Black Box Poetics

We live in an age when most of the language we read and write runs through proprietary digital systems we do not understand. Accordingly, this course approaches poetry in terms of code[s], data collection, overflow, opacity, and one-way mirrors. We will consider ununderstandability itself as an aesthetic property, discuss compositional strategies of selective clarity and obscurity, and use poetics to probe the unknowable. We will look closely at source code, but our purposes will be more conceptual than technical. No coding experience is required.