Part One--by Ana María Caballero

PITPD was born in a second-grade classroom, where Jason’s son and my son sat next to each other and bonded over chess. At a classmate’s birthday party, Jason and I chatted and soon realized we’d both gone to the same college before pursuing MFAs in creative writing. Coincidence led to honesty about what we do. About what we do, do. I make poems. Jason makes generative art. I told him about FX HASH. He launched a few sold-out projects and was stunned.

Jason reached out and asked if I wanted to collaborate. My head often feels like a maraca of ideas, so I said yes. Our first project, I WISH FOR THE METAVERSE TO RINSE OFF OF ME, was conceived in the shower, where feeling web3 burnout, I said those words out loud. Right after I said them, I had a new idea—and laughed at my fickleness. This laughter, both tender and blunt, became the inspiration for our first collection, which celebrates the power and infirmity of affirmations. Jason created the elegant visuals for this piece—an oracular, colorful word soup–while I concentrated on the affirmations, and their contradictions.

As we worked on this collection, I asked Jason if we could represent the effect of annotating a poem, which I’ve always found to be such a poignant moment of connection with and devotion to verse. I wondered if we could employ poems from the public domain to convey the act of reading. Several months later, he wrote to share a new system he’d created, by which words dance off the page. Ana, what do you think of using this animation to perform readership?

We began working on PITPD in May of 2022. We had so many questions. How many poems would we annotate? How many readers would annotate each poem? Would we define each reader, giving them a personality and a handwriting style? Would different readers read “on top” of each other? Would each reader read once? Would a collector receive one poem, or would certain poems lead to other ones? Would the comments be intellectual, or more colloquial? Would they be a combination?

One of my favorite essays is Toni Morrison’s Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature, where she writes:

“Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.”

I didn’t want PITPD to be canonical. There are poems that are taught because they’re relevant, but they’re also fun, such as The Odyssey. Others are historic but dull. I spent the summer going through countless poetry anthologies and raking Project Gutenberg, with the hope of assembling a collection that was at once uncanonical, representative of our collective unconscious, and—hopefully—sexy. I gave myself extra points for including poets I didn’t know.

The biggest challenge was verifying that the poems were in the public domain, which proved especially difficult for translated poems, where the translation, too, had to be in the public domain. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t find a Pablo Neruda translation we could use.

At first, I created profiles for each of the fourteen readers who’d interact with the texts, sketching out identities based on Jason’s explorations with handwriting, pen colors, and doodles. We soon realized this was a murky dead end. To profile is to erect false monoliths. What makes reading so powerful is that it attaches to our mental states. I don’t read as a daughter, wife, student, mother. I read as I am feeling today.

My annotations capture casual, academic, probing, superficial, visceral, vernacular connections with verse. Jason’s algorithm does the sorting.

We went back and forth on the pacing for months, wanting to balance the pulse of the digitally native with the intention of the collection—that of celebrating private, quiet connections with poetry. We found peace on middle ground. Each iteration is read by several randomly selected readers. The words dance off between readers to signal a fresh interaction with the text. Each reader engages with the poem numerous times, represented by different colored notes in the same handwriting, some of which faintly make it into the following reading. Many readers share the same comments, the same emotional responses, to certain lines of verse. With each reading, time passes, paper ages, delicate vestiges of past marginalia remain—the story of our collective readership is told. Meanwhile, marginalia chronicles the life of each poem.

Once we determined the flow of each iteration, we wondered how to acknowledge intertextuality. Should different poems be linked, or should each edition of PITPD perform a single poem? Saluting the importance of rereading is central to this collection. And yet, just like no human is an island, no text is an islet.

We decided that only a few, rare editions [some 11%] would summon more than one poem via a thoughtful exercise based on thematic spillage, shared poetic influences, and historicity.

Here are the linkages:

3%

• “Who Has Seen the Wind” by Christina Rossetti
• “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• “I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)” by Emily Dickinson

2.5%

• “Exotic Perfume” by Charles Baudelaire
• “If You Should Go” by Countee Cullen
• “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

2%

• Excerpt from Canto XXVII, “Inferno” by Dante Alighieri
• Excerpt from Book XXIII, “The Odyssey” by Homer
• Excerpt from Book II, “The Aeneid” by Virgil

1.5%

• “The Desolate Field” by William Carlos Williams
• “Of the Surface of Things” by Wallace Stevens
• “Spring “by Edna St. Vincent Millay

1%

• “SUPPOSE AN EYES” by Gertrude Stein
• “A Jelly-Fish” by Marianne Moore
• “Résumé” by Dorothy Parker

0.5%

• “[I seek for rhythmic whisperings]” by Zinaida Gippius
• “Caprice” by Sor Juana Inés De la Cruz
• “Of a Certain Friendship” by Elsa Gidlow

We debated how each iteration should end. Would all the markings suddenly appear on the poem? Would we close with an enigmatic blank page—signaling the infinite possibility of verse?

Our choice to keep the animations running for several hours—an eternity within a digital setting—in which gestural traces of previous annotations gradually build, aims to show that what is left of what we read is not the exact memory of the text itself but the experience of connecting with it.

Memory is an etching, a layered marking.

The notion that authorship becomes irrelevant with the passing of time is also at the heart of this collection. No matter how much sweat goes into a poem, eventually, it stops belonging to its author. All that matters is that the words were written. And that they are read.

Reading and writing are generative acts. Writing takes inspiration from the world to generate meaning, casting it as language that can, in turn, generate countless interpretations. Meanwhile, reading generates agency for poetry . Via readership, we bring works of literature close to our breathing worlds; we also help ensure others will do the same.

Some might think that it is the texts of the poems in the public domain that are permanent while our interactions with them are ephemeral, but PITPD aims to show that it is through collective readership, made up of small, personal moments of connection, that verse lives on.

Reading writes poetry’s survival.

Part Two--Jason Sholl (AKA hieroglyphica)

Designing PITPD was perhaps above all an exercise in restraint. As a generative artist, my instincts are to show something complex and beautiful. But this piece required that generative effects be subtle, allowing the words of the poems and voices of their readers to take center stage. Thus, I found myself studying old books and journals from my shelves, and then from my father’s shelves, and then from images on the internet, to learn what oft-read pages truly look like with the passage of time. To my disappointment, most were strikingly plain. Stains and smudges were rare, as were notes made in any color more vibrant than simple gray pencil or black ink. For PITPD, I took the most interesting of these elements and gently exaggerated them.

The poems’ typefaces and layout were modeled after the iconic style of mid-20th century Poetry magazine. Readers’ handwriting was brought to life with the help of a talented group of font makers: Manfred Klein, Jellyka Nerevan, Hannah Marlin, Kimberly Geswein, Daniel Midgley, Marcus Melton, Dana Jacobs, Khurasen, Marsnev, Brittney Murphy Design, Apostrophic Labs, StringLabs, Creatype Studio, Fontherapy, DumadiStyle, Fikryal Studio, Heinzel Std, and Poemhaiku.

One of the great challenges of the piece was coordinating the timing and placement of so many distinct elements. The background, comments, and poem all had to appear and fade at different rates to appear in sync. Font metrics and motion had to account not only for the size of the canvas, but also for the length of each particular poem. Comments needed to be placed randomly but couldn’t overlap one another. I ended up using five separate offscreen buffers to keep track of everything.

Treating each character of the poems as a particle was highly resource-intensive and required aggressive optimization to ensure the program ran at an acceptable frame rate. (1) It also gave me a profound respect for working with fonts, whose measurement and placement employ a system developed in the days of manual typesetting and not much modernized since. The abundance of easy-to-use web libraries for drawing text obscures this fact. But I can assure you that if you are ever forced to manually calculate and set things like leading and advance width, you will walk away with a sense of awe at the thousands of minuscule, precisely placed bezier curves we take for granted every time we send an email.

In many ways, Ana and I are fantastic collaborators: we both have a strong background in visual and written art, and we both are excited to explore ambitious new kinds of projects in web3. Ana also has a keen interest and growing ability in coding, which allowed her to quickly grasp and work with the logic of my algorithms. In this way, we were able to engineer a compact and scalable system to store the poems and comments for an anthology of scope and length limited only by our imaginations. (2)

In other ways, however, we are terrible collaborators, amplifying each other’s tendency to further complexify the already complex, to put off and to delay (we are both, after all, parents and spouses whose primary job isn’t making long-form generative art pieces). There were many moments when I marveled that this project was even moving forward at all, especially during the summer, when we were both traveling, corresponding only occasionally by email, and essentially just working on PITPD independently at our own respective paces.

That this project was in fact completed—and came out as well as it did—is a testament to the power and promise of web3. PITPD tells a story that could only be told in a long-form generative medium, by collaborators bringing different forms of expertise to the project. Web3 made this possible: While all of the above is technically achievable in web2, without the proof of authenticity afforded by blockchain, digital generative art would never have blossomed into a viable form, and without the enthusiastic and supportive community of artists and collectors who have flocked to the Tezos ecosystem, a project like PITPD would have had immense difficulty finding an appreciative audience. Without this community, the idea of collaborating with Ana on a poetry anthology would never have crossed my mind; generative art would have remained for me a casual hobby largely on hold while I pursued other “more important” goals.

The history of art—from Lascaux to the present—has as a dominant theme the progression toward ever-greater levels of abstraction. Digital generative art represents a new stage of this progression, one in which even the artist him or herself has been abstracted into the stylized and often unpredictable creation of human-written algorithms. When I look to the future of art, I see so much to explore in this realm—so many new kinds of stories to tell, so many new ways to share something fresh and meaningful and thrilling with the world. PITPD was created in this spirit, and we invite you to enjoy it in this spirit as well.

(1) At its core, this program is an elaborate system of conditional logic, and as a result it is not amenable to GPU-based processing. For much improved performance—especially if you are using Chrome—please make sure hardware acceleration is disabled.

(2) Please feel free to open up your console and see how this piece was engineered. We left our code readable with the idea that in generative art an appreciation of process enhances appreciation of the finished work. You can also uncover an easter egg that allows for large-format rendering of your piece.