Concrete Code

2024

“Concrete Code” is a work inspired by the tradition of Concrete Poetry, a literary movement that expands the boundaries of literature by allowing words to generate meaning through their “verbivocovisual sensitive totality,” integrating verbal, visual, and auditory elements. In this work, however, the poems are composed using programming code that incorporates poetic devices and symbolic signs into its structure. Despite all the poetic interferences the programming text of Concrete Code has undergone, it remains fully functional, respecting the syntactic and semantic rules of the programming language and the JavaScript library — p5.js — thus producing a visual result through its execution. Each poem in Concrete Code is perfectly legible to the machine. This is demonstrated by the QR code links that accompany each of the works presented here. By accessing them, one can view the non-concrete version of the project. As for the human reader, they will find recognizable words among the tags, meter within the equations, and rhythm within the algorithms.

AI Context

The creation of the programming codes used in the work was carried out through a process of cybernetic interaction, involving the collaboration of a human (the artist) and a machine (artificial intelligence tools). This process is part of the doctoral research currently being developed at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.

Tobias Gaede

Brazil

Bio

Tobias Gaede is a visual artist and researcher focused on the relationship between art and technology. He is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the University of Porto, and a member of LICCA-UFC and i2ADS. He has published books such as “Depredador”, “Vigília”, and “Código Concreto”, and has presented artworks and research in events across Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Poland, the USA, France, Germany, Israel, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.