Roberto Simanowski
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667376
- eISBN:
- 9781452946788
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667376.003.0002
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
This chapter provides a definition of digital literature and describes its characteristics. It evaluates the distinction between digital literature and digital art. It considers the role of the ...
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This chapter provides a definition of digital literature and describes its characteristics. It evaluates the distinction between digital literature and digital art. It considers the role of the author in text production by narrative machines and bacteria. It also raises the question of literature versus installation, stating that the phenomenon of digital aesthetics is full of borderline cases.Less
This chapter provides a definition of digital literature and describes its characteristics. It evaluates the distinction between digital literature and digital art. It considers the role of the author in text production by narrative machines and bacteria. It also raises the question of literature versus installation, stating that the phenomenon of digital aesthetics is full of borderline cases.
David Jhave Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034517
- eISBN:
- 9780262334396
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034517.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics ...
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This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications).
Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms.
Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactives), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy.
In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness.
Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.Less
This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications).
Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms.
Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactives), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy.
In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness.
Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.
Jessica Pressman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199937080
- eISBN:
- 9780199352623
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937080.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter traces a constellation of literary efforts to represent cognition with and through media. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the central node in this network, the inspiration for a variety of ...
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This chapter traces a constellation of literary efforts to represent cognition with and through media. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the central node in this network, the inspiration for a variety of digital modernist works that adapt stream of consciousness. Diverse digital works include a Twitter-based performance of “Wandering Rocks” (by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy), a generative, database-driven performance artwork (Talan Memmott’s My Molly [Departed]), and a complex narrative inspired by a section of “Ithaca” (Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter). Considering these works together and in relation to their modernist source of inspiration shows how stream of consciousness, that central literary technique for representing consciousness in twentieth-century literature that came to the fore through modernism, is decidedly about media. This chapter shows how contemporary literature updates modernist techniques for depicting human consciousness to reflect changes as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital.Less
This chapter traces a constellation of literary efforts to represent cognition with and through media. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the central node in this network, the inspiration for a variety of digital modernist works that adapt stream of consciousness. Diverse digital works include a Twitter-based performance of “Wandering Rocks” (by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy), a generative, database-driven performance artwork (Talan Memmott’s My Molly [Departed]), and a complex narrative inspired by a section of “Ithaca” (Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter). Considering these works together and in relation to their modernist source of inspiration shows how stream of consciousness, that central literary technique for representing consciousness in twentieth-century literature that came to the fore through modernism, is decidedly about media. This chapter shows how contemporary literature updates modernist techniques for depicting human consciousness to reflect changes as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital.
Jessica Pressman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199937080
- eISBN:
- 9780199352623
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937080.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Digital writers Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries claim that their work of Flash-based digital literature, Dakota, is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.” The chapter ...
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Digital writers Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries claim that their work of Flash-based digital literature, Dakota, is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.” The chapter close reads the digital work in relation to its proclaimed source material despite the fact that the speed at which Dakota flashes challenges efforts to do so. YHCHI brilliantly adapt Pound’s poetry at the level of content and form. For not only do YHCHI remix the language of the first cantos but they also use Flash to renovate Pound’s poetic technique of “super-position” or textual montage. This chapter examines the transformation of Pound’s formal technique into Flash to show how the poetic result illuminates connections between the modernist and digital modernist texts as well as the literary periods they represent.Less
Digital writers Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries claim that their work of Flash-based digital literature, Dakota, is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.” The chapter close reads the digital work in relation to its proclaimed source material despite the fact that the speed at which Dakota flashes challenges efforts to do so. YHCHI brilliantly adapt Pound’s poetry at the level of content and form. For not only do YHCHI remix the language of the first cantos but they also use Flash to renovate Pound’s poetic technique of “super-position” or textual montage. This chapter examines the transformation of Pound’s formal technique into Flash to show how the poetic result illuminates connections between the modernist and digital modernist texts as well as the literary periods they represent.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter four looks at Emily Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as a way to challenge the coherence of the book in the mid to late 19th century.
Chapter four looks at Emily Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as a way to challenge the coherence of the book in the mid to late 19th century.
Jessica Pressman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199937080
- eISBN:
- 9780199352623
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937080.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter intervenes in discourse about the readability of computer code. It traces a prehistory of this discussion about code-as-text back by drawing a parallel between the idea that computer ...
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This chapter intervenes in discourse about the readability of computer code. It traces a prehistory of this discussion about code-as-text back by drawing a parallel between the idea that computer code enables universal communication and the idea that the Chinese ideogram is a universal medium for poetics, most famously propagated by Ezra Pound via Ernest Fenollosa. Chinese has been a central part of Western discourse about universal language for centuries, from Leibniz’s binary logic through to Norbert Wiener’s computer-based machine translation and debates about Global English via the World Wide Web. This chapter traces this thread across the intertwined histories of poetics and computing. It reads a work of electronic literature that incorporates ideograms into its interface design (Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon) and a digital novel that confronts and rejects the idea that cyberspace enables universal translation (Erik Loyer’s Chroma). These works resist the ideological underpinnings that turn code into a universal language— either through the conceit that code is capable of universal machinic translation or that code is an autonomous, unreadable entity on par with a natural language. These works thus critique computational ideologies through literature. In so doing, they remind us that literature and its study are essential to understanding and critiquing digital culture and discourse.Less
This chapter intervenes in discourse about the readability of computer code. It traces a prehistory of this discussion about code-as-text back by drawing a parallel between the idea that computer code enables universal communication and the idea that the Chinese ideogram is a universal medium for poetics, most famously propagated by Ezra Pound via Ernest Fenollosa. Chinese has been a central part of Western discourse about universal language for centuries, from Leibniz’s binary logic through to Norbert Wiener’s computer-based machine translation and debates about Global English via the World Wide Web. This chapter traces this thread across the intertwined histories of poetics and computing. It reads a work of electronic literature that incorporates ideograms into its interface design (Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon) and a digital novel that confronts and rejects the idea that cyberspace enables universal translation (Erik Loyer’s Chroma). These works resist the ideological underpinnings that turn code into a universal language— either through the conceit that code is capable of universal machinic translation or that code is an autonomous, unreadable entity on par with a natural language. These works thus critique computational ideologies through literature. In so doing, they remind us that literature and its study are essential to understanding and critiquing digital culture and discourse.
Jessica Pressman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199937080
- eISBN:
- 9780199352623
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937080.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter performs close reading as media archaeology. William Poundstone’s Flash-based digital work Project for the Tachistoscope: {Bottomless Pit} (2005) flashes a steady stream of speeding text ...
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This chapter performs close reading as media archaeology. William Poundstone’s Flash-based digital work Project for the Tachistoscope: {Bottomless Pit} (2005) flashes a steady stream of speeding text and icons in a poetic remediation of the tachistoscope, a nineteenth century invention for measuring perception. Poundstone’s tachistoscopic poetic both archives and promotes excavation of the older reading machine. This chapter pairs Poundstone’s digital work with an experiment in machine poetics that dates from the modernist period: Bob Brown’s Readies machine (circa 1930). The Readies was never built, but Brown’s writing about the machine and his anthology of poetry for it serve as a crucial link between experimental writers of modernist and contemporary periods imagining literary revolution through innovations in the speed-reading machines of their own times.Less
This chapter performs close reading as media archaeology. William Poundstone’s Flash-based digital work Project for the Tachistoscope: {Bottomless Pit} (2005) flashes a steady stream of speeding text and icons in a poetic remediation of the tachistoscope, a nineteenth century invention for measuring perception. Poundstone’s tachistoscopic poetic both archives and promotes excavation of the older reading machine. This chapter pairs Poundstone’s digital work with an experiment in machine poetics that dates from the modernist period: Bob Brown’s Readies machine (circa 1930). The Readies was never built, but Brown’s writing about the machine and his anthology of poetry for it serve as a crucial link between experimental writers of modernist and contemporary periods imagining literary revolution through innovations in the speed-reading machines of their own times.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter one is about digital writers’ challenge to the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early 21st century.
Chapter one is about digital writers’ challenge to the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early 21st century.
Jessica Pressman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199937080
- eISBN:
- 9780199352623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937080.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book presents an alternate genealogy for born-digital, avant-garde literature by connecting it to high literary modernism. “Digital modernism” refers to the strategy of adapting the poetics of ...
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This book presents an alternate genealogy for born-digital, avant-garde literature by connecting it to high literary modernism. “Digital modernism” refers to the strategy of adapting the poetics of literary modernism into new media literature, and this pursuit is shared among a diverse group of digital works. Examining digital modernism provides an opportunity to consider the modernist roots of digital literature and to recognize how modernism is centrally about media. Reading between these historical periods and their medial formats also demands the renovation of close reading in order to approach born-digital literature and illuminates how close reading remains vital to digital culture. By showing how media studies has its origins in literary studies, this book suggests that media studies should be considered part of literary studies and literary criticism.Less
This book presents an alternate genealogy for born-digital, avant-garde literature by connecting it to high literary modernism. “Digital modernism” refers to the strategy of adapting the poetics of literary modernism into new media literature, and this pursuit is shared among a diverse group of digital works. Examining digital modernism provides an opportunity to consider the modernist roots of digital literature and to recognize how modernism is centrally about media. Reading between these historical periods and their medial formats also demands the renovation of close reading in order to approach born-digital literature and illuminates how close reading remains vital to digital culture. By showing how media studies has its origins in literary studies, this book suggests that media studies should be considered part of literary studies and literary criticism.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary ...
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Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary contexts. My book describes, largely through original archival research, ruptures in present and past media environments that expose how certain literary engagements with screen- and print-based technologies transform reading/writing practices. My book, then, is a crucial contribution to the fields of media studies/digital humanities and poetry/poetics in its development of a media poetics which frames literary production as ineluctably involved in a critical engagement with the limits and possibilities of writing media. Throughout, I demonstrate how a certain thread of experimental poetry has always been engaged with questioning the media by which it is made and through which it is consumed. At each point in this non-linear history, I describe how this lineage of poetry undermines the prevailing philosophies of particular media ecology and so reveals to us, in our present moment, the creative limits and possibilities built into our contemporary technologies. By the time I return once again to the present moment in the post-script via the foregoing four techno-literary ruptures, I have made visible a longstanding conflict between those who would deny us access to fundamental tools of creative production and those who work to undermine these foreclosures on creativity. In many ways, then, my book reveals the strong political engagement driving a tradition of experimental poetry and argues for poetry’s importance in the digital age.Less
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary contexts. My book describes, largely through original archival research, ruptures in present and past media environments that expose how certain literary engagements with screen- and print-based technologies transform reading/writing practices. My book, then, is a crucial contribution to the fields of media studies/digital humanities and poetry/poetics in its development of a media poetics which frames literary production as ineluctably involved in a critical engagement with the limits and possibilities of writing media. Throughout, I demonstrate how a certain thread of experimental poetry has always been engaged with questioning the media by which it is made and through which it is consumed. At each point in this non-linear history, I describe how this lineage of poetry undermines the prevailing philosophies of particular media ecology and so reveals to us, in our present moment, the creative limits and possibilities built into our contemporary technologies. By the time I return once again to the present moment in the post-script via the foregoing four techno-literary ruptures, I have made visible a longstanding conflict between those who would deny us access to fundamental tools of creative production and those who work to undermine these foreclosures on creativity. In many ways, then, my book reveals the strong political engagement driving a tradition of experimental poetry and argues for poetry’s importance in the digital age.
Roberto Simanowski
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667376
- eISBN:
- 9781452946788
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667376.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
This chapter investigates the so-called death of the author, arguing that the proclaimed reallocation of power from author to reader is a betrayal of the discourse theory. It examines the quality of ...
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This chapter investigates the so-called death of the author, arguing that the proclaimed reallocation of power from author to reader is a betrayal of the discourse theory. It examines the quality of mechanic authorship, or authorship through the use of text generators, by discussing how innovative automated text generation is. It concludes that one may declare the death of the reader rather than the death of the author.Less
This chapter investigates the so-called death of the author, arguing that the proclaimed reallocation of power from author to reader is a betrayal of the discourse theory. It examines the quality of mechanic authorship, or authorship through the use of text generators, by discussing how innovative automated text generation is. It concludes that one may declare the death of the reader rather than the death of the author.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media ...
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In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media studies: works of “readingwriting” that explore a 21st century media poetics as they question how search engines answer our questions, how they read our writing, and even how they write for us.Less
In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media studies: works of “readingwriting” that explore a 21st century media poetics as they question how search engines answer our questions, how they read our writing, and even how they write for us.
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823264377
- eISBN:
- 9780823266784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264377.003.0012
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter examines the sense specificity of listening by focusing on the verbal-visual-sonic art of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) as a technology of distraction. Citing YHCHI's ...
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This chapter examines the sense specificity of listening by focusing on the verbal-visual-sonic art of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) as a technology of distraction. Citing YHCHI's Flash-encoded audiovisual work DAK0TA (2002), it argues that aurality must be reconceptualized in terms of the transmediation that informs such works of digital literature. It considers DAK0TA's strictly timed sequencing of text to the sound of jazz drumming and suggests that the experience of looking and reading must be understood as a kind of listening or as the experience of being sung to. It also explains how DAK0TA resonates with the aesthetics of difficulty found in modernism.Less
This chapter examines the sense specificity of listening by focusing on the verbal-visual-sonic art of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) as a technology of distraction. Citing YHCHI's Flash-encoded audiovisual work DAK0TA (2002), it argues that aurality must be reconceptualized in terms of the transmediation that informs such works of digital literature. It considers DAK0TA's strictly timed sequencing of text to the sound of jazz drumming and suggests that the experience of looking and reading must be understood as a kind of listening or as the experience of being sung to. It also explains how DAK0TA resonates with the aesthetics of difficulty found in modernism.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter three focuses on poetic experiments with the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chapter three focuses on poetic experiments with the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter two moves to poets’ engagement with the transition from the late 1960s’ emphasis on openness and creativity in computing to the 1980s’ ideology of the user-friendly Graphical User Interface.
Chapter two moves to poets’ engagement with the transition from the late 1960s’ emphasis on openness and creativity in computing to the 1980s’ ideology of the user-friendly Graphical User Interface.
