About Benjamin Laird
I am a PhD candidate in Creative Media at RMIT University. My research is in the performative and programmable in poetry across differing media. I am interested in how code acts performatively in poetic works and how poetic language can be programmed. My PhD project involves a creative component — poetry in print and programmable media — and an exegesis.
My undergraduate degrees are in Engineering and Computer Science from Swinburne and an honours year at RMIT in Media and Communication. You can read my honours exegesis, (en)coded poetry: read, write, execute on the honours lab website.
I have worked as IT support, a puppet animation technician, a front-end web developer, and a web application developer and I currently support and (re)write code for the Overland literary journal and Cordite poetry review websites.
My essays, posts, and poetry have been published in various places.
About <code>text
<code>text is a place to develop my thoughts on my PhD both as a method of research practice and for sorting out the ideas involved. It is also where I work through what I think about media, poetry, politics, programming, and labour.