Introduction

"Tape Mark 3" is a series of generative poems inspired by the creative work of Nanni Balestrini (Milan, 1935 - Rome 2019), in collaboration with IBM engineer Alberto Nobis, which resulted in the poem "Tape Mark I" published in 1961.

The present work bears the same title but is marked with the number 3. Nanni Balestrini himself, created similar poems and published them in the collection “Come si agisce” edited by Feltrinelli in the year 1963 with the title “Tape Mark II”.

The collaboration between Balestrini and Nobis consisted in inserting the poems written by Balestrini in the program created by the engineer. Balestrini didn’t write the poems himself, but chose 3 verses from poems written by 3 different poets, namely "Hiroshima Diary" by Michihiko Hachiya (1955), "The Mystery of the Elevator" by Paul Goldwin (unfindable), and "Tao Te Ching" by Laozi or Lao Tzu (4th century BC).

He chose these 3 poems without a specific reason.... (?)

The verses were then permutated and generated by the IBM 7070 computer. The verses were then registered on a magnetic tape. In fact, the title of the poem derives from the name of these magnetic tapes. Subsequently, Balestrini made minimal grammatical and punctuation changes to the text and published it in print format.

For many years, the original poem only existed in the form of that very scheme of the algorithm which was published in the “Alamanacco Letterario 1962 Bompiani”.

A new versions of “Tape Mark 1” written in Perl was created by Wayne Clements on the web page www.in-vacua.com.

A team formed by Emiliano Russo, Gabriele Zaverio, and Vittorio Bellanich creeated another version written in Python which is available on the web page museo.freaknet.org.

In 2021, I published "Tape Mark 3" written in Perl adapting the code of Wayne Clements. A year later, I created a new web page on a cloud server that doesn't support Perl. Luckily, a web developer offered himself to translate the Perlo code into PHP.

The PHP version of "Tape Mark 3" is now avaible on www.edgedpub.com.

“Tape Mark 3” follows the same principles and mode of work as “Tape Mark I”. The original poems used to create this series are 3 poems written by 3 different poets. These are “Limits” by Jorge Luis Borges, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, and “Perhaps One Morning Walking” by Eugenio Montale.

Moreover, the 3 poems are thematically different - still following Ballestrini who chose "tre brani tematicamente differenti" - except for a few but important similarities of the content.

All three poems show a lonelely man absorbed in his thoughts, walking and looking at nature. The topics adressed in the poems are limits, margins, infinity, and loneliness. The three poems, therefore, share the same semantic field and the verbs are expressed in 1st person singular. These common factors result in consistancy in every possible variation that can be generated.

“Tape Mark 3” consists of 6 different poems enumerated from 3.1 to 3.6. The versions 1 and 2 are written by me; the versions 3 and 4 are variations of two poems written by Nick Montfort; versions 5 and 6, on the other hand, are written with a code copied from “Poesie elettroniche” written by Fabrizio Venerandi. Both authors have given permission to copy their code as long as it is declared in the newly created files.

This work is a practice for my PhD dissertation about digital aesthetics and performative materiality. The poems chosen are pertinent with my research. In an interview given to Emiliano Russo, Balestrini compares his poem with a theatre show: "The text is the representation, and the algorithm is the booklet of the theatrical play." (See video below from min 15-17; English subtitiles are available.)

In other words, the poem is the stagee play or performance, and the algorithm is the booklet with the instructions for the performance.

The code files of "Tape Mark 3" are available on the the Github repository github.com/edgedpub/Tape-Mark-3.