I had spent much of 2019 thinking about the intersection of computation and consciousness, something I was calling #consciouscomputation (That hash tag is crucial).

I was starting to collect my thoughts, inspired by a friend of mine who started a small creative community of people who give share and give feedback on work. Then I lost interest.

I was traveling a lot the first two months of the year for my job as a DevOps consultant.  I was in Seattle during the first outbrake of covid19 in the states.  As I traveled I began to feel the environment changing, and this question of computation and consciousness no longer interested me. But my mind was still racing, I was having conversations, collaborations, reading, and writing. 

I started to think on a meta level about what is the constant among all these activities, what could be big enough to contain my interests, but focused enough to be able to communicate clearly.  

Thanks a lot to a creative group I am a part of, and Nitzan who called me a systems poet, I started thinking about what I am calling system poetics. 

What is system poetics? 

A system is a coherent body of thought or methodology.  It can be vedic astrology,  germ theory of disease, transcendental ideology, theory of computation, freudian psychology, sufi mysticism, iconology, the sonnet, and so forth. 

What is not a system? Individual things and individual things grouped together without an organizing principal. 

We can look at different systems in a comparative way to see how concepts and individuals from one system map to one another, or how different systems map to different experiences. And we can also look at systems poetically.

A system poetics looks at spaces between systems and the overlaps that are both ineffable and expressible, and through exploring these spaces open up new avenues of thought and action.  Because. while I am interested in ideas, I am also interested in what how thoughts inform action and experience. 

I am working this through at systempoetics.com. It is a “living document”.  This blog is codified, each post is written once and stamped (and occasionally edited),  system poetics is a running list of what is on the top of my mind, what I want to engage in I am focused on the process of this thinking and the processes of building this out. 

I have some ideas planned, that to be worked out in collaboration with you. Tomorrow, I have my first newsletter going out which will give a taste of what is going to be going on, so please take a look and sign up if you are so interested.