PLIANT DESIRE (an anagram of PRESIDENTIAL) is a creative coding piece in which 69 random Trump tweets from the onset of his presidency are sampled, broken apart, and reconstituted into a rambling epic poem with stanzas of 69 lines that encapsulates a despot’s narcissistic authoritarian aggrandizement of self and self-serving interests at the expense of people and environment; masquerading as a country’s economic and security concerns.
Pliant Desire is a generative language work that interrogates how power bends language into self-serving form. Drawing from a corpus of presidential tweets, the work fractures political rhetoric into poetic stanzas, stripping statements of their original context and reassembling them into a looping, unstable structure. The resulting text exposes how desire—for authority, affirmation, and dominance—remains pliable under its own repetition.
Rather than advancing argument or narrative, the language circles itself. Meaning does not resolve; it rehearses. This recursive structure reflects a political condition in which repetition substitutes for accountability and coherence is replaced by rhythm. The work reveals rhetoric as material—capable of being stretched, warped, and redeployed—while retaining the emotional force that sustains it.
Pliant Desire establishes the conceptual ground later explored in I’M PEACHY, where repetition becomes not just structural, but architectural. If this work exposes recurrence as a rhetorical strategy, the subsequent project embeds that recurrence directly into the mechanics of a machine—allowing language to loop itself without human intervention.
Pliant Desire and I’M PEACHY examine political language as a system defined by recurrence. The first breaks rhetoric apart to reveal its pliability under power; the second reconstructs that recurrence within a machine that cannot stop repeating. Across both works, language ceases to communicate and instead circulates—trapped in loops that sustain authority through repetition rather than meaning.
The work traces its roots to THE HARPY AND THE HARE , a (political) bedtime story for children and grown-ups, when Canada had its own fascist-leaning government and prime minister. As inextricable (meta)phor, PLIANT DESIRE was coded in a single day (Black Friday – dysfunctional nadir of economy) and utilizes colors based on 911 and 666 hex codes.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 29/11/2019 (Black Friday)
Generate your own EPIC POEM: https://pyhook.dissonanceonline.com/trump
