https://www.operationalpoetry.art/

Artist: Nimrod Astarhan

Operational Poetry is a browser extension making explicit the executability of language. The work takes Serphane Mallarme’s poem Livre as its point of departure. In his poem, Mallarmé describes a theatre which stages a self (the Conceptor / Poet / Operator) experiencing himself and his world, as Henri Meschonnic suggests, phenomenologically ‘in parentheses’. Operational Poetry highlights syntax keywords from different programming languages found in the textual parts of pages on the internet. Acting as an augmenteur, the extension makes visible the territories of text in HTML that are interpretable - and colorfuly highlights them. The highlights and their color codes also create new meanings and patterns in existing texts. While most English language pages will usually contain some keyword, the work makes present the areas of the internet that exercise interpretability and executability as well as languages or bodies of text that don’t. Pondering sorcery and source codes, digital colonialism, and language divides, the work is an experiment in how reading code changes reading.

Nimrod Astarhan is an artist, technologist, and lecturer for Digital Art. As an artist working in Sculpture and Digital Media he exhibited in museums, festivals, and biennales in Israel, Germany, Belgium, the U.S., and the ISS. In 2023 his work will be a part of Gwangju Biennale’s Pavillion Project.