ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyzes visual artist Romano's online and real-time installation that interface collects snippets of text from the internet—fragments based on user-entered data or pre-generated poems, in the case of an installation. It also analyzes several online artistic and theoretical works by the Colombian digital artist who currently resides in San Francisco, California. The book explores the literary and aesthetic features of his projects "Árboles de textos" and "esferas" in terms of what Joanna Drucker has called "speculative computing." It focuses on the workings of a "quantum mechanism" in Loss Pequeño Glazier's digital poetry. The book argues that the variance at play in Glazier's multi-valent poetic variants illustrates the principle of quantum superposition in a very non-metaphorical way, showing that the time of reading(s) in Glazier's programmable poem converges and diverges around a series of poetic possibilities, according to probabilistic algorithms.
