BITMAP POEMARIUM

Bitmap Poemarium an artist book that brings together a collection of 33 conceptual poems.

In a nod to the Surrealist’s “automatic writing” practises of the early 20th century, I created a form of poetry by limiting his composition to the predictive text prompts suggested by my phone. Drawing on ideas cited by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, I believe that over time, the use of his mobile phone has made it an extension of my own neural system and that therefore, part of my own subconscious resides in the memory of the electronic device.

POEMARIUM

In 2020, when I acquired a new mobile phone, its memory only contained factory data. To establish personal contact, I had to store my fingerprint information in the system, which somehow read and translated my DNA into binary codes. These codes were then processed by the device, which I use to express myself socially on a daily basis.

As time went by, my use of the device cultivated a symbiotic relationship, where the digital memory suggested frequently used words and strung them together with others to complete the sentences of my messages. 

This method of machine learning is similar to neuronal synapses, where electrical impulses connect different points in our memory. With frequent use, these connections establish paths that improve performance and energy savings, which express unconscious behaviors in our being. In this sense, my mobile phone had become an “extension of my neural system,” an idea that was explored in 1964 by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. 

Following this idea, and after a year of using my smartphone, I turned to the subconscious contained in my device to express myself through automatic writing. This work is in line with the literary expressions of surrealist writers in the 1920s, who sought to reveal the deepest sectors of the mind.

Starting with a word of my choice in a message on WhatsApp, I continued only with the predicted text prompts suggested by the phone, creating sentences with a surreal tone and a landscape that allowed me to recognize elements of my everyday life.

Like my brain, my phone allows the use of multiple languages, and I have programmed it to recognize and help me with the writing of English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. In this first edition of my book, I have presented a collection of 33 poems in English.

BITMAP

Noticing the degree of information we absorb daily from screens, I started to dig into the surface of digital images to reveal their depth. I began by reading the data from an image using the Python language. However, I needed a tool that was commonly used and understood by most users, so I opted for word processors. When I opened a digital image with a word processor, a cascade of characters was revealed, which were intelligible to humans but perfectly processed by the computer to translate them into something recognizable.

I then created a blank image with a .bmp (bitmap) extension, into whose code I inserted the poems generated with my phone. The computer read these poems as color codes arranged in a bitmap in the form of a Cartesian grid. In this way, the computer had interpreted human text in its hexadecimal color system, generating a new image.

The left hemisphere of the brain performs mostly rational functions and interprets the intuitive messages coming from the right hemisphere. Similarly, the images arranged on the left page of the book correspond to the rational interpretation of the poetic code arising from the subconscious arranged on the right side.

BITMAP POEMARIUM is a work that reveals both the outside and inside of an image (bitmap) and is presented with the very code that generates it, from its surface to its internal “circuits.” This work generates an environment that makes it possible to understand the reading of a digital code, which otherwise, due to its cryptic nature, would be completely incomprehensible to human understanding.