The Pettis Collection of Computer Art · Computational Poetry
In 1983–84 the Canadian poet bpNichol wrote First Screening: a suite of twelve programmed, kinetic poems — words that arrive, drift, erase and rewrite themselves on screen. He wrote them in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple IIe and issued them through Underwhich Editions as 100 signed, numbered copies on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. It is a founding work of computational poetry, a sibling to Knowles & Tenney's A House of Dust elsewhere in this collection.
This screen runs bpNichol's genuine source listing — his own code, not a re-creation of the poems — through a small Applesoft interpreter built for this page. No emulator, no ROM: the program's HOME, VTAB/HTAB, SPEED and text-window pokes are executed as the Apple IIe would have, so the curtains, sliding doors and scrolling waves move at their intended pace. A full run is about seven and a half minutes at 1×.
bpNichol left a note in the code: “FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE'S AN 'OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE' AT 1748.” to tune it in — two words, FRED and GINGER, dance across the screen; dedicated “for ellie.”
Source preserved, documented and ported in 2007 by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi and Dan Waber, and published at vispo.com/bp. A physical signed Underwhich floppy (or the 1993 Aleator Press edition) remains on the collection's hunt list.