Digital poesis impulse: A methodology of creative coding with GPT as co-pilot

Abstract

Any poem can be digitalised, but under what conditions might the poet desire a digital incarnation of their creative output? And for a writer with hobbyist coding skills, might ChatGPT be a suitable partner for creative coding? Faced with three digital poetry commissions and the terror of the blank screen, the author explores questions of poetry and desire, artificial intelligence and authorship, and the tools which enable her digital writing practice. As Irina Paperno (2004) notes, “scholars do not know what to do with diaries” (p. 565). Where the author’s research asks what can be done with journals-as-archives the experimental, multimodal approach of digital poesis breaks open the notion that static containers such as memoir or biography are the best ways into literary archives. The author discovers the coding container as a playful place to enact modes of relationality between text and medium, mother and daughter, archive and archon. Much like Winnicott’s (2005) mother-child play space enables an infant to test the limits of their inner world and external reality, a source-code editor offers unlimited combinatory potential for enacting a relational and material archival response. Through exploring practice-based research, this article tracks the methodology of the three digital poems from ideation to execution and publication, offering exegetical insights along with a detailed accounting of the tools and processes used in the making.