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What is Entropic Poetry ?

People tend to think that poetry has nothing to give


today. What is a poem supposed to give ? What is
poetry for?

It’s no surprise that people who belong to a highly


visual age of information consider poetry as an obsolete
aesthetical form of text. Because, according to this new
perception, any kind of creative work could be
understood and accepted as art only if it has some
audio-visual character. And text is allowed to
participate in the artworks as a mere communication
channel, which is actually just a boring necessity, as it
is the case in subtitles. Consequently, books are
considered to be the incompact antic media of
knowledge transfer, which could be easily replaced by
CDs and DVDs. Consisting of huge volumes of pure text,
a book is regarded as something meaningful only if it
contains some kind of useful, that is pragmatic
information, or if it has the potential to become an
interesting scenario for a future movie. So it seems that
we have arrived at a new and audio-visual station after
our long adventure through written text.

While investigating the current situation of written


text by problematizing the notions of information, data
and speed, Entropic poetry demonstrates an art of
poetic reaction against today’s audio-visual pragmatism
which ignores and sacrifices the text. Among many
other possible ways, entropic poetry finds a meaningful
way to demonstrate that poems/texts have both
informative and audio-visual aspects. Benefiting from
binary encoding’s neutrality against various data types,
it constitutes a concrete text-image-sound unity. At the
same time, regarding information theory, entropic
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poetry acts as a tool to measure the degree of


complexity of poetic works, encouraging the poet to be
more experimental. For example, dada would appear
more entropic in general, when we would transform
both dada poems and classical poems into entropic
poetry. Moreover, entropic poetry could function as a
means of textualizing any given image, and any given
music, by applying the inverse-transformation. Thus
one could be able to find an analogous textual
representation for, say, Picasso’s Guernica or
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Some selected poems translated into the language


of entropic poetry are shown below :
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The representations above belong – totally or partly


– to the poems Paradise Lost, Book I (John Milton);
Totenklage (Hugo Ball); A Lookless Cat-Black (Ece
Ayhan); Tempo Denyot, Remix (Ozcan Turkmen);
Tempo Denyot, Titanna Imperatrix Mundi (Ozcan
Turkmen), respectively.

Since entropic equivalents of letters are language-


dependent, the first two representations are based on
the letter occurences in english language whereas the
latter three representations are based on turkish-
specific values. For the second poem (Totenklage)
which is actually written in a universal language,
english based values are given preference.

When interpreting the results, there is a single rule


to apply which is very simple : The more red a
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representation gets, the more information the base-text


contains. Thus the red, orange or yellow sections
indicate the points where the text gets more entropic
whereas the green, blue or purple parts point out the
frequently used letters and punctuations. In other
words, what we get by applying the entropic conversion
is the “thermal map” of the text.

How does Entropic Poetry work?

In his famous article "The Mathematical Theory of


Communication” (1949) which gave birth to
“Information Theory”, Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001)
defined a measure of entropy :

H=-Σ pi logpi
where pi is the probability of i. Putting all its results
in the field of electrical engineering aside, and using
the base-2 logarithm, this formula gives us a measure
of average information contained in a message, in bits.
The information contained by a message X is
understood as the amount of uncertainty that is
eliminated by observation of X. Shannon information is
appropriate for an unordered space like the space of
alphabetic letters.

When we take a written text as the message, then


the pi’s in the formula become frequencies of
occurrences of different letters/words or letter/word
pairs, triplets etc. Every text unit – letter (pairs) or word
(pairs) – contains an information amount which is
inversely proportional to the frequency of occurrence of
that unit (pi), and the text as a whole contains an
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average amount of information of H bits. For example, if


a text is measured to have an entropy of 2 bits, then
one would use 2 bits in digital representation of each
text-unit, and the whole message could be represented
as a binary string which has a length of 2n (where n is
the total number of text-units in that text). As a result,
any communication channel with a capacity of
transmitting 2 bits would be enough to transmit such a
text.

Entropic poetry uses Shannon information to


process poems as text messages containing
information, that is it makes use of statistics about the
frequencies of letter occurences. In my implementation
of entropic poetry as a java program, I’ve simply used
letters as text-units. There were two basic reasons for
choosing letters instead of words or letter pairs/triplets :
First of all, it’s hard to find accurate statistical values
about the occurrence frequencies of letter pairs or
words. Secondly, accuracy wasn’t my principal concern.
I knew that there would be always problems with
accuracy whatever method or frequency subset I might
use. Rather I’ve focused on what we get by applying
some entropic transformation than the accuracy of that
transformation itself.

So I took advantage of two different statistics: For


turkish letters and punctuations I extracted my own
occurrence frequencies from one of my former essays
on digital poetry, namely the Digital Poetry : Today’s
Purgatory (2002). Among many others, that text
seemed more suitable to me, since it could be said to
have been written in a kind of mixed language. For
english letters I used the statistics I found at
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0181.html
which claims to cover “approximately 1 million words of
real text”.
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The next step was to transform the source text into


a Pm x n matrix, where m is the total number of lines we
get after the elimination of the header line, the blank
lines between the lines and epigraphs; and n is the
character-length of the longest line, including spaces.
The absent elements of the Pm x n matrix were filled with
blanks. Then this Pm x n matrix is given a visual
representation according to an entropy-to-color table
based on rainbow spectrum, and by mapping the
entropic equivalents of character elements into piano
keys (MIDI notes between 21 and 107), it is given an
audio representation.

As I’ve mentioned before, the characters of the text


which are considered to have more entropy will appear
red, orange or yellow, whereas the more frequent
letters and punctuations such as spaces, E, A etc. will
appear in colors of green, blue and purple when the
program is run. Similarly, we will hear higher pitched
sounds for characters which are seldom encountered in
texts. The size of the output panel is fixed; so, longer
texts will be represented in a more dense fashion.

Relations to Information Aesthetics


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The application of information theory into the


field of aesthetics is not new. The philosophers M.
Bense and A. Moles constructed an Information
Aesthetics influenced by Shannon’s and Wiener’s
Information Theory. Moreover, Information Theory
was also influential in music theory circles during
1950-1960. For example, Leonard Meyer’s Emotion
and Meaning in Music published in 1956 was
influenced by Information Theory. In 1957, Brooks,
Hopkins, Neumann and Wright published the results
of their research under the title An Experiment in
Musical Composition (IRE Transactions on Electronic
Computers, Vol. 6, No. 1) which, after an analysis of
the probabilities of notes occurring in various hymns,
resulted in computer generated hymns. Another work
to mention is composer James Tenney’s Ergodos.
So, what is the relation of entropic poetry to
information aesthetics? First of all, this is an
implementation of entropic poetry, thus it is an
application of the information theory to poetry.
Although this application is something new, it wasn’t
the whole motivation behind the work. Aiming at
demonstrating something similar to what Maxwell
demonstrated with his well-known equations, I
“demanded the impossible”, and tried to create a tool
which would glue data of different nature, that is text,
image and sound together. Being the common
physical attribute of signals of any nature, that glue
was “frequency”, and Shannon Information served as
the tool to bridge the gap between analog and digital
worlds. It is important to notice, however, that
entropic poetry is not a mere continuation or a mere
implementation of the ideas of information
aesthetics. Information aesthetics is in search of an
objective aesthetics, and benefits from information
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theory as a scientific method that is powerful enough


to explain the artist’s influence over publikum. In
other words, information aesthetics considers
Shannon Information the criterium, the explanation,
the goal and the result of the whole aesthetical
process, whereas entropic poetry uses the
information theory also in an ironical manner. It takes
advantage of science to be able to say : “Hey! Poetry
is more than what you see in it! It is full of
information, and it has an audio-visual character! So
are you sure you want to see poems like the ones
created by Entropic Poetry Tool?”. At the same time,
entropic poetry turns to the poet and asks: “Are you
sure you can’t paint something different than this?”
Both a tool and an artwork - Entropic poetry is a
reaction to the publikum and a warning to the poet.

Ozcan Turkmen, 01/03/2010 (revised)

Web References :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
http://csml.som.ohio-
state.edu/Music829D/Notes/Infotheory.html
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/018
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