post-Internet art which we think it can be the next artistic expression trend.

In this post, I would like to introduce one way of writing Post-Internet poetry that mixes traditional poetry and coding poetry: Versioning Poems - I hope to inspire a new generation of poets, please update me @nicolagreco if you write some.

Versioning Poems

A versioning poem has two characteristics:

1. Versioning tool: The poem written in commit messages using a versioning tool
2. Commit diff: Each line has a commit diff that has code related to the message

In this way, one could clone a repository and just list the commit messages. The following is a poem of mine 9*19 Flowers poem.

Understanding requirement 1

As you can see each line shows up as a poem

$ git clone https://github.com/nicola/flowers-poem
$ git fetch origin poem
$ git checkout poem
$ git log --format="%C(yellow)%h%Creset %Cgreen%s%Creset%n%b"

ea814f4 POEM: 9*19 flowers
02d0dc0 Handcraft flowers from maths and lines,
aa14064 Choose the colors to make them shine,
ad4e12c Till the soil to plant the seeds.
700b967 .
7cea9e1 See me to make me glow
93c57f8 Touch me to give you more
e023bd0 Touch me you'll never stop
e146d2c Please touch me again.

Understanding requirement 2

The difference added by 93c57f8 Touch me to give you more relates to a piece of code that adds the function start_touching

93c57f8 Touch me to give you more
+  function start_touching(d, i) {
+    var flower = d3.select(this);
+    flower
+     .transition()
+     .delay(10)
+     .duration(1000)
+     .attr("d", handcraft_flower)
+     .style("stroke", "#ccc");
+  }

Conclusion

Figure 1: Detail of 9*19 Flowers poemYou can get very bizarre, the code does not need to work necessarely. In the case of my flowers, the final commit brings up a final working version of a visualization of the poem (See Figure 1).

I challenge your engineering skills and creativity to surprise me with a poem of yours.

- Nicola Greco,
Keep on rocking the decentralized web