Data Crunchers II - IV
II
Inside the computations
there’s an assimilation
of the
very self-ness of self;
it exposes corruptions
in record sets.
This taking-in of data,
A huge and soundless
harvesting-up of it all:
then wheat in the mill –
the coarse data put into
the press,
a sort of
something-out-of-nothingness,
a newness computed
outwards
through refinement and
crunch
and the alchemies of
meaning:
compression
of the communicative
via a medium.
“Some nights, I
dream-record backwards,
data-crunching out meaning,
backing up
the files of my life
(knowing some to be corrupted),
trying to sense, again,
the original hard-coding,
feeling out again for the symmetry
in binary
on which an elaborate artifice was built:
experience experienced
only
through the film of code,
a moving shadow of reality.
This separate world captured
in abstract,
an intangible Rosetta Stone
pulled out from the earth,
dusted down in
its great immensities and precisions
of
detail and cypher.
At a distance to them,
we are holograms of reality,
dreaming together.”
There are the
deep-downings
of memories,
their increasing
reachings
and memories’ memories –
these infinity mirrors
of content out there:
located
within the endless
refraction of subsections,
the folders within
folders,
Metadata of metadata
seeks itself in
reinterpretation; is
liable and exposed to be
plumbed,
tapped, probed;
and then restored,
replicated, re-rendered.
This, embedded and low-lying
in the
tentacularities of cyber
warfare,
has disappeared into
its silent
battle-fronts.
III
Random access memory:
“They are rooms of one entire skyscraper
That know not one
another
Or how they hold their
construct together–
This builds upwards
and outwards,
Its wholeness
recontextualises itself
Contiguously and
continuously.
Building blocks of data
Sublimate and
Fissure in a collective memory.”
Armies of spies and
vigilant rogues out there:
out in the great
shadow-depths of the
internet,
the forest has ears, and
sublimated in a
hive-minded,
near-perfect recall,
that trawls and trawls,
deep fakes sit in wait.
Tuning and retuning as
the frequencies frisson
at great distance; and
more prosaically,
knowledge amasses
passively.
IV
Remember the data wiped
and buried; then,
like a man technically
dead,
restored and returned
into being, it was
excavated, and
resurrected:
the separation-space of
being
gone but not gone,
“dividing being and le néant.
Revising and revisiting these files of my life as they are
recontextualised and transmuted
(some perhaps forever corrupted).
Much information in me to be repurposed
out there in the near-perfect recollections
webbing and webbing throughout the ethernet,
an untrackable tangle of jungle.
An error of rendering is inherited
in the transfer between two systems
somewhere out there.”
Interpretative
ambivalences
both liberated and
walled in
by the language
that is this facilitator
and conduit,
the un-locker and
limiter of meaning:
connotation integrates
imperfectly
and everchangingly,
as the numbers – which
know more than they
will say, their content
encrypted
and compressed – are
crunched – become
minced into metaphor.
Born
in Dublin in 1988, Peter Donnelly’s first collection, Photons, was published by
Appello Press in 2014. Following its publication, playwright Frank McGuinness
commented that "Peter Donnelly already shows he has a strong imagination;
indeed, a savage one presents itself on occasion when the beautiful and brutal
confront and confound each other." His second collection, Money Is a Kind
of Poetry, was published by Smokestack Books in 2019; it has been described as
“a meditation on contemporary alienation and the processes by which every new
technological advance seems to increase our isolation from each other, and the
more connected we are the less we appear to know ourselves.” He is currently
working on a third collection.
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