Anipoem for January 26, 2024 (Today)

Anipoems

The term Anipoem is most commonly associated with the work of artist Ana Maria Uribe. In the 1960s she began creating Typoems – Concrete Poetry works written with Lettera 22 and Pica type typewriters. In 1997 she created the Anipoems, moving concrete poems hosted on the web which continued the ideas present in her Typoems. These poems exhibited many recurring themes and visual formats, as summarized by Jorge Luiz Antonio in an essay commemarting Uribe’s work. He describes their themes as:

“A thematic group runs through the Typoems and Anipoems: a course by the aspects of life through words-titles and wordsimages, since the visual, sound and animation produce another syntax (it would be the digital or hypermedia syntax, the result of interacting links and languages?). Thus, we have the nature (Waterfall, Autumn, Winter, Spring, etc.), the city, the circus, the discipline, the tennis, the orchestra rehearsal, the train in motion, the busy day, episodes seemingly fragmented of our daily hlife. The look of the author creates a kind of journal by keywords. The shift from printed to electronic communication. Uribe would certainly write object-poems in the third dimension, poemssculptures, maybe she would turn them into videopoems if she had not chosen the digital medium.

Her works range from the mundane – “Poema cortante / A Cutting Poem” emulates a blade cutting through a paper or which emulates the movement of a zipper. To the sublime – “Hojas Rojas Secas [Dry Red Leaves]” uses the colors of fall and a downward movement of letterforms to represent leaves dying and falling to the ground in the Fall season.

The Anipoems are evocative of other concrete poets, such as “E. M. de Melo e Castro, Jim Andrews, Augusto de Campos, Sérgio Capparelli and Ana Claudia Gruszynski, Arnaldo Antunes, David Daniels (1933-2008), Clemente Padin, among others”. However, her work is also responding to the conditions of the screen, network (internet), and time in a way that was inaccessible when many of their works were made.

The Game of Life

John Conway, an English mathematician, created the Game of Life in 1970, as part of his exploration into complex systems and cellular automata. He was interested in a problem in mathematical logic called the Turing machine, and specifically in the question of whether a very simple system could exhibit complex behavior.

The game is a demonstration of “cellular automata”, a math concept with a grid of cells that evolve over time based on predetermined conditions. This concept is used for modeling behaviors such as forest fires, traffic flow, and other systems.

In the case of the game of life, it is a “zero player” game, meaning that it plays out only with the initial input and no further interaction. The game is played on a grid of square cells, with each cell having two possible states – alive or dead. The state of each cell changes each turn based on the number of living neighbors it has. The rules are simple:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies (underpopulation).
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies (overpopulation).
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (reproduction).

The game led to the popularization of cellular automata as a concept and has generated much study and artworks using similar concepts.

Within the game, visual forms have emerged, or been found through study, that have unique properties. For instance, an “oscillator” runs through a sequence in an infinite loop. A “glider” which travels across the canvas in a single direction. And a “still life” which never changes unless another element encroaches upon it. These forms are still being found today, as an enthusiast community continues to investigate the game.