As I write, I find myself constantly deleting and replacing characters or chunks of text. Some of thes self-edits are the result of typos and grammatical errors; some result from a perceived lack of clarity in the text; still more result from embarrassment about whatever it is I have just written. The phrases, words, fragments and characters that constitute my deleted text output disappear when I hit the ‘delete’ key, and yet, once they have been brought forth into the world, they cannot be completely destroyed. Instead, they are relegated to a sort of limbo: their status as official text is not accepted, but their existence is not denied. They are forgotten, but not gone.

What happens when I rescue these ‘lost words’? What do they look like? What do they say to me? What do they say about me? The Lost Words project is an act of both exploration and exposure. I am not merely uncovering those parts of myself that are normally covered, I am presenting them without the context of those parts that are normally uncovered, forcing the reader (and myself) to examine this nakedness that much more closely in its decontextualized state. What results approaches a pure form of expression, in which my consciousness has no hand -- the role of consciousness being so often to restrain, to protect, to prevent exposure. This, truly, is subconscious poetry.

These poems have been generated through a two-part process. In the first part, logKext, a commercial keylogger created by FSB Software, is used to log all of my keystrokes over an arbitrarily determined period of time. The complete log file is then passed through the Lost Words program (written in Java), which seeks out all of the keystrokes that were deleted.

Click on the image above to view a full poem.

This work stems from two major influences: the work of Danish author Tor Nørretranders, and the Fluxus movement. In “The Bandwith of Consciousness,” a chapter from his 1998 book The User Illusion, Nørretranders writes that human beings have a limited capacity for conscious information processing, and, as such, much of what we believe to be conscious activity is in fact subconscious. This idea is the basis for my project, which relies on the assumption that much of my writing is done at a level that is below full consciousness. This lack of awareness is what lends the expression its purity; it isn’t (or is barely) clouded by the controlling hand of consciousness. The influence of Fluxus similarly relates to minimizing the role of consciousness in the creation of art. The work of many of the Fluxists, particularly Jackson Mac Low and John Cage, uses algorithms and operations of chance as bases for generating works of art. Mac Low’s work is the the most notably predecessor to what I am doing here; he was a pioneer of non-intentional poetry, using randomness and coincidence to produce much of his work.