Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Why you are a prime number


WHY YOU ARE A PRIME NUMBER

The pleasure of primes:
pleasure of mystery.

They return to the primal,
not composite, composed,
are fundamental shape
not squares,
rectangles,
triangles,
cubes,
whatever.

Every now and then
in the sequence of things,
the prime, unbidden, unanticipated,
no formula for it.

We know that there are infinitely many of them:
if there is a greatest prime P
multiply all primes together and add one;
call it X;
X is greater than P
and no primes divide X
so there is a greater prime than P.

The primal.

The composite. The composed. Composed of primes.

The prime. The fundament. The valuable. The original.

O she is prime. I am composed of her.

The primes are what is left when the patterned is removed.

Primes are generated in the normal course of living.
Nothing special is required to generate the special.
It inheres in the generation of things.

They are the ground
of number's figure,
what is left
after the patterned/composed
is acknowledged.

2500 years later,
after the most acute minds
have all had a go at the old riddles,
many of them remain unsolved.

Are there infinitely many twin primes?
Like three and five,
eleven and thirteen,
seventeen and nineteen...

No one knows.

Primes and pattern.
Primes and no pattern.
Secret, elusive pattern.
Leibniz noted p prime <=>
(p-1)! congruent -1 mod p
but that is not enough, apparently,
even to determine whether
there are infinitely many twin primes
like 3,5 and 11,13 or 17,19.
Nor are there any good formulas
that produce only primes like 2n
produces only even numbers or 3n
produces only odd numbers.

But what is this doing in a poem?
I'm trying to figure that out,
whether there are several twin poems
that can allow a place for such talk.

If there is a last one...

There will be a last one for me.

When I did math seriously,
spending days or weeks or months
working on a problem, the satisfaction
of solving it was not simply the
pleasure of finishing well,
was more
like water,
the feel of it on the body,
and after you surface,
leave the water,
shivering and memory.

Sometimes when you write/create
well enough, you get the hum,
it isn't
so much the pride of having done it
as something else, the hum,
you're free and easy for a while,
did your job on earth.

That's the feeling I'd get sometimes
during and after solving an enigmatic
math problem.

Not just the protestant work ethic hum
but having your finger in the socket.

The pleasure of primes
is the pleasure of mystery.
As in the face behind the day,
intent of darkness,
all we cannot understand
but are fascinated by.
Not pattern undetermined
but the unpatterned,
what's left,
the fundamentals.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

review of Doom 3


Here's an HTML version of a review of Doom 3 I wrote:

Portuguese:
http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2597,1.shl
Thanks to Giselle Beiguelman and Paulo Migliacci.

English:
http://vispo.com/writings/essays/doom3.htm

ja

DISCUSSION

Santiago Ortiz Herrera (Colombia)


Here is some interesting work from a Colombian artist-programmer named
Santiago Ortiz Herrera: http://moebio.com . I browsed the online interactive
work, which is mostly in sound tones, and looked at some of the
documentation concerning his many installations.

ja

DISCUSSION

Doris Cross and the poetry of cancellation


Here is an interesting commentary by Geof Huth concerning visual poetry of
cancellation: http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/04/doris-crossed-out.html . More
particularly, it talks about Tom Phillip's A Humament, mentions related work
by d.a. levy, but focusses primarily on some remarkable work, portions of
which are viewable from links within Huth's commentary, by Doris Cross
published in the pages of Kaldron magazine. It isn't recent work, but it is
both an interesting commentary by Huth and also the links provide far shots
and closeups of some of Cross's crossings out--I agree with Huth when he
says Cross's work "...is more poetic, and therefore more affecting, than
Phillips'."

Huth goes on to add that "She is using a dictionary, so she is guaranteed a
rich variety of words....Also, unlike Phillips, she isn't trying to tell a
story, she isn't trying to devise a novel (with characters and something
akin to a plot). She is creating a series of poems. She has freedom."

He gives a purely textual example of Cross's poetry of
cancellation--something quite beautiful--and concludes with

"Being a poet, rather than a novelist, Cross has the freedom to produce a
text as enigmatic as a Sapphic fragment. And sometimes just as powerful."

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

RE:_RHIZOME_RAW:_the_present_act_(l'acte_present)


Thank you. That was quite good and both http://www.vilt.net/nkdee and
http://www.vilt.net are well worth checking out also. A well-realized
strongly literary net.art site. In French, for the most part, and with
enough visual multimedia that the tastiest parts don't seem to be utterly
dependent on an understanding of French. So, strongly literary in French but
with something also for the rest of the world. I like that sort of approach:
no reason to give up any form of writing, and they all appear crowding round
in virtual profusion. I see this is the work of Dirk Vekemans. Well done!

ja
http://vispo.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]On Behalf Of
Dirk Vekemans
Sent: June 14, 2005 5:40 AM
To: list@rhizome.org
Subject: RHIZOME\_RAW: the present act (l'acte present)

http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/nkdeeblog.jsp

Gilles Deleuze teaching on Leibniz, Valenciennes, France 1987, recursive
definition of