Brian Kim Stefans on the use of computer programs to create poems

Q. How does it matter to a reader that you have sometimes used programs to write texts?

Brian Kim Stefans: I think a lot of what's happening today involves determining the individual's relationship to these machines, which may after all one day "do our thinking," though I'm just thinking about how computers alter our concepts of language in ways that most theorists I've read think has to do with expansive, limitless economies, the "web," rhizomic spaces, etc. I want to demonstrate, in a way, that appreciable form can surface out of these chaotic mixes, hence be the ambassador between the human-scale reader and the faceless, presumably dominating information field (imagine an installation artist transforming one small but significant corner of Times Square into a human-scale space, just to show that the interaction is possible). I also have this idea of being an "organic" programmer, which is to say I write the programs myself in ways that create "elegant solutions" to the textual problem at hand -- it's cyborgian, they are extensions of my fingers, so to speak. Spooky. Well, that may sound banal, but it's mostly why I even bother to mention it, and to also drop the idea into someone else's head so that hopefully other people will try.