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E-Poetry,
an international festival and symposium of digital poetry,
was inaugurated by Loss Pequeño Glazier in 2001 in
Buffalo, and has occurred every two years since (other
meetings were held in Morgantown, London, and Paris). This
year’s event took place in Barcelona, principally (and
well) organized by Laura Borràs at the University of
Barcelona. I have attended and made presentations at four of
these meetings, and having done so has made a significant
impact on both my creative and critical work. A report I
wrote about E-Poetry 2003 was published by Borràs’s
research group, Hermeneia, whose efforts were recently
removed from the Web by her former employer (Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya/Open University of Catalonia)—my
previous report and many documents valuable to the study of
digital literature are unavailable to researchers as a
result of Borràs’s undesired, undeserved
professional predicament. Because
I am working on a manuscript focusing on digital poetry and
the Web, and presentations made in Barcelona are a
reflection of the discipline at present, I spent several
weeks afterward reviewing notes and recordings I made during
the events. Since I had the privilege to attend (thanks to a
travel grant from the Department of Humanities at New Jersey
Institute of Technology and additional support provided by
Borràs), I decided to make these observations
available for people who are interested in contemporary
practice (creative and theoretical) but could not be there.
They are for anyone who is interested in what transpires at
a gathering of individuals who are seriously engaged with
digital poetry. As noted in my book Prehistoric Digital
Poetry, I am a proponent of the (Charles) Olsonian
concept of the “saturation job”, and this report
is no exception to that objective; beyond my immediate
family, there is nothing I am more saturated in than digital
poetry. Below
I document events chronologically, with labels categorizing
the focus of each session and paper titles preceding
summaries. When possible, I include links to works presented
and discussed. I’d like to stress that anyone
interested in the materials as a result of my transcriptions
of panels should make an effort to contact the authors and
obtain a copy of the original essays. Due to the nature of
the act, my words on the information and arguments presented
may not be accurate or may be improperly stated. Since
I was unable to attend every session, I asked for assistance
from Giovanna di Rosario and Mette-Marie Zacher
Sørensen, who furnished their notes for this report;
John Cayley and Laura Borràs also offered helpful
comments. Kenneth Sherwood provided audio recordings of two
other sessions I could not attend. I offer my sincere
gratitude to these colleagues, the organizing team, and
everyone else whose efforts made for a fantastic
experience.. The
opening of the E-Poetry 2009 Festival—which was also a
featured event of Barcelona’s annual “week of
poetry”—took place in the spacious penthouse
floor at CCCB
(Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona) and
was attended by more than 175 people who were not
participants in the Festival. Works were shown on several
mid-size flat screen monitors that were set up in front of
the audience. Following
Borràs’s welcome and introductions, the first
presenter was Maria Mencía, who aesthetically
connects her visual, generative poetry to Concrete and Sound
poetry. Mencía presented five different examples of
works gathered under the title “Poemas Visuales
Generativos” (documentation of some of these works can
be found at http://www.m.mencia.freeuk.com/).
For each piece she enlisted a collaborator from the audience
to propel the stage presentation: Scott Rettberg improvised
a reading of a work titled “Accidental Meaning”
which Mencía had produced in collaboration with
Lilian Roby; Jason Nelson and Stephanie Strickland’s
voices generated visual poems based on the tradition of
concrete poetry and more specifically in Mayer’s poem “ALPHBETENQUADRATBCH
1”. These were developed with the technical help of
Alexander Szekely. Then Mencia introduced some new work
produced specifically for the event, programmed by
José Carlos Silvestre. In these pieces body movements
generated the compilation of letters and symbols on the
screen.One particularly important moment was Rettberg’s
live reading onstage (speaking the words aloud as they were
being generated). As the text emerges onscreen (a database
consisting of the 100 words American high school students
should know upon graduation), Rettberg improvises; the
display of the reading process of this sort of work is made
clear for everybody to see. Rettberg, encountering different
randomly activated words of various sizes and colors,
recites those that catch his eye first. Essentially, this
type of connecting and assembling is what anyone
encountering the work—or any
generated-in-the-moment-artwork—does, unless s/he
strategically imposes a method of viewing beforehand (e.g.,
plans ahead to view and respond to the words appearing in
the upper left corner only). His reading of Mencía’s
shifting structure amounts to a litany of words (a “word
salad”), some combinations (permutations) of which
possess lyrical, sometimes humorous, poetic qualities, not
unlike the juxtapositions found in more abstract forms of
writing such as Language Poetry (e.g., “repeated to
teach misconduct”, “chicanery implant”, “vernal
subterfuge artifice not facetious but by chicanery insipid”. In
Mencía’s other visually generated poems, sounds
of the user’s voice and bodily movements activate the
appearance of text on the screen. In the first of three
voice activated works she showed, fragments of lines (in
black)—which resemble snippets of code—vertically
and horizontally appear on the white screen; in the second,
a jumbled line of type appears, an inscribed effect she
refers to as “note taking”. In the third voice
activated piece and body movement piece of her “Poemas
Visuales Generativos” , aesthetic results are similar:
letters drawn from various sources appear in small “piles”
on the screen, according to tone, pitch, volume, or
direction and intensity of the user’s movement before
the computer’s camera. The piles are ultimately formed
into patterns and shapes. Not using conventional software in
her work Mencía seeks to, “explore Code as
language and a medium&and to test how code controls the
medium”. As in previous works, such as “Birds
Singing Other Birds Songs”, Mencía presents a
blank slate for the viewer, who participates in the poem by
interactively constructing materials on the screen upon. In
a statement about the work, Mencía writes of her
interest in “the breaking and production of meanings,
the non-semantic, the visual, the oral, the blank page, the
engagement of the reader/user in the shifting from the
linguistic to the visual and back”. Glazier
followed Mencía on the stage, where he perversely
(given his background as a early mover in the field of
digital poetry) offered a completely conventional poetry
reading (in Spanish). After Glazier’s analog
interlude, Jason Nelson presented a retrospective of
selected works, introducing eight of his digital poetry
projects, including “Game
Game Game and Again Game”,
“Jailbreak”, and “I
made this you play this we are enemies”.
Seeing him expertly piloting the games through several
levels and at the same time theatrically read the words
inscribed on the screen (as well as intermittently popping
up) was enlightening. Nelson presented the idealized
experience of the work—in which the player quickly
manages to read at least parts of the work while
successfully navigating through the layers of the interface
(in fact conducting navigation in a way that permits
extended reading of the text presented on each level).
Especially when a player is becoming familiar with the
structure this ideal scenario won’t be realized, but
it is a possibility. Nelson’s games are marked by
copious kinetic and sonic elements, almost to the point of
overload. To hear/see him play and read along with them
simultaneously was instructive. In chaos, spontaneous action
leads to surprising results, which will not be anticipated
until the player is familiar with the game. Another
interesting component to being in the audience, watching the
performance of these poems, is that we see more text than is
reported by the voice onstage. Someone watching a gameplay
performance does not just follow the author to watch and
listen to receive messages, but independently reads the
interface to discover her/his own alternative routes on the
screen as well. Nelson briefly introduced several non-game
pieces titled “wittenoom:
speculative shell and the cancerous breeze”
and “wide
and wildly branded”.
“wittenoom” is an interactive structure in which a series
of interlinked pictures documenting a barren landscape are
joined on the screen by falling “cards”, each of
which contains a passage of text when clicked;
unfortunately, a technical glitch prevented Nelson from
showing more than one section of the piece during the
presentation. “wide and wildly branded” is a “compass
creation” in which the user navigates through virtual
and textual terrain. Arrows direct the viewer to a wheel of
colored spokes, which on mouseover reveal text in two
labeled areas, marked “poetic” and “subpoetic”.
Examples: “poetic: come and learn to migrate
routing/subpoetic: a wide and wildly branded population”;
“poetic: a patent action of the ground/subpoetic: anything is a
visited mythology open”. “Birds
still warm from flying”
is a new, perhaps more complex version of the “poetry
cube” previously built by Nelson (see http://www.secrettechnology.com/poem_cube/poem_cube.html),
although this version of the work does not allow the viewer
to contribute input. Instead the viewer manipulates Nelson’s
3D object, into which text and some video and sound clips
are embedded, selectively choosing (registering) what is
read. Nelson’s also launched a brand new game called “Jail
Break”, rooted in Dadaism, but spent very little time
showing it, and concluded by showing two incomplete
interactive works. In “the completely forever menu”
lines of the poem cascade down the screen according to the
viewer’s location in the a succession of pull-down
menus. “Chronos” Nelson described as a “completely
incomplete digital poem” and extended an invitation to
all to add something to the interface. The work is
structured as an interactive timeline marked in decades and
years, but Nelson is unsure of what to fill it with—thus
his invitation to contribute served as a question, and as a
challenge to the audience. Stephanie
Strickland presented her digital poem Slippingglimpse
(as she did with her collaborator Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
at E-Poetry 2007). In the work, instances of Strickland’s
poetry are combined with videographer Paul Ryan’s
processed documentation of water flow “chreods”
(“dynamical systems that return to their own flow”).
Part lecture, part screening and reading, Strickland
described how the group was able to achieve their artistic,
adaptive goals. Sections of slippinglimpse were
projected and poems— which are a pastiche of writings
on topics relevant to the subject—were recited.
Slippingglimpse is unquestionably an important
example of digital poetry, an appropriate choice to present
to a large audience, but I don’t mind expressing some
disappointment that Strickland did not prepare new materials
for the event and hope to see new dynamic work form her in
the near future. Philippe
Bootz presented his work Passage, a “unique
reading poem”, a “multimedia generator”
that combines music with fixed and kinetic imagery
containing literary texts (available for download at
http://www.labo-mim.org;
“The
Set of U”,
which is central to Passage, is published in the
Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1). In the
audience, we read and/or hear the texts (in French) and
music (i.e., the authors voice is present), and what appears
on the screen differs from what is spoken. Passage
is a long poem, running for more than thirty minutes, so we
did not experience a full viewing at CCCB. Among the visible
effects seen in the ongoing animation is use of visual echo:
segments of text are built from previously seen texts. As
Passage progresses, it becomes interactive, giving
the viewer a sense of participation. The presence of Marcel
Frémiot’s music, which gives pathological
ambiance to the work, cannot be understated. The work is
visually and textually complex, requiring time and patience
from viewers. Aesthetics of the work compare to Bootz’s
early efforts in Alire, but are more complex and
refined. Beyond reading and listening, the audience is
visually and aurally stimulated, and given time to reflect
on the concepts and symbolism presented. Bootz’s
importance to the field of digital poetry, as an artist,
organizer/publisher, and theorist, is unquestionable.
Passage is a new and sophisticated work, yet one
that is perhaps best observed in a private setting. To fully
experience and appreciate the subtleties of Passage would,
at any rate require multiple viewings, so hopefully everyone
introduced to the work here will follow-up with subsequent
viewings. Isaías
Herrero, winner of the last edition of the “Ciutat de
Vinaròs” Digital Literature Prize and the final
performer of the evening, presented a rich hypermedia poem
titled Eidola
Kosmos.
Made with Flash, the piece consists of perhaps a dozen
layers of graphically vivid text. Herrero’s opening
interface reveals instructions and rapidly scrolling and
pulsating icons and text atop a crystal clear image of a
barren natural landscape (montaged with superimposed
iconography). Seemingly numerous ways for the viewer to
proceed are offered (although upon review, movement between
the dozen or so layers is strictly linear). Herrero conducts
a reading of his skillful work, advancing through its
various undulations, which (as shown at the event) include
refined animations and rapidly moving texts appearing within
shapes, 3D texts, and processed video loops—aspects of
which are interactive and present the viewer with choices to
make and texts to consider. In some sections, input alters
the position and content of text and image. Much of the
time, muted sounds are included, which assist in
establishing the work’s tone. Most of the writing is
not in English, but a few spoken words in English are
inserted, such as this sequence that is heard in one of the
early layers: “there is no pilot”, “You
are not alone”, “This is the language future”,
and “and it is digital”. The text, on a quick
reading, largely concerns changing the world—one
presumes meaning various things—and the multimedia
language devised by Herrero reflects the potential power and
spectacle of the mediated idiom(s). A
reception celebrating the start of the fifth edition of
E-Poetry was held in the gallery immediately following the
presentations. Five lemon cakes (one for every E-Poetry) and
a sweet regional wine were served. The
second day’s events took place at Caixa
Forum,
a stylish art museum/complex located in a renovated old
factory within the Parc du Montjuïc. In her opening
remarks, Borràs offered her view that the
international E-poetry community was very active: almost 100
artworks and 50 papers were submitted for consideration. She
announced 100 people were participating in the event, and
that the global economic crisis had an impact on
participation (25 invited participants were unable to attend
due to financial issues). Bootz (president of the scientific
committee for e-poetry) shared a few thoughtful
observations, sharing his perception that our
interdisciplinary field is growing and changing. He stated
the importance of recognizing that digital literature may
seem at times like regular literature, but that it is not
and that it causes problems for conventional publishers. He
noted it is the 50 year anniversary of digital poetry—a
half century since Theo Lutz’s stochastic generator
was used to make poetry, and stressed the importance of
research, and the need for researchers to be as innovative
as digital poets; that the work of the scholar involves
knowledge, addressing cultural identities, and contemporary
aesthetics. Glazier spoke briefly, but not without
substance. Beyond offering greetings and appreciations to
all gathered, he shared his observation that Barcelona was a
“perfect” place for E-Poetry to occur, as the native
language (Catalan) is a “language within a language”
(referring to the fact that Catalan is a language that
exists within another Official language, Spanish), a truth
that is “central to digital production” (i.e.,
such a language, code, exists in digital poetry—and is
the thing that makes it happen). The other comment he made
that bears consideration is that the field is at present in
an “interface stage”—meaning that much
emphasis is being put into interface production. Glazier
noted he found many of them confusing, and indicated his
hope that artists would eventually return to concentrating
on text. Keynote
address: “Understanding
Text That Moves: Two Close Readings” Roberto
Simanowski gave the first keynote address, titled “Understanding
Text That Moves: Two Close Readings”. Simanowski’s
paper was in part inspired by my 2007 E-Poetry paper about “creative
cannibalism” and digital poetry, a topic he has
closely considered during the past two years. He likens the
idea of cannibalism to remediation and considers its
affinities with postcolonial studies (i.e., anticolonialist
strategies), exploring the concept of cultural anthropophagy
in the context of digital media—particularly as a
reaction to “xenophobic movements”. Simanowski
addresses “the other” in digital media and how
is it devoured, focusing on how text is regurgitated as a
visual object, as sound, and performance—sometimes
stripped of original linguistic content. Examples
highlighted in the discussion include The
Messenger
(Paul de Marinis, 1998/2005), The Complete Works of
W.S. (Caleb Larsen, 2008), and bit.fall
(Julius Popp, 2006). The latter title—in which words
are “written” by falling water drops—was
given a close reading during the second part of Simanowski’s
talk (named “Why is writing with water too fluid to
allow for deconstructive maneuvers?”), which shows how
works in digital media can function as cultural critique in
the art business. He debates whether or not corporate tools,
no matter how inventively they are employed, can be used to
subvert commercial intent. Simanowski suggests the material
aspects of bit.fall may indicate a secret to
success, that its sensuality is what makes it so appealing.
At the same time he notes that a graphic waterfall, which
devalues the signified in a way similar to the spoken word, “may
not be good for allusions of permanence”. Invoking
Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool, Simanowski
celebrates bit.fall for its, “Ethos of
information that is against information”, for showing
the “uselessness of useful information,” and for
how it “uses information to abuse information”.
The third part of the presentation (“Why is standing
still in front of a screen not enough resistance yet?”)
begins by raising the possibility of digital text appearing
ornamentally (the “wow” factor, that is so often
the goal of design and theatre), then thoroughly introduced
(i.e., “read”) a work that doesn’t
marginalize text but rather commands attention to it,
Still Standing (Bruno Nadeau and Jason Lewis,
2005). Simanowski describes how the work “disciplines
movement of the body in favor of the text”—showing
a demo of how the text “soaks up” the viewer’s
motionless body with dynamic typography (which he sees as a
type of reverse cannibalism). A comparison is made to Guy
Debord’s “war” on the cinema (i.e., cinema
without pictures, in order to create critical awareness)—highjacking
of new medium in favor of the old. Simanowski sees this as a
subversive turnaround of the object, meaning, or idea—a
critique of bustling activity on the screen, on the society
of spectacle (although he notes severe limitations in terms
of text in Still Standing). The presentation
concluded with Simanowski declaring his hermeneutic
standpoint that the critic should understand the utterance
as well as the artist, and then even better. Simanowski’s
presentation was as always thorough and erudite. I am still
somewhat awestruck that a scholar of such high quality would
pick up on an idea I’d been developing and take it so
far. Otherwise, I always highly value the information
Simanowski conveys in his presentations. Just as I learned
about Text Rain and Listening Post from
Simanowski in 2007, I am introduced to bit.fall,
The Messenger, and Still Standing in 2009.
His interest in a broader spectrum of digital arts, and the
generosity with which he shares it, helpfully informs those
of us who tend to concentrate on literary works. A
discussion session lasted about twenty minutes, with
questions and comments from the audience. Cayley followed up
on the topic of cultural anthropophagy, to discuss the
implications of Simanowski’s argument that the
practice digital literature is radically ambiguous. He
questions the opposition Simanowski sets up between
colonizer and colonized, that the audio/visual is the
colonizing (or what eats)—the problem being that the
audio/visual is technology/power. In Cayley’s view we
are eating ourselves, not the other (insofar as the literary
is mediated). RS replies by reminding us how the book
colonized culture, that literature before print wasn’t
the main expressive practice. Now text is being eaten by
technology—bringing back audio/visual communication
related to artifacts (which he calls an “irony of
history”). In his view, “Literature is not the
end of it. There are always ends of empires. We are
witnessing the end of the empire of text (and the western
world) over the next ten years)”. Bootz shares his
observations that Concrete & Process poets in Brazil did
similar things and asks, “Is digital poetry eating off
of these practices?” Bootz makes the point that
cannibalism is not limited to text but to technology itself—not
only in reverse, but with computing and digital media. The “real”
cannibalism “would be the relationship between the
two.” To understand and see what is novelty in digital
literature we need, states Bootz, “to take into
account all facets of the work, not only installations but
public readings”. RS responds by saying “the way
text is presented in concrete poetry does not necessarily
undermine the text but contributes, by its specific way of
appearance, to its meaning as a second layer (making the
example of Gomringer's "Silence", which at the center
removes a word and leaves a gap: real silence cannot be
announced, but we can¹t understand this without this
gap missing in the text; we need to relate to text to
understand the message even when we shift from linguistic
objects to visual ones”. The remaining discussion
focused (indirectly) on issues of genre, proving—without
saying so—how digital literature has expanded beyond
the computer terminal. Ken Sherwood raised issues of
contextualization, stating an interest in installations and
reading in public spaces. In his view the problem is not
technology but the nature of installations. Viewers
unwilling to stand in front of a work in a gallery for more
than a few moments will have problems, so the problem is not
technology but the setting: “If we could take the
works home they’d be something else”. When put
on the spot to do so, Simanowski was unable to extend his
argument by finding examples that are not installations in
public spaces (although he did mention Squid Soup’s
“Untitled”
as a possibility. A woman in the audience opined that when
installations are involved, we need to ask “What is
the literary aspect of the work? How much reading is
involved?” Simanowski questions how helpful
establishing the proportion of words is in order to define
something as literature rather than as art; for him the
question is, “do I construct a world in my mind as I
do when I read something? If I don¹t, then it is not
literature”. Strickland notes that anthropophagy is
about heterogeneity—and from her perspective emphasis
should be on eat/digest/mixing, combining with the text. I
commented on the impressive imaginative powers of the
artworks documented in the presentation, and that their
inventiveness is what is so important to recognize.
Following
the keynote, two panels of paper and a panel of works
transpired. For the first time ever at e-poetry, concurrent
sessions were held, so as to expand and diversify the
program and to foster the inclusion/participation of younger
scholars working in the field. As a result, I cannot
directly report on everything that occurred, although I have
acquired audio recordings of some of the sessions I missed
and a synopsis of all sessions are included below. Since the
papers (i.e., Proceedings) from the symposium will be
published online, I do not go into full detail in reporting
on the contents of the papers below; abstracts for the
papers are already online at http://www.e-poetry2009.com/pdf/e-poetry_2009_abstracts.pdf.
It is entirely possible (if not likely) that I have
misquoted (perhaps even misrepresented statements by)
authors; the Proceedings should be referenced as
authoritative documentation, for accurate details and direct
(more coherent) representation. The
first panel I attended, “e-poetry and other literary
and artistic forms”, featured presentations by Juan
Gutiérrez and Laura Borràs (“GPS—The
Global Poetic System”), and Dionisio Cañas (“Emerging
Poetry and Videogames”). Gutiérrez and
Borràs’s project, a non-commercial
collaboration started by the Hermeneia research group in
2007 with the help of a grant from the Spanish Ministry,
maps the streets of Barcelona, which in a very certain sense
provides an alternative lens through which to “read”
the city. In the presentation he defines the project: “to
discover the poetry of the geography of the city&a
system to get lost, and discover what you would otherwise
not discover”. The system detects literary and
artistic points of interest, explains the significance of
its interdisciplinary core (in particular social sciences
and hard sciences, such as art and Information Technology),
and describes the directions being taken in a new version.
Creating the system involves establishing categories and
meta-information connections, so the group has devised an
Epistemology of Electronic Literature: The
chart (and database design) contains spatial and temporal
components, which could be used to map the contents of any
city, ideally accessing a mutable central repository of
information through a range of interfaces. Users will enter
their location, and then follow a path determined by
pre-programmed or random logic built into the system, and
interact with other users. In one example, a user follows a
route established by passages of George Orwell’s
writing about Barcelona. Applications will be created that
allow users to contribute to the system. Gutiérrez
described the main problems, and issues of consideration
(such as attaining and maintaining the user’s
attention and interface design). In the discussion
immediately following the presentation, Jim Rosenberg stated
his view the system won’t be able to absorb all of
electronic literature if it doesn’t deal with certain
(extensible) object models, to which Gutiérrez
replied the system will handle materials through 52 compiled
source codes. Jason Nelson wants “to make a work that
studies the differences between coordinates that could be
read in any place, a sort of geometric poetry. Can that be
done? What other layers can be added, perhaps vertical
layers?” JG: Absolutely, coordinate-based works can be
harnessed through a system called “mobile beacon”,
and is scalable—complexity can be added, though
z-coordinates (height) is not available. CF: How would
someone like Jim’s work, which is not oriented to any
type of place, fit into the system? JG: Place is not
necessarily important; one application for the GPS includes
functioning as a hypertext electronic literature archive.
The
second paper in the session, “Emerging Poetry and
Video Games”, was presented by poet Dionisio
Cañas and Carlos González Tardón, an
artist and researcher of immersion a psychology in
videogames (see http://peopleandvideogames.com/);
the two are publishing a book later this year called Can
a Computer Write a Love Poem?: Techno-Romanticism and
Electronic Poetry). Cañas claims one of the
fundamentals of the avant-garde is playful activity, and
that poetry has always been a game—if not more, a game
of making verses. He points out the popularity of video
games (noting 30% of the Spanish population and 68% in the
US are players), and that fictional characters, such as “Mario”
are among the most well known personalities in the world.
Begins by comparing ludic videogames to cinema, and how both
have a tendency to make fiction real. Tardón makes
connections between poetry and videogames, noting how
literary traits of videogames have been celebrated by groups
such as “Game
Poets Society”,
a collective whose members write poems based on videogames,
and read a poem about “Space Invaders” by
Jonathan Cooper. Artistic games, such as Orit Kruglanski’s
InnerSpace Invaders (1998), I
wish I were the Moon
(Daniel Benmergui, 2008; see ), as well as games by Nelson
and Tardón were briefly screened. In contrast,
Tardón also suggested commercial mega-games, such as “Shadow
of the Colossus” and “Rez”, were strong
examples of “classic” games whose multimedia
elements were artistic, performative, and contained deep
beauty. Because of the “flow” found in both
poetry and games, Tardón and Cañas argue that
videogames can be used to portray a poetic art similar to
poetic theatre, which could be used to connect people to
poetry. Videogames can produce sublime feelings via the
action and immersion of the player, who creates her/his own
world, or makes sense of one that is given, in a
transcultural language. In the discussion, Gutiérrez
raises the point that IQs have been decreasing, and one of
the correlative factors to this is access to television and
videogames, and that these activities distract people from
literature. If we try to incorporate poetry into them, how
can that be done without losing the cultural treasure we
have? JG asks, “is there a new emerging field, or as a
fusion with old forms”? DC: Apocalptic statements are
not truthful; games and poetry are popular and are not
exclusive of each other. CGT: In his research, he has found
players tend to read more than non-players. If someone makes
a good videogame with poetry, players will go back and read
poetry, in the way that people who like rap music are often
inspired to read poetry. JN: A recent game of his has had 5
million hits. In his view, people are interested and it is
exciting, but the interest in playing dominates the activity
rather than engaging with texts. It is a gateway because the
interfaces are “a language they can understand”.
The trick is to get users interested in the text. Jorg
Piringer commented that the players in popular multi-user
game are like theatre actors, why not discuss the potential
for poetry in such spaces? Brian Stefans mentions [Neil
Hennessey's] "Bassho’s Frogger"; games solve a
problem of passivity in interactive art, which is that often
there is no larger objective. In videogames, there are
clearly defined tasks. Games are “task-based
interactive art” in which the engagement is more
intense, as in the play in writing with rhyme and meter. DC:
Young people are educated in videogames, so they are going
to be around, whether or not they are great, they will
impress on e-poetry. He plans to work on one titled “Rimbaud
Rambo”. Panel
of papers: Close-reading e-poetry: “New
Meanings of Poetry in Eduardo Kac’s Poems”, “Point
cloud paradoxes: e-poetic terminology and Alan Sondheim’s
‘Wild Theory’”, “Traveling through Loss
Pequeño Glazier’s Writing Spaces: ‘Demarcated
Locations’ in ‘Dynamic Texts’” In
the other panel being held at the same time, William Bain,
Eliza Deac, and Mirona Magearu presented papers. Deac
introduced herself by explaining that electronic poetry is
not known at her university, and that her research is
personal. Her paper, “New Meanings of Poetry in
Eduardo Kac’s Poems”, looks at the “prehistory”
of digital poetry while discussing Kac’s work. She
notes how the labels for the poetry change as Kac progresses
(particle, digital, bio, and space), and that they serve as
a pretext for poetry. This contrasts with general tendency
of technological literature, and underlines novelty of forms
that cannot exist without programmable medium by blurring
borders between genres. Uncovers Kac’s work in
relation to traditional poetry. Posits the work as following
Modern and avant-garde models, reading Kac through Laurent
Jenny’s book, La fin de l’intériorité.
She sees the pursuits as open ended aspirations within the
tradition of literary theory (questioning the stability of
literature). Literature is redefined by technology, as it
has been previously (with Symbolism, as in Mallarmé).
Thought is presented differently, space is different,
metaphors and processes have changed. Screen and page are
different kinds of mediums, E-poetry is the newest phase,
though it does not break away but enhances or enlarges the
literary possibilities, changes the perspective. Common
ground with the past includes “the figuration of
thought” (Valery), a recurrent topic of Kac’s
theoretical articles (i.e., transforming the instrument).
Kac literalizes various arts in his programs, replacing
metaphors into an unrestricted context. His works are on DVD
and internet, and previously used other tech systems (like
Minitel), and does things his predecessors couldn’t
do. Words in his work have rich semantic value, also uses
shapes and symbols, and cosmological themes. “I”
is a strong presence. Biopoetry and space poetry are newer,
not as explored (special poetry mainly exists as an
anticipatory idea). Kac’s syntactic operations are
active on multiple registers. She briefly discusses his
holopoems, moves from aesthetic to fluid: text as a kinetic
image; they are hybrid, more dynamic, “interlingual”.
E-literature genres are expanding, but Kac’s Biopoetry
projects may not qualify. He tends to explore and combine
media as the computer continues to shape new works.
Bain
talked about “Point cloud paradoxes: e-poetic
terminology and Alan Sondheim’s ‘Wild Theory’”
(he didn’t read a paper but talked about what he is
doing in the paper). Terminology is important to theorizing
any analysis; art is social, and the social is addressed in
Sondheim’s work. The poem, part of Sondheim’s
Internet Text (also published in a book called
The Wayward), is the focus. He describes the poem
as “metaliterary” (theory becomes practice) and “self-referential”
in the sense of referring to the writing process within the
piece”. “Wild Theory” in Bain’s view
is full of “social play” and makes us mindful of
Freud’s idea of joke work, or dream work in which the
subconscious mind comes out. A point cloud is a set of 3D
points describing the surface features of a virtual object.
Bain associates this with Virginia Woolf’s “company
of gnats”: both deal with perception, monadality,
multiple, simultaneous perspectives. Bain does a close
reading of “Wild Theory”, which he describes as
a one page “poetic vignette” that features use
of two characters (called “eminences” in
Sondheim’s writing, usually feminine, here named
Tiffany and Honey). They discuss what the “wild theory”
is or isn’t (and what it does and doesn’t do).
Dialog begins in medias res, in an outdoor park, has an open
ending: “voices disappear in the distance”.
Ordinary language and technical language profoundly mingle.
Signifiers in the poem propel him out to the greater piece.
Parody and Feminist criticism are evoked, as are theory
bundles, liminal spaces; “Wild Theory” refuses
axiomatics, embodies pragmatics, phenomenology, and other
fields of knowledge. “We need an encyclopedia to come
to grips with the poem”, which pendulums, back and
forth (between styles of language, dialog) throughout.
Sondheim, like the Internet, is full of theories. Bain cites
Ron Silliman’s “wild form” and also
connects the work with Hegel dialectics, Derrida, Judith
Butler (resignifying). He ends by etymologizing wild and
theory—wild should be written “wyld” to
reflect the polysemy in elements of language. Magearu’s
“Traveling through Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Writing
Spaces: ‘Demarcated Locations’ in ‘Dynamic
Texts’” (which included a 3 page handout I didn’t
acquire) starts with a quote from another of Glazier’s
works (Io
Sono at Swoons),
to show he creates a “sound poetry script for
performance” out of lexical fragments. This type of
work (bizarre word combinations that change every 40
seconds) challenge a reader’s ability to understand,
points to difficulty of reading in new spaces. Glazier makes
an intriguing Concrete construction: multilingual nature
explores disturbance of languages. What do readers make out
of it if the poem constantly changes? Does the dynamic
nature of text make it a performance? What is Glazier’s
rationale? Is it a performance or script for performance?
Performance of digital poetry becomes more inclusive of
identity and culture. Magearu discusses intersection points
of these issues: and then does a “partial close
reading of Glazier’s Mouseover. Performance
in poetry involves particular temporal and spatial
boundaries, with an audience, although traditional aspects
have already been broken by performance poetry (especially
the relationship between poet and audience). Now audience
interactivity is a characteristic (action/re-action), and
works are not always finished in any conventional sense,
extended by digital technology’s “sites of
encounter”. Lenses she uses to read works: through the
techniques of making (digital poetry), as spectacle, and as
method for constituting identity and culture. There’s
a symbiotic relationship between digital poetry and its
readers, analogous to scripted performance. Cites
Permanence
Through Change,
a book the museum community uses embracing concept of
variable media, scores are used for rebuilding works. This
applies to digital poetry because code is a score,
reproduces a particular experience. Recreation validates as
performance, digital poetry loses identity without readers.
Coincidentally, readers lose identity while reading.
Identity is defined through interaction. Glazier’s
work represents approaches to issues of national and
linguistic identity, inviting speculation about identity
(determined through interaction). Glazier’s network is
personal, interconnected, self-referential, and is also a
network of the readings that happen in the poem. He does not
take complete control, but establishes parameters of events—ephemeral
& multiple iterations, and resembles performance in this
regard. In Mouseover
there are 4 major panels, with different kinds of readings
within each (she develops a non-linear reading strategy).
The work reaches an endpoint, and the reader is a dynamic
and meaningful presence within it. In
the discussion, JR reacts to the comment that code is a
score, asks if it is instead a set of instruments. If the
latter, then perhaps there is no score. SB: How can we avoid
describing the material? MM: Can it be both? In the variable
media concept, artists describe characteristics of their
work and choose most effective preservation strategies.
Rather than listing physical components, understands
behavior and intrinsic effects. KS to MM: Sympathetic to
performance and orality. Referring to performance poetry—are
there any particular things you have in mind? MM: Not
exactly, it is the elements present in the poem, on the
textual level, as an instance, a physical action. KS there’s
a way to historicize Glazier in the 90s—through Olson,
the emerging Electronic Poetry Center, a rich social
tradition of poetry readings. LG: in Spanish you get two
exclamation points. MM: Does this mean that it itemizes the
voice or reader? SS cites a new book by Jennifer DeVere
Brody (Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play), in
which punctuation is studied as performance, and suggests
code can be both—variable media concept provides for
hardware and software choices. JR: I think it can be both,
but if we focus on code as the set of instruments, that
leaves room for something else but I’m not sure what
that means. Bain: one distinction I found was the
distinction between object oriented programming and
imperative programming. Every thing textual is
coded. Panel
of papers: The nature of the digital text. Code and
literaturnost: “New Generation”, “Against
Digital Poetics”, “E-Poetry Triangulated:
Transmediality, Transtextuality, and Textual Instruments” Following
lunch I attended a panel titled “The nature of digital
text”, featuring talks by Ambroise Barras, Sandy
Baldwin, and Markku Eskelinen. For many years the literary
attributes of computer poetry have been studied, and
machines have become part of the poetic process, not for
self-satisfaction but for experimentation in linguistics and
literary sciences. Barras believes that comparisons between
contemporary and historic or antiquated works are
problematic, and analyzes the qualities that contemporary
generators have inherited. In his view, scientific
advancements have led (and will lead) to the production of a
new generation of higher quality works in the genre. The
more audience can contribute, and the more economic the
style, the more the computer will be acknowledged as
aesthetically valuable. While to some degree acknowledging
appreciation and agreement, Barras picks a bone with (i.e.,
finds “suspicious”) my claim (in Prehistoric
Digital Poetry) that nothing new has emerged since the
initiation of the Web, that history is confined to repeat
former experiments. In his view, generators have not their
vitality, and have become more vivid. He sees my
categorization and the historic works as primitive. What are
the new ways of generation? Barras points out newer, more
detailed models for study, involving artificial
intelligence, have emerged in Spain and Scotland. Software
can be trained to handle human circumstances, including
language production. Poetry is vague and complex, however,
which makes it difficult to reify digitally. AI researchers
are now trying to represent the actuality of poetic
processes—typicality and novelty—while
restricting themselves to use of accepted poetical forms.
Barras mentions programs Aspira (Guervas); Malurome (haiku?)
which he classifies as “virtuoso”, celebrating
their “mastery, classical construction, and meeting of
“grammaticality, meaning, and poeticity”. AI features
radicalize the texts by significantly removing aesthetic
considerations because the computer cannot express itself
aesthetically. Barras makes notice of a recent French
literary journal (Passage d’encres 33),
dedicated to computer poetry, which contained a
questionnaire distributed to and answered by artists “in
the Francophone scene”. Barras singles out three
questions he finds most relevant: What kind of relation does
e-poetry maintain with textual materials?, “Is there
any pleasure of the text in e-poetry?”, and “Can
a generator produce high quality literary texts?”; he
notes several replies by researchers and practitioners.
Though use of text is not absolute, poets can return to text
and need to give impact to words. Notes Bootz’s model
of poetical program creation, his view that programmed poems
may be labeled by failure. Two stages poetic conception: (1)
that thoughts can qualify as formal—delegation of
author to program of shaping text, and (2) authorial
intention of making coded program with intervention in
reception (modification of observable characteristic of
work). Other modalities for approaching the work have been
developed, some without object or intention. Barras’
conclusion is that we have new generative features, but also
a new generation of readers. Baldwin’s
presentation was wild, more rapid-fire than presentations
thus far (at one point somebody asked him to slow down, but
he said he couldn’t). Baldwin (dis)orients audience by
smoothly blending quotes (by Jake Chapman and Alan Sondheim)
and his own statements. The comments, to begin, relate to
(or are commentary on) Code Work but quickly extend to other
“economies” of text (intermediation and so on). Not a
conventional paper but more a monologue, musing on several
topics at once. Baldwin moves quickly between subjects and
thoughts and performs well. The pluralism and rapidity was
refreshing (and certainly not without substance). Rather
than hang a certain topic out to dry, to deaden it with
focus and absolutes, Baldwin’s discourse is lively, as
lively as the artworks and theories invoked. Shock
(Chapman) (i.e., shocking the viewer) is not the answer;
Lip (Sondheim) (i.e., extreme bodily sexuality) is
also not without limits, although its presence gives Baldwin
the opportunity to discuss online chat and style, specifics
of the interface, (and how the minimal economy, the “interiorized
topography” of chat might be beneficial). In reference
to Lip (which could, I think, be somewhat extended
to Sondheim’s work in Second Life), he
discusses new modalities of expression, “pre-symbolic”
forms in which “the extreme becomes organic” and
“writing is not a sign but an organic membrane”, a “tethering
of body to screen” (cites Mishima, flesh and the
ideality of words). Argues these printed works are the only
examples of digital poetics: “Digital poetics means
the poetics of the digital” & in Baldwin’s
view most critics don’t emphasize enough the digital
qualities. The problem of writing the net is a neglected
issue—too often compared to print (books). Baldwin
raises issue of limits to the ELO definition for “electronic
literature” because it presumes a discourse,
suggesting its constraints leave the institution open to
generic critical attack (at the same time he also expresses
admiration for its neutrality). Observes that the literary
seems to be too easily folded into the various genres of
e-writing, that media’s role is too understated and
needs to be analyzed as part of the content. Contemporary
analysis is too allegorical, perhaps too tied to
preconceptions of what electronic literature is, and too
attentive to its features in relation to other discourses.
Usefully reads a Shakespearian sonnet as a digital poem.
Concluding points: critical options have merged, producing
knowledge, counter knowledge, pleasure (including being part
of an emerging field and group). His title confronts
limitations in the current discourse but also connotes
proximity, intimacy; we must seek the “ascii
unconscious” (Sondheim). Eskelinen’s
relatively brief talk begins by explaining his own type of
triangulation: he is exiled from Game Studies, does not like
poetry, and is not interested in interpretation or cultural
critique as justification. Also adds to the discussion of
cannibalism his interest in the anthropophagy between text
and user, when the text takes information from the user
(measures bodily states and does something with them).
Invokes Aarseth’s triangle for describing the textual
machine (1997) as a model for his talk, how it changes shape
to the point of destroying itself. Notes generic media
distinctions in e-poetry, in which media plurality is
ignored. From a cybertext perspective, e-poetry belongs to
ergodic and non-ergodic media ecologies, including works
that could be made using non-digital media. Pluralism in
poetry has been around for many years, and many digital
poems are simple continuations of printed works; Eskelinen
wonders why such works garner critical consideration as
such. Ergodic poetry has a long history, and is challenging.
The best that could be achieved by convenient scholarly
inclusions (focus on remediation) is to elevate the
discipline from “invisibility to comfortable
marginality”. Instead, we can triangulate, discuss
e-poetry in terms of frontiers (Transmediality,
Transtextuality, and Textual Instruments). In the
presentation he glosses over his discussion of
transmediality, simply offering comments on quotes by
Giselle Beiguelman (“the interface is the message”)
and Eduardo Kac. With regards to transtextuality he issues a
complaint to e-poetry scholars, who he sees as having
countless contexts in which to challenge poetics but do not
do so expansively. Poetry sets text into relation with other
texts but the connections are not theorized adequately.
Ordinary theories cannot account for all aspects of
textuality. Eskelinen largely did not really read his paper,
but rather presented an outline of it, with comments. Each
of these scholars, in different ways, issued calls for
expansion in critical studies of digital literature. As a
critic, it was interesting to hear these different
perspectives, and made me aware of some of the primary areas
of interest. We must account for many things, there are many
possible courses of analysis, and the differences in people
can be marked in discrepancy in their critical interest. The
field and process is pluralistic and can be open, but
certain areas shouldn’t be neglected. Different people
will naturally be attentive to different aspects of the
work; hopefully, in the end, all grounds are
covered. In
the discussion: JR to SB: The elephant in the room is Turing
completeness. “When we’re admitting
programmability into the picture you can prove there is
escape from any possible formulation?” CB: possible to
situate within Turing, but not sure. William Bain asks how
object oriented coding fits into the definitions of
electronic/digital/virtual? CB: one can instate a poetics of
any online text. PB: important to ask the question “what
is digital literature”; several different answers.
Introduce the concept of “ambiencia”, an
architectural term. There are many different ways to see it.
In one way, the poem is an object we can learn, in another
the poem is not an object but an entity that has the power
to act, in which it is not the materiality that is important
but the nature of the action. This promotes the making (and
study) of an entity that acts on our relationship (to text,
to machine), and to the nature of the action—as
certain works use digital material not just computing. A
different point of view on text, such as this, is needed. CB
comments they should be situated in relations to the humans
that make them. JC: likes the idea of abandoning a
definition that is contingent, but notes an aesthetic side
to CB’s partisanship to it. What is the role of a
particular aesthetics in his practice? CB: Chose examples
according to two imperative directions: entities that
produce action and relation un-subjective body. JC: This is
different to Mark Hansen’s sense of body; you’re
not reading through the body. CB I’m talking about the
body as saturating every mark we deal with on the screen. RS
to AB: Discuss Schmitt’s assessment of generators as
play with no consequence; what is the consequence of this on
generated poetry? Blends the survey questions (“Can a
computer produce high-quality text? Can there be pleasure in
e-text?”), and points of discussion to a new question:
what happens when we learn that there is no human behind the
text, what does that mean? Is it then an autobiographical
process? They can still be read as high-quality texts, but
that is not the point; he wants to acknowledge computer’s
presence. RS: Wonders if we have not some sort of religious
sense of digital texts, the aura of which we see as a
pantheistic sauce, God speaking through the machine;
connects sublime to the machine. AB sees it more in
scientific terms. RS the quantity (science) is not of as
much interest as quality. Either I don’t pay attention
because it is chance, or I presume an author. JC no question
of it being a machine, and a combination of humans not
unified by a single author, it is a combination. CB: there
has to be an origin. JC: can’t it just be shocking?
JR: the reader of the generator is a missing component in
this discussion. The reader is in control, can “order”
poems, save the work, throw it away. In analyzing from the
point of view of these activities, this is how you unify
generator w/other forms of digital poetry. The reader gets
to choose to do something. AB: Was trying to say that what
the generator produces is not text but the construction of
the reader, a compulsive way of reading. Panel
of papers: The nature of the digital text. Code and
literaturnost: “Word Arrays Processed in
Tranquility: Procedure, Program, Play, Poesis”, “The
Promises of E-Poetry” In
the simultaneous panel, Kenneth Sherwood and Emilia Branny
made presentations. Sherwood looked at text generator poems
and pedagogy, issues relevant to a general audience and
skeptics. He argues for the necessity of teaching of
electronic poetry in literature programs, commenting about 3
works (leaving out discussion of Nick Monfort’s PERL
generators that’s also in the paper). Word arrays:
cites Hayles (“electronic literature tests the
boundaries of the literary&”). Teaching context
prompts him to consider the implications of including
e-literature to literature programs, and its relation to
poetry as genre. Cites Juliana Spahr and Joan Rettalack’s
Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the
Contemporary, which underwrites teaching as “liberal
humanist paradigm”. Experimental poetry imagines a
productive challenge of the production of the contemporary,
making a case for teaching different types of texts. How do
we make a living classroom? He extends this to e-literature
and poetry. He cites George Landow, introducing literature
to digital literature opens up prospects of textual reading,
giving it literary style and form. There’s not a
consensus about this regarding digital poetry. His title
overwrites Wordsworth: now we have word arrays
processed in tranquility. Sherwood highlights
problem for poetry as imagined as a pseudo romantic effusion
in which authorial communication comes from an inspired
author. Immersive experimental text is transparent, emotion
flows across aether between the inspired poet and recipient,
material of language dissolves in a mystified haze. For
student, poem blossoms latent intentionality, a message to
be disclosed through interpretation. He cites Jerome McGann
& Lisa Samuels (“Deformance and Interpretation”)
who argue contemporary interpretive practices are the same—people
are after meaning. There’s still an essential relation
between work and structure of ideas is preserved. Conceptual
form gets articulated for the work; for novice or advanced
readers, interpretive impulse is part of the act of reading.
Sherwood discusses K. Silem Mohammad’s printed poem “Mars
Needs Terrorists”. Students observe disjunctions, the
usual poetic markers (punctuation), etc., see patterns,
identify thematic. When they learn that it is made with
Google, it becomes a problem text. For the author it is a “formalized
distress signal”; students are “arrested”,
call Google the author and speak out against appropriation
in literariness—it does not “mean” as
poetry usually does. This opens the door to text generation.
Disagreeing with Bootz, Sherwood disengages generated texts
from intentionality, sees them as aspects of form shaped by
decisions of makers, materials of medium, and the
conventions of genre. Intention is the convention and craft,
wanting to seek a substitute for focus on intentionality. “Why
are we always asking what poems mean?”. How do we
teach generated work? His examples, Nanette Wylde’s
“Storyland”
(2004) and Glazier’s Io
sono at swoons
(2003) bewilder novice readers, but with “Storyland”
they “can bridge gaps” and can interpret as
product of author’s imagination (can create “user
narratives”) and they begin to revise interpretive
intentions (reverse engineering their approach, thinking
about how works are made rather than what mean). With
Glazier, they can’t produce a user narrative or simply
analyze—don’t know how to proceed. Hearing him
discuss the work (and read it) changes that—it helps
them to know that he is distant from the work, that he
de-authorizes and is surprised by what it creates. It is the
opposite of direct expression, less susceptible to mapping.
We have to respond in a playful way, tuning into fragments
of conversation in a multi-lingual city. Sherwood notes the
irony of returning to speaking the work as a way to read it.
To read generated poems requires an extension of
interpretive practices; they foreground process and
programming, leading through play an engagement of language
and “performative unhinged reading”. Afterwards,
Branny suggests that if we don’t have an idea of how
to talk about it, it is not a good idea to make judgments
that cannot be responsibly made. Literature is a premise for
experimentation; many techniques are present around us in
the commercial world. E-poetry can have a social impact, and
something may open up in the electronic space. What is the
goal? If you want to describe, you have to make a whole
picture, but if you talk about something it gains a place in
the academic world and propagates. The more we write about
e-poetry, the more it will become e-poetry. KS: But the
process of canonization is an ideological one. EB: If you
are a researcher you don’t want your name to be
associated with researching a terrible poem! Branny
explains she is a cybertext researcher, new to writing about
e-poetry. She begins by citing Aarseth’s
Cybertext [paraphrase]: “We need the
image of the text in order to focus, we use metaphor or
reading to indicate that reading will be partial and never
reach the text itself”. Reading process should be
discussed in theological terms—reader has goal to
reach a goal, to grasp work in completeness, and to
translate the work into a sign. Work must be read and
interpreted. What is a poem? First clues are included in
paratexts (i.e., titles, publisher, and comments). Process
starts when reader begins to “uncover” the
(unstable) text, a quest that involves indirection. The
desire to pursue reading leads to actions and commands made
available by the work; readers rely on feedback, become
operators (process can be envisioned as a circle:
[text-promise-desire]). Literary promises are given
by various indications within the work. We interpret and
manipulate with respect to desire—results redirect the
process, which continues. Interp may take place on several
levels—on the surface level (as seen), as imagined or
perceived (as read), and on the whole process of reading
(double reading, process). Interpretation is not limited to
mental activity but semiotic sequences, can be literary on
all of these levels. 3 groups (seen, read, process) have
promises: of destruction/creation, of cognition, and of
aesthetics (functional refer to role of reading experience),
each can make a link to poetry. This is why e-poetry is
different than previous forms; it is not rhymed, or
metrical, and is not to be read in a single session. She
shows examples of Jean-Pierre Balpe, Jim Andrews, Lionel
Kearns. A realization (in the promise of e-poetry) is that
we arrive at areas of text by making movements on the
screen, more moves reveal more text. Works such as Kearns’s
are like a puzzle. Hypertext lexia can be associated with
traditional reading, but doesn’t leave much space for
considering the cycles of interaction. She references Sharif
Ezzat’s “Like
Stars in a Clear Night Sky”
(2006) and Judy Malloy’s "L0ve0ne"
(2006); we get more poems by clicking through links; cycle
belongs to the structural promise (multidimensional, on a 2D
surface), screen is an ad hoc presentation surface,
signified becomes visible, a projection of parts of a
simulated whole. Branny shows Andrews/Pauline Masurel’s
"Blue
Hyacinth",
which has many combinations (4 texts). Navigable 3D surfaces
are also possible—citing Daniel C. Howe and Aya
Karpinska’s "open.ended"
and Dan Waber and Jason Pimble’s “I,
you, we”.
Multi-threaded linear structures, like John Cayley’s
"translation"
are noted, as is Zenon Fajfer’s "Ars
poetica"
(2005). Structural promise is not a new invention;
electronic media is a new means of exposing it,
reconstitutes reader through navigation. She cites Cayley, “writing
renders surfaces complex”, electronic surfaces are
like surface of sea. The representation promise: unlike
traditional poetry meaningful substance is not a combination
of signifiers but programmed movement, many works involve an
operator. Cites Robert Kendall’s “Faith”,
movement of letters corresponds with meaning of relevant
fragments of text. Representation is limited to action
involving displacement. Promise of destruction: everything
that can be said is already predicted within the linguistic
system, making the task of writing poetry useless. Uses
poetry to be free from language and reference (Language
Poets, David Melnick, Kearns, Jim Andrews—user
executes text). In Poland, destruction is developed by an
e-poetry group (I can’t make out the name), who have a
manifesto stating that the reader/writer communicates with
her/himself, then others; see writing not as a body but a
machine; disagree with language; instead of describing,
change. Dismantle words, meaning reassembled on the level of
signification. Use audio and visual interference, mechanical
repetition (some devoid of meaning). Creative promise: poem
tool for creation, and possibly self-expression. Work is
being played rather than discovered. No lasting significance
but momentary satisfaction, rooted in collage, readymade.
Make works of poor quality (using non-existant) words. Cites
some Polish work(s) and Andrews’s “Nio”
(reader is free to mix sounds). Cognitive Promise: poetry is
able to reveal the truth hidden in language (rooted in
kabbalah); means that if we do something with language, we
might find something hidden; not common in electronic poetry
(more of a conceptual gesture). Play leads to revelation.
Aesthetic promise, rooted in Kant. Provides reader with an
aesthetic experience; rejects possibility of any superior
promises; paired with destruction of language. The program
controls. Aesthetic promise is not the ultimate/superior
promise of e-poetry, which combines intention of author,
ghost of reader, and paratexts. Existence of the work is a
circular project. Behavior of reader is motivated. In the
discussion, someone asks, why don’t we see criticism
that is harsher? KS: It’s an involved question,
regarding what is good literature, what is its relation to
culture and society, that is not particular to e-literature.
Now more of a calling attention to the work than the
journalism you might expect. Modalities of e-literature are
in flux. What are the grounds on which we’d make those
kinds judgments? If we don’t know what an electronic
poem is, how do we know what a good one is? Almost none of
the literature I’m interested have a chance of being
popularly accepted. Look at the premise of whether the
measure of popular appeal is what we want. Panel
of works: “about nothing, places, memories
and thoughts”, "How to hear a sentence",
Frequency The
Caixa Forum sessions concluded with presentations of
creative works by Patricia Tomaszek, Marisa Plumb and
Jonathan Ben-Meshulam, and Scott Rettberg. Tomaszek very
briefly presented her interactive audio piece, a
cannibalistic performance tool called “about
nothing, places, memories and thoughts”.
In this work, as demonstrated by Tomaszek, users combine
audio samples of lines of poetry by Tomaszek and Robert
Creeley (chosen by Tomaszek), making new (“mashup”)
poems by fusing their words. Plumb and Ben-Meshulam
demonstrated and discussed their "How to hear a sentence",
which examines, “how we can utilize our different
vocabularies&to model the world through description and
generate new ideas”. They make screen texts by
collaboratively using extractions (most significant or
ambiguous words) from a written text about language and
communication), writing them into each others’ texts,
resulting in passages such as “I am advocating a Lean
Hypothesis about reality and a Lean Alternative to our
materialistic culture”. In the audio track for the
performance, they are reading these constructions for the
first time; texts move onto the screen, making new texts (“inferences”)
that accumulate in a black box on the screen (see Fig. below
for detail). An example of what compiled at E-Poetry, which
contains a couple of nice phrases: “objects mind start
contingent/many order artificial suggests/language past
prove event/generated talking stored speak/speech eye
histories hearing/mimicry events everything”. There is
a connection between heard (audio) and read (seen) text, but
I do not believe it is mechanical (the phrases may appear
randomly). I am not sure what technology is used, whether or
not each set of seen words enters randomly, or if the piece
appears the same each time (though I would guess not). Plumb
introduced the piece, started it and let it run for several
minutes. As the piece was played at E-Poetry, more prose
appeared simultaneously with time passing, sticking to the
screen both in prose and poetic form as the dialog between
male and female voices resounded. A series of seen and heard
statements, that require “cross-modality perception”
results in a poem for the audience read. Marisa
Plumb & Jonathan Ben-Meshulam presentation, How to hear
a sentence, E-Poetry 2009. Scott
Rettberg began by showing a nature poem generator my Nick
Montfort (“Taroko
Gorge”),
explaining he liked its elegant syntactic structure but not
the content so he re-worked it to be about Tokyo instead.
Rettberg read from the output for a few minutes, which
begins: “Public servant arrests the kid/Movie stars
eye the mystics./beat the curvy floating--/Bicycle
messengers defend the cigarettes./Scandals imitate. Temple
liquidates the whale”. He then presented the poetry
section of Frequency, a “constrained writing”
project made from the 200 most used words in English.
Process: wrote a 2,000 line poem using the words, then wrote
a program that selects from those lines to make new
(constrained) poems. An example of output
displayed: Rettberg
furthered the reach of Frequency by adding features
and calling it a novel, which he then showed and read.
Process: for each line of the long poem a Creative Commons
image with one of the 100 most popular Flickr tags is
downloaded and associated with a line, and more frequency
words are added. Result: a series of hypertextually linked
screens featuring a title, a brief prose passage, and an
image—an elegant hybrid hypermedia work. In the
Discussion, Rettberg was asked about his associative process
(each Line of the original poem being associated with tagged
image) and discussed the various forms of constraint he
uses. He stressed that Frequency was far from
complete, that eventually all of the words in the poem will
be links (in the novel the links are made randomly by a
script). He hopes to have it online by summer 2010. Mencia
questioned the look of the piece, too reminiscent of the
book; Rettberg wants to work more on the interface. Question
about the narrative structure: didn’t start out with
one, but the images led him into developing a set of
characters and problems. Then a brief discussion about using
images out of context, followed by questions about how "How
to hear a sentence" was made. Plumb explains it was
hardcoded, using javascript to generate the statements. The
sentences have keywords with different levels of inference,
which are compiled. Asked about connection between audio and
visual layers; spoken layer is reading of the source text
(most context specific), the incoming lines are found
sentences (from “personal” databases) containing
certain keywords from source texts, and the words remaining
at the center are “shared truths” (I‘m not
sure if these are the keywords?). Rettberg asked about use
of Montfort’s program. He explained he essentially
changed the stylesheet and greatly expanded and changed the
vocabulary and a couple of the rules of the program, which
was a very simple javascript. Digital
poetry performances: Popup,
MIDIPoet, What we had has not yet been,
Interliteral MISsplet LANDings The
evening event, featuring Gerard Altaió, Eugenio
Tisselli, Alfred Marseille and Jan Baeke, and John Cayley,
happened at the Laie Pau Claris bookstore in downtown
Barcelona [a live tele-performance titled "Poema
Notturno Rosso", streaming from Italy, featuring mirrored
projections by Lello Masucci, also occured but could not be
seen very well ]. It was a smaller space which the event
filled to capacity. Altaió’s work, “Popup”
(2006), consists of six poems which appear atop an
exclamatory poem on the screen (e.g., “Arriba el
pop!/Upa o pop!/Ave pop!”). Each poem appears as a
series of popup boxes, into which a soundfile is embedded.
Letters and words that accumulate into narratives are
inscribed into the browser title bar (e.g., “well,/ok/is
true/life/is more/basic/than/art/LOVE/STORY/is a/pop
up/poem/like/real/life). In half of the poems, animations or
images are presented in the popup boxes; in another,
fragments of a single image are reformed in tiling popup
windows. The final result of the first poem, shown below,
also shows how pop-up boxes can be arranged together to
transmit a message, and in general Altaió shows us
how versatile and expressive popup windows can be. This is
digital “Pop” art, infusing pop culture: sound
samples are taken from rock songs (in English)—mostly
huge hits from the 80s and 90s, but occasionally work by
lesser known artists (e.g., Captain Beefheart). Often the
samples presented center around a theme (e.g., fire,
mother). To note the specifics of composition: in
Altaió’s second piece, the letters of the title
are spelled out in the title bars of rectangle boxes in
varying shades of blue while songs by Bobby Vinton (“Blue
Velvet”), The Doors, Paul Simon, Deep Purple, Michael
Jackson, Leonard Cohen, The Clash, and others are heard. In
technology used and content presented (its simplicity) there
is an enormous retro sense to the work, which somehow escape
being negative attributes in spite of the sometimes cloying,
overplayed music Altaió employs in his “hipermetasupraextradigital”
work. Gerard
Altaió, Popup, E-Poetry 2009. Tisselli
performatively demonstrated his software program
MIDIpoet
(2002), in which sounds, images, and words are conducted by
the author in real time using an invention (of his) that
sends signals between instruments (in this case, a
cellphone) and the software. Sounds and images (words) are
accordingly produced as output. Describing his work as “contemplative”,
Tisselli instructed the audience to relax while experiencing
the work. What appeared as low, pulsing sounds were emitted
ranged from calligraphic images, to words and thick
grayscale lines blending and streaking across the screen in
patterns, with occasional lines appearing (e.g., “no
text, only texture”). He interacts with his work, at
some points, by typing in words (“where/do
these/letters/words/come from?/why/do
they/go/click,/click?/can you read this phrase?/where did it
go?”), and at other times by pushing the keypad of his
cellphone to initiate different pre-programmed activity on
specific areas of the screen he points to with the phone.
The directions texts move in are also controlled by the
phone (performing the work, Tisselli makes somewhat
exaggerated hand gestures to let the audience know he is
controlling the movements and layering in real time). Some
technical problems interfered with the flow of the
presentation, but in the end the powers of Tisselli’s
creation were apparent nonetheless. In contrast to
Altaió’s noisy work, this was very quiet and
ponderous—words are transformed into moving shapes and
patterns, into which more lines or words are inscribed. At
other times intact lines of poetry move across the screen as
controlled by the poet moving in front of the screen, to be
read as the subtle ambient music plays; at any moment the
appearance of text can be changed from textual to visual—verbal
statements become abstract art. Eugenio
Tisselli, detail of projection, Midipoet performance,
E-Poetry 2009. Marseille
& Baeke showed a series of videopoems given the title “What
we had has not yet been”. Poetry is presented with
digitally processed found film footage and soundtrack. As
Baeke explained, the text that appears is not coordinated to
the action of the imagery or dialog but is part of the
atmosphere of the work. In the first section shown at
E-Poetry, two black and white films (from the same reel, but
not mirror images) are shown as the text of poem scrolls
vertically across the screen (one loops from beginning to
end and the other from end to beginning). The imagery
(characters dancing in a kitchen) and text (addresses
various domestic matters) are thematically relational if not
synchronized, and the soundtrack (an upbeat, “old-fashioned”
dance number with strings and horns a la I Love
Lucy) is appropriate to its character. The second
segment began a series of single screen shots featuring
mirrors and travel images that evolved into a split-screen “dialog”
between an elderly man and woman, in which the conversation
that is read differs from the one heard. Read text forms,
sometimes kinetically, a slant comment on what is heard;
words seen trickle down to the black space below the images
(as in the Fig. below). Interestingly, these words become
hyperlinks attached to different sections of the video (some
are one channel, others are split; some contain captions,
some are in color). It is impossible, at least some of the
time, to absorb all the text—partially because it
moves or disappears quickly, and partially because there is
a lot of stimulating material presented simultaneously. A
partially linear, partially non-linear, fragmentary
commentary on (or perhaps question about) domestic culture,
the poem begs the viewer to read into the combinations
presented by work to determine the message perhaps indicated
by the title. May
26: Keynote address : “Digital
literature: a random literature?” Daytime
sessions on day three transpired at the University of
Barcelona. I missed (with apologies) Jean Clément’s
morning keynote. The following sentences in this paragraph
compile notes by Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen and
Giovanna di Rosario’s rough translation of the
presentation. Jean Clément talked about the use of
randomness functions in digital literature. He went back in
the art history to show examples of earlier examples of
randomness and chance. He asked questions to the differences
between randomness and chance. Isn’t there always a
manner of chance in producing art? – inspiration and
contingency. Typological: which are the forms of chance and
randomness in digital/“general” Literature?
Epistemological: Which role does these two concepts play in
the creation but also reception of works. The scientific
approach during time. The illuminist philosophers sought a
more rational explanation of randommnes (it is not a higher
intelligence, that could explain it all). Later: chance is a
new unforeseen meeting between two independent causalities.
Einstein: “God does not play dice”. The
principle of uncertainty by Werner Heisenberg; Art History:
John Cage with his piano tuned randomly; Duchamps “Musical
Errattum”, composed music with drawn notes picked in a
hat by his sisters; and Pollock’s paintings. The
literary avantgarde fit naturally in this movement. Here JC
means we see a process already where a certain literature
will leave the book. Usually in a book, the reader is not
controlled ( like in the cinema or at a concert). Daniel
Pennac pointed out the rights of the reader in Like a
novel: not to read, to jump pages, not to finish the
book, to read again, to read anything, to the bovarysme
(textually transmissible disease), of gleaning, to read
aloud, to be in silence. Laurence Sterne broke with this
control in Tristram Shandy. Breaks within linear
design. Invention of the codex in the 12th Century
contributed to the non-linearization of the reading. In
hypertext, the reader doesn’t have the right to read
it all anymore, can discover things by chance. In modern
litterature, many authors prefer the fragmentary genres
(seems to correspond better with our time), more authors
propose a nonlinear reading of their books. Reading becomes
more like a play. You don’t know what happens. Later
in history, it is not enough to show your reader variable
paths. Now the author builds a generative advice. Statements
in random texts are never fixed, but variable. Important:
the legibility of the random texts is variable (different
lengths and amounts of possibilities). The first computer
text generators: Christopher Strachey made in 1951 a
computer that was able to write love letters. Later:
Haikutype-poems and so on. Randommness is an essential
device of programmed poetry. In the definition of chance,
meeting is an important notion—chance supposes a
subject face to face to a phenomenon—interactivity.
The difference in hypertext from print to screen is the
space, and also the possibility of interaction. The machine
responses can be managed in a random way—and even if
not, there is always an effect of chance (what do you choose
among several possibilities). Chance and creation: Is the
introduction of the chance into the creation process an
abandonment of the author capacity?? Bréton:
Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism” “dictation
of the thought, in the absence of any control exerted by the
reason, apart from any aesthetic or moral concern”.
Simanowsi asked about this topic in the discussion. If the
automatic writing in the surrealist thought concerns the
unconscious, what would then the unconscious of the computer
be nowadays?? Oulipo on the other hand defined themselves as
anti-chance – or: the programming of the chance
(George Perec). “L’art est non-hasard par
definition”; it is not always possible to distinguish
randomness from chance. Clément proposes to define
the literary random as a formal mechanism, associated with
algorithmic processes intended to produce statements by
combinations of textual elements; this could happen on
print, but the computer could multiply until the infinite.
Randomness is present in almost all digital works—it
is both the signature and a process of creation. The author
passes the hand to the machine. Symmetrically, the chance in
digital literature is the figure of random for an
interactor. The computer is different from a simple automat,
it simulates a possibility of entering in dialogue with the
interactor—its behavior is associated with a human
intelligence. The computer is a partner in the utterance
process. This raises questions about the nature of literary
value. Panel
of papers: Terminologies: ontologies and definitions of
e-poetry and e-lit forms: “Ephemeral
Passages: ‘The Series of U’ by Philippe Bootz”,
“Conservation of electronic literature works”,
"entity/identity" I
attended the noontime session featuring Alexandra Saemmer,
Serge Bouchardon, and Bootz. Saemmer’s paper, “Ephemeral
Passages: ‘The Series of U’ by Philippe Bootz”,
was a close reading of excerpts from two poems (“The
Set of U” and Passages, see above) by Bootz.
Begins by discussing the instability of digital poems, how
some works from 1980s and 90s cannot be seen due to changes
and operating systems (and others have different
characteristics than originally intended). In Saemmer’s
view, authors have 4 options: 1) ignore instability, create
for the moment; true for many, such as those using Flash; 2)
Right context—“mimetic aesthetics”
preserve events as well as possible, but difficult if not
impossible; 3) accept instability as aesthetic principle—“aesthetics
of ephemeral”, slow decomposition is the “literary
disenchanted mission of the work”; and 4) “aesthetics
of re-enchantment”, mystifies relationship between
animated words and images to advocate an “unrepresentable”,
sensitive to possible mutations; machine continues the work
of innovation. Bootz’s work embodies the aesthetics of
the ephemeral, although the other above-stated conditions
are “alternately intertwined and exclude one another”.
Saemmer points out that Passage has taken on the
tone of a life’s work, and is about time (in various
ways)—therefore raising questions about memory and
transformation. Although there are different possibilities
for meaning, Bootz’s electronic text addresses
obsolescence and the shaping of time. She suggests a range
of ways its media effects and figures can be read, singling
out the line “fil de l’eau”, an expression
meaning “go with the flow”, describing Bootz’s
animation as a “moviegram” whose effects she
describes as “telescoping” (temporary
illegibility). Fragility of connection and temporal
coherence between sound and animation are accepted in the
aesthetics of the ephemeral. Saemmer points out paradoxes in
the work, such as it is created with the certainty of
failure, but that the author does everything possible to
postpone the failure. Passage features more “mimetic
aesthetics”; the artwork “becomes a science
experiment” and through the animation, media, and
wordplay both a “reflection on the future” and “spiral
into obsolescence”. She concludes by celebrating the “stable
framework enabled by adaptive programming” that drives
the aesthetics in the work, recalling the instability of the
entire proposition and the impossibility “to write
time” [note: I wonder if she has seen Kenneth
Goldsmith’s books, some of which certainly seek to do
so]. Saemmer’s presentation, which convincingly
shows how the reader both follows a path and leaves marks on
it, was focused, articulate, and insightful. Her clarity,
organization, detailed exploration of the minutiae of Bootz’s
poem could serve as a model for this type of critical
investigation. Bouchardon’s
paper (co-written with Bruno Bachimont), “Conservation
of electronic literature works”, discussed “media
decomposition” and initiatives prioritizing the
preservation of digital writing. Technology presents the
possibility of “heritage preservation”, though
no definite solutions to the problems caused by new formats,
proliferation, and heterogeneity in form. Archiving is a
priority in the field of digital literature. The problem is
that the work “is neither an object nor a simple event”.
Some authors consider their works to be impermanent, and
bear their own disappearance within themselves (i.e., the
aesthetics of the ephemeral). What should be preserved? The
original file (“seems insufficient, especially if
generative or interactive”); the file is not the work—what
the viewer perceives is. Bouchardon explains how there are “descriptive”
and “restitution” forms of preservation—in
print they are the same but in digital these are distinct
from each other (“there is the mediation of
calculation”). Is the content what is on the hardware
or the screen? “What is the right rendering of the
document if the preservation of the resource is not enough?”.
Digitization itself does not preserve the content, which is
only accessible through the functionality of the tools. Four
main strategies of preservation: museological (saving
hardware and software, suitable for small projects but
difficult to maintain), migration (updating compatibility,
maintaining functionality; costly but easiest to implement),
emulation (contents are not meant to evolve, simulated on
current environments; fragile but emulation is never
perfect, costly but ineffective), description (relying on
descriptions of events; “counterintuitive” but
interesting and “potent”). Cites Jim Andrews’
using various approaches to preserve bpNichol’s work.
Reconstruction is valuable, but the identity of the content
needs to be established; preservation as reinvention. Argues
that description might be the best method (gives example of
classical music); content is preserved, score never changes.
Notation system is needed that’s as strong as musical
notation. Issue is to preserve the identity of the content.
Absence of context can be an impediment. Notes online
directories that catalog literary experiments on the Web:
1.) At NT2
3,000 descriptions are contained, not technical but
aesthetic; works themselves are not archived; 2.) Electronic
Literature Organization projects, include a directory
(that sometimes includes critical context) and a wiki (the
ELO Library of Congress/Archive-It Project) that allows user
to index and access online works (depends on the
participation of community). 3.) CASPAR
(European,prototype) aims for long-term communal
conservation of scientific data, including music,
documenting the life-cycle of a work (considering multiple
possibilities for preservation but emphasizing description);
4.) ARCHIPOENUM (ARCHIve-POEsia-NUMerique, see Bootz below)
uses description (of multiple sorts), conventional archiving
methods, and “indexing” solutions; combines
theoretical thinking and practical approaches. Important to
developing strategies for description; preserving is
editing. Bootz
started by making some impromptu comments about the
preceding papers, that “work will fail” but it
is an act of tentative representation with a permanent
objective—not as a performative tool but as a text.
Code is life within the poem that can be reconstructed. To
act is to live. “Reading is only one possibility of
reception but not the totality of possibility of reception”.
Notes AS changed the meaning of the work, talking about the
present changes the conception of present to a non-temporal
present; her reception changes the poem itself. He then
presented (for co-authors Samuel Syonecky and Abderrahim
Bargaoui) a talk about the ARCHIPOENUM
project, including a demonstration of the current state of
the tool (which is an open-source work-in-process). The tool
(delivered as a Firefox plug-in) is designed to index
documents related to digital work using different ontologies
and procedural models. Flexibility is important, as
intelligence changes over time. The talk describes the
project (including its theoretical background), discusses
issues and protocols of indexing, and shows it in action
(through the example of creating a form for and “validating”
Jean-Marie Dutey’s “Voies de Faits”).
Preserving works is important, but not to fossilize them. “The
power to act goes through documents”. In the
discussion, Baldwin asks, you can index the relation between
the relation between the work and the actors? PB: Yes, using
a procedural model it can be identified on a chart.
Rosenberg comments to Serge, agreeing with emphasis on
description; the key point is to make it “self-describing”—a
programming environment that can address itself and the
artifacts are objects and invent a notation, which can
become text. Some programs make this possible. JR encourages
people to think about this because it automates the project.
Torres: several people in several countries have archiving
projects—do you think it is good for us to keep
working separately and then converge? PB: Develop
independently, find different problems and solutions, but
then begin to communicate. Simanowski: compare aesthetic
ephemerality and frustration in digital works as a situation
parallel to that faced by performance artists and wants to
know more from AS about the role passivity plays. Panel
of papers: Close-reading e-poetry: “e-canzoniere
in Facebook”, "Identity and the subject in digital
poetry" This
panel featured talks by Raffaele Pinto and Yra van Dyik.
Unfortunately, I have little information on either
presentation, and for completion's sake would be pleased to
receive anyone's notes on this session (which could
be added to this report). Pinto’s talk, “e-canzoniere
in Facebook”, shared the experience of using Facebook
as a poetical place. According to Borràs, Pinto has
been publishing more than 120 sonnets, one every day, that
generates revision, comments and other sonnets from a strong
community of readers. Presumably these papers will be
published, or will Panel
of works: "Speech-Sound Generated Visual", "Touch",
"R3//1X//0Rx", "Urban Fragments" Following
lunch, there were presentations of artistic works by Brian
Kim Stefans, Serge Bouchardon, Christine Wilks, and Jody
Zellen. Stefans began by presenting his piece
Kluge,
“a language video game in which the goal is to make a clean
text”. He showed and described its design (invented
forms and constraints) and other attributes (mentioning it
is related to both television and Rimbaud). Although this is
not a new work, it was excellent to see Stefans do a demo of
the most recent version, which contains features I hadn’t
seen before (such as the “New York School poem”
and “Breakout” sections). While it isn’t
necessary, of course, seeing an artist present a work is
immensely instructive. The second part of his presentation
was a purely visual piece he called “Flash polaroids”
and described as “algorithmic film”, where the
photos made by Stefans are being accessed algorithmically
(accesses a Flash timeline at different rates). The work
appears as a collage of video fragments—“you’re
just supposed to meditate on it”. He concluded by
showing his most recent Flash work, Scriptor, which
is made of “dynamically animated hand-drawn fonts,
letterforms, or doodles” (see screen captures at
http://www.arras.net/fscIII/?p=363).
Stefans describes it as another version of his “ambient
poetics”. Vibrating segmented letters form and reform,
sometimes into words. His objective was to animate every
point and every line of a letter, as the program draws text
from a recent New York Times (NYT) article about
Obama and Afganistan. He had a poem titled “We make”
translated into Spanish, which he read with an accomplice
from the audience named Augusta (i.e., two languages) while
Scriptor ran on the screen. Obviously what is heard
is disconnected from what appears on the screen, but we are
asked to consider them together; a commonality between the
two pieces: focus on something being made. Bouchardon
did a brief presentation of his Web-based work
“Touch”
(“Toucher”), which is subtitled “Six
scenes on the paradox of screen Touching”. He crafts a
series of screenworks that use the mouse in various ways to
activate effects (sound, image, links) on the screen. One
section allows viewer to rearrange words, exploring the “ambiguous
relationship between touching and being touched”. Some
game-like and erotic elements are featured in the pieces,
which “allow the reader to touch the music” and
invokes “the brutality of the click”. In one
scene (“Blow”), the user blows through a
microphone to make the text appear, and in another through
eyes tracked by webcam (Bouchardon asks, “is touching
achieved on contact, or can it be achieved from afar?”).
Wilks
(whose comments on the presentation—as well as links
to several works she showed—are posted at
http://crissxross.net/wilx/2009/06/07/remixing-at-epoetry-barcelona-2009/)
showed a series of works that have been presented on a
collaborative blog titled remixworx.
Members of the group have done roughly 500 multimedia
remixes since 2006 (Wilks usually uses Flash). She presented
“trails” of posts to the site—which is set up as a
blog and artistic responses are posted in comment fields—that
reflected how the works evolved, and also read a couple of
text pieces from the site. Beyond the high quality of the
works presented, the collaborative axis of
remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer
variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic
visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing
on the site is marvelous. Zellen’s
work focuses on cities, and she began by presenting several
sections of her collection Urban
Fragments
(2009). In the first section shown, six movie clips (a
double triptych) appear. None of her work includes sound.
The second juxtaposed kinetic text from Elias Canetti’s
Crowds and Power onto a square with four different
animated panels of black and white images. Zellen does a lot
of work that involves tracing over the newspaper,
transforming both images and headlines/text into elementary
but revealing line drawings, which she then juxtaposes in
Flash animations; these are figurative but not literal
copies, which are sometimes incomplete (i.e., the text for
one screen reads, “Obama has/McCain ups ante”.
Another work (shown as documentation, not in live form)
juxtaposed (collaged) images from the Internet and the
current RSS feed from the NYT. Zellen expressed her
interest in the Internet as a “sculptural
space&where you click on the link and windows pop-up all
over the screen” and showed a couple of such pieces—one
in which she transfers “the idea of walking into the
idea of drawing”. She showed a commissioned piece
titled “Without
a Trace”
that randomly juxtaposes a live rss text feed and image from
the NYT (which is drawn by the computer) with a
comic strip panel, a text excerpted from a comic, and a
drawing made by Zellen. The combination of elements changes
once per day (resulting in a “calendar of
juxtapositions”), and have also been transformed into
animations in which fragments—drawn lines of news
(sometimes seen in reverse) and line drawings—are
fused and interact with each other. She concluded by showing
a couple of older pieces that shared attributes with the
recent works (i.e., newspapers, animated text/image,
pop-ups), such as “Seen
Death”
(2007). In
the discussion, AS asks JZ why she is obsessed with pop-up
windows. JZ: explains she’s working against the idea
that a Webpage is flat, “that you can only go up,
down, and across”—she wants to interrupt that
and allow the user to see simultaneous things&“the
only way to do that is to collage windows over the
background space”. She wants to create depth,
sculpturally—there’s always a relationship
between what’s happening in each of the windows. JN:
Asks everyone about the limitations faced (e.g., pop-up
blockers) and how it affects what is created. BKS: His work
is mostly for installations—he might try to write
something for the Web, “but probably won’t&it’s
not a high priority”. Talks about how the Web is
always changing and how people often don’t know how to
use properly something that’s on a webpage. He doesn’t
do javascript pieces anymore because “debugging those
things used to take forever”. SR: Asks about
Scriptor: is it what happens to the input text in
an imagistic sense that is important, or will the text have
a new relevance? BKS: Each of the Scriptor pieces
will be different, not all will have the same effects, but
it seemed appropriate that a piece about war had explosions
in it. The alphabet is one of the sets, so that whatever the
content is, it is “going up against this alphabet”
and the content might just be the relationship between the
words and motions. Wants to develop unique pieces and see
what texts work. Sandy B asks CW to say more about how the
collaborative blog works and how that relates to what we
saw. CW: All the pieces are on the blog, but she remixed
(i.e., ordered/simplified the interface) them for the
occasion (and added some soundtracks). She explains the blog
works by somebody posting a work, with the source files, and
the others remix them (always citing source). Q: Who are the
people who use the blog (“they look like either weird
or remarkable people”)? CW: A lot of the group met
through Trace (Nottingham Trent, UK) community. Went that
stopped, Randy Adams organized the blog and asked people to
remix, continuing to do the work they’d already been
doing. Anyone is welcome to join (they have a flickr site to
network). Cayley: Given the sense of “new horizons for
the literary” (N.K. Hayles reference), asks the panel
why they feel comfortable with the idea of poetry. BKS:
Likes to feel uncomfortable with the idea of poetry. SB: In
poetry, first and foremost, the play is the materiality of
the signifier, and that’s what he tries to do with “Touch”.
Not just the signifier as words or sounds, but metaphors.
Work made with digital media is more about manipulating than
reading, and that is close to poetry. JZ: never writes poems
but brings together text and image in a way that is poetic.
CW: Likes to combine visual poetry and textual
poetry&has to do with denseness, the way things are
picked, and reading. BKS: You wouldn’t argue that
Kluge has something to do with poetry, but with
Scriptor he’s thinking more of the one word
poems of Aram Saroyan, Ed Ruscha’s word paintings,
very minimal things, also references Valery’s response
to Mallarme’s Un Coup de des (“for the
first time I saw the mind in the process of thinking”).
Doesn’t necessarily mean Scriptor is that but
thinks there’s a way “poems map mental processes
and wanted to allude to a certain kind of psychic space in
the work”. JC: These various mediated arts, labeled in
different ways, are associated to traditional art forms, but
the work is not verbal; wondering about the relation to
linguistic practices—people are bringing it up more
and more and will continue to do so. JM to JZ: Wondering
about the difference between data driven processes and
manual processes, and handmade aesthetics—how is that
negotiated? What limitations are there? JZ: Has limitations
because she is not a great programmer. In the
non-automatically drawn piece she sets up drawings in a
database. Some elements are not generated live, are from a
stored archive. Also worked with programmer who was able to
capture live image and top headline from the world news
because she felt it was more topical and changes all the
time. Collecting all these things she learned how much
things repeat themselves; she’s become interested in
such random juxtapositions and decided to archive and
represent them as a calendar of a year of
juxtapositions. Panel
of papers: The nature of the digital text. Code and
literaturnost: “Bar Codes and Poetry:
Experiments in Hypermedia”, “On the Literary
Nature of Digital Poetry”, “New Interfaces for
Textual Expression” The
final session of the day featured papers by Tina Escaja
(read by Elena Castro), Janez Strehovec, and Adam Parrish.
Escaja’s paper was read by Castro (“everytime I
say I it is not me”). She shares observations about
technology as “a means for the liberation of female
creativity”. She elaborates on the problematic
approaches taken of certain cyber-feminisms when applied to
Latin American and Spanish women, comments on Donna Haraway’s
“Cyborg Manifesto”, and discusses her own hypertext
projects in these contexts. Only 60% of people living in
Latin America cities have computers at home; 90% use one in
the office; less use than in Europe and North America. Women
who use Internet are minority; have same access as men but
use less—the situation is changing, but a long way to
go. Cyberfeminism is a healthy alternative but occasionally
makes problematic assumptions and ignore real problems that
face the “modemless masses”. Hispanic women
working on the Internet codify and modify “from the
cracks of tradition”, naming their roods and nodes,
revealing themselves. Escaja using a pen-name Alm@
Pérez, has created a hypertext VeloCity,
which, as she writes in her abstract: Strehovec’s
talk, hampered by the fact that he spoke softly and
continually turned away from the audience, began by
addressing poetry in the age of the short attention span.
Design of new works are mosaics, hybrid designs, everything
is unstable, precarious; new relations between textual
components are established. E-poetry is a new textual,
meta-textual, linguistic, and non-linguistic practice.
Previously poetry was concerned with other aspects of forms,
addressed emotions and responses to conditions, now the
approach is through cyberlanguage (neologism, generated and
shaped through computers). The nature of the work is
question; it is not a “safe” field, different
possibilities open up for the non-verbal poet. Strehovec
references Giselle Beiguelman’s “Code Movie”
and use of mobile screen devices. E-poetry is post-textual
and requires new forms of perception. Due to pace of life,
our attention spans are getting shorter, is in danger. We
can’t stick to one thing—the author has one or
two seconds to get a reader’s attention. Observational
skills have suffered due to multitasking. Spoke about the “language
of elevator pitch”—poetry whose presentation as
long as an elevator ride—as an idea for a project.
What is crucial is the first impression, to get the reader
excited and involved with the language; cinema theories
apply to contemporary conditions of e-poetry. Key concerns:
leave behind terms and concepts applied in traditional
literary and poststructural theories. The idea of “stain”
is important, as well as defamiliarization, making strange
and concept of uncanny. Such a poetics is found in works by
JooYoun Paek. Surprising events, juxtapositions are
important. Quotes Beiguelman: “the interface is the
message”; contemporary conditions: a “nomadic
cockpit”, as in Aya Karpinska’s work.
Parrish’s
talk was interesting and important, as it emphasized the
invention of textual instruments, in particular four
physical interfaces he has designed to generate text and
what he discovered in the process; a summary of his
experiments (including video demos) is online at
http://www.decontextualize.com/projects/nite/.
Text results from some kind of physical action, can be seen
as recording a process or gesture that’s linguistic in
nature—quotes Olson on the typewriter (“Projective
Verse”), how poet has with the typewriter the same
advantages as a musician. We create text through some kind
of interface. Generally we use a keyboard, which is easy to
understand; Parrish expands and reduces this in his work
because not much has changed since typewriter keys. First
shows his “Oulipo Keyboard”, which is a regular
keyboard except that several number keys on the keyboard
have been “eradicated”. Putting constraints on
writing as such makes the writer think/approach the process
differently. Instead of taking away functions, Parrish’s
second example, the “Entropic Text Editor” adds
another layer—a keyboard augmented with an analog
expression pedal used to modulate the text (e.g., when you
push the pedal forward it creates more randomness in the
text and vice versa, also alters the “weight”
and kerning of the letters). He calls it a “performance
of Jabberwocky”, something that creates output but
retains traces of physical process, as if it were gesture.
The third project, “Markov Live”, is a physical
interface that creates Markov chains (algorithm). It is a
wooden box with two buttons—one chooses a word and the
other creates a new line (buttons/words changes also
activate sounds). The computer identifies every sequence of
two words of a source text and builds a list of every word
that can follow any sequence of the words, cycles over the
words and the user presses a button to choose a word. Output
text results from user’s decision making process. The
final example shown is called “Beat Poetry”
(which has nothing to do with Ginsberg, Kerouac, et al.)
because it is a drum interface: two drum pads communicate
with the computer. One creates a new line, one creates a
word. Words are mapped to gestures by registering whether or
not the user hits “on the beat” (a beat
generated by the program)—if so, it randomly takes an
uncommon word from a source text loaded into the program; if
not, a less-common word is chosen. Parrish situates his work
in several other practices: New Interfaces for Musical
Expression (NIME),
a group focusing on inventing and adapting musical
instruments (such as the “Shoreline Guitar” and “overtone
Violin”). New instruments create new relationships
that might not have occurred otherwise. Situates within
e-poetry by comparing to Stefans’ the dreamlife of
letters and Jim Andrews’s “Stir Fry Texts”,
but what he does differently addresses relationships between
author, text, and audience (see diagrams on Parrish’s
aforementioned website): text is more closely related to the
interface, text is more independent from the author. He
re-conceptualizes the text “not as also the piece, but
as a record of the process”. He’s trying to
create new poetic forms with the interfaces, which could not
exist otherwise. To
begin the discussion, JM asks AP: What do you mean by
audience? AP: Making tools to create live output, a tool for
other users, and textual artifacts. Audience views text in
real time but can also go back to a recording of it. In
e-poetry, user and audience is usually the same person; he
believes these can be separated. You can have someone who is
using the interface to create something else (other than
what is intended by the author). SS: Is your new way of
writing and reading inviting the audience to come up and
play these things? AP: Not necessarily, but a possibility.
SS: If all audience has is output, then it is static; the
production is not static. You want audience to have the
experience of producing with these instruments, to train
them to do so? Are they playing them, or watching you play?
AP: Sees both processes happening at the same time. SS: But
they are different experiences. AP: Your understanding of
the text depends on understanding the process behind it. SS:
Understanding what? AP: Most important is understanding the
mapping of how it works. Sandy: It’d be great if we
all had these drumsets, connected to the same big screen
projector, all doing it at once. JM notes the un-portability
of such a scheme. AP: Wonders how a collaborative
performance would work. ME poses questions for further
consideration: How do you see an ordinary player become a
virtuoso? What kind of interface would you design for your
fellow panelists? AP: We’re virtuosos at the keyboard
already, can extend those skills to new related
tools. Digital
poetry Performances: "From Interminimals
to Intertarot", "Lyms", "(s)Pacing",
"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", "A life history
performance" An
evening event took place at Milano, a cocktail bar between
the University and Catalunya Plaza, featuring works
presented by Ramon Dachs, Ottar Ormstad, Jörg Piringer,
Talan Memmott, and Sandy Baldwin (collaborating with Alan
Sondheim, who participated remotely). Dachs, a local,
essentially retrospectively “surfed” (i.e.,
switched back and forth) between works he has created since
the mid-1990s while a piano soundtrack played in the
background. Pieces presented by Dachs (who did not read the
work aloud) were “Interminimals of poetic navigation”
and “InterTarot de Marsella”. “Interminimals”
unites a series of small hypertextually connected poems;
more information about the work’s history and the work
itself is published on the Hermeneia website. “InterTarot”
is an aleatoric poetry device that uses Tarot cards as part
of the narrative structuring (as the user “draws”
cards, new lines of text appear). This work was also
published by Hermeneia, but—like so many other works
housed there—is no longer functioning at the old
location (some works are now available at http://www.hermeneia.net/).
Dach’s works are unadorned yet elegant, and it was
interesting to follow the flow between the two pieces as he
presented them. Ormstad,
a Concrete poet, introduced his work (titled “Lyms”)
by stating his project is to make a connection between
Concrete poetry and new technology. His animation combined
of different works made of shaped letters in patterns (black
on white) with an ambient soundtrack; multi-lingual words
were formed. The screen presentation started sparsely and
gradually became more full and complicated. At first,
addition and subtraction of words beginning in “f”;
a woman’s face appears in the background, words in
green shaped into arrows appear atop the text.
Non-alphabetic lines and shapes eventually appear, giving
geometry to the work, as well as more photographic imagery;
combination of these elements with shaped, kinetic letters
and symbols. Ottar
Ormstad, projection during performance, E-Poetry
2009. Ormstad’s
piece was not interactive, and he did not vocalize any of
the words. Memmott,
who has focused on video in the past couple of years, showed
several videographic and animated pieces. The first work was
a short (i.e., about 90 second) abstract video that looked
like scenery taken from a moving train, except for that the
image was processed so as to be oblique, layered with
translucent squares, rectangles, and other forms of kinetic
static. Next Memmott showed “Indeterminate
[anti]Pop”, and Flash work that randomly
selects cartoonish images (octopi, dollar bills, badgers),
geometric shapes and many phrases, combining them with
boisterous beats and sounds (sometimes attached to the
images, as when a telephone appears and rings)—effectively
making a randomly generated animated music “video”
and soundtrack. Lines and images pass very quickly, too
quickly to be read completely. Viewers who do register and
connect lines will find delightful nonsense that makes sense
in the way a Language poet (such as Bruce Andrews) or
Dadaist makes sense (i.e., “doomsday genre pap/abet
tacit bawdy shake” or “the sushi ostrich/I
resist high debt”. I’ve seen this work several
times—it is funny, loud, and perhaps most clearly
reflects Stefans’ concept of “fashionable noise”
(although not in any pejorative sense). Memmott plays a
great trick in his next video: dividing the verbal and
visual dialog. He combines footage of a man and women
talking in a bar, in Swedish with English subtitles that are
clearly not literal translations of what is being said, but
are instead part narration (tracking a budding but doomed
romance between characters), part (mistranslated?)
conversation. I like the imaginative shifts, a kind of
deception. Dialog is dry and humor sardonic. Some samples of
dialog: “I hope this drink is better than the last./I
wish I’d ordered water”, “Am I the best
you’ve ever had?/No.”. Memmott concluded with a
piece called “(s)Pacing”, during which he (at
first) seemed to be mixing either verbal or visual elements,
or both), then paced around the bar while a dark (in lack of
color and in tone), abstract (spliced, segmented screen)
video plays. What appears on the screen includes footage of
pavement, shoes, and a soundtrack of classical music and
footsteps is heard. Street scenes form, as do visual and
verbal collages. Words of a poem (and what look like
diacritical marks) appear in/on at least three different
layers, Memmott strolls: “heartrendering/unraveling/forwarding/cobblestone
replaced by blocks of concrete wandering&”. What
emerges is a portrait of a solitary figure, who has an
interesting vocabulary (e.g., banausic, oppidan) in thought,
“engrossed in the lack of getting anywhere”. Baldwin
and Sondheim did a chaotic performance using their Second
Life avatars and a real time Skype conversation (dialog
about their movements and locations). This too I have seen
on more than one occasion, and the presentation of materials—described
by Baldwin as “part drama, part ritual”—improves
each time. Here two different screens were projected. Both
artists have used SL extensively, and have created
spectacular (vivid, elaborate, fragmented 3D) virtual
spaces, characters, and detritus (such as body parts).
Beyond the contrived scenes and “live action”
that occurs, dense text passages are also layered onto the
projections—they appear in small font and are
difficult to read but definitely add an out of the ordinary
layer to the already ornate visual textures (see
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_funks/sets/72157618985161705/
for documentation of this and other sessions). Some of the
texts are written by Sondheim, and others Baldwin describes
as “pseudo-generated” and “flarf style”,
which are “attached to gestures”. All of the
objects appearing have their own text. During one segment of
the performance, Sondheim’s “body”, “a
vast plasma”, locks onto Baldwin’s—the
movements of which are generating the text. They demonstrate
how certain actions by the characters lead to visual events
as well. A pre-recorded soundtrack plays, characters dance.
In addition to the spectacle engineered, the live (spoken)
dialog is unquestionably a compelling part of the work in
performance. Part explanation, part negotiation of
choreography (“can you see the other avatar?”, “where
the hell are you?”)—such exchanges and questions
are for everyone. Baldwin’s strategy, beyond
description, also involves invoking events that are also
happening in the room, bringing real space into the work as
well, and we get the sense of being a part of a making in
progress, which he declares in Barcelona is “all a big
mess”. Jörg
Piringer, details from performance, E-poetry 2009.
Most
of the time, words appear incompletely, no phrases are
formed because letters are disappearing as others appear, a
simultaneously that scrambles any sense of wholeness to the
text. The second part of the show, titled “Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”,
was classic Piringer: black alphabetic figures on white
(although I noticed some subtle coloration of background and
letters, which I haven’t seen before). Letters rapidly
arrange themselves in accordance to the artist’s
minimal, staccato vocal input. They become characters in a
visual narrative, begin to take on their own identity as
texture, well outside the realm of grammatical sensibility.
At times we hear what sounds like a swarm of flies as small
letters buzz around larger ones. The variation of
combination—a call and response of the
verbal/non-verbal—triggered by Piringer in real-time
is always fantastic to watch. A story is not told directly,
but the representation of spontaneously formed text and the
fact that text can speak visually (in synch with musical
sound), is in the foreground here. May
27: Installation and Panel of
works: “Italian e-poetry”, “What
They Said/My Summer Vacation”, “Code, Not Text:
for a poetics of code proper” For
the final day’s sessions, we returned to a large room
at CCCB, which was large enough to house a fairly sizeable
installation of works as well as seat about 100 people.
Installations included an extensive, concerted presentation
by the INFOLIPO group titled “Mots, images, paysages”
that featured works by Barras (“Postcape”),
Alexandra Catana/Lucian Niculescu/Paula Bartis (“Awaiting
Horizon”), Cécile Bucher/Delphine Riss (“Ma
journée par défaut”), Jade Wang/Nicolas
Szilas (“A travers shan”), and Edgar Acevedo (“Café”).
Works by Judy Malloy, Giuliano Tosin, Jerome Fletcher, Hans
Kloos, and another piece by Szilas/Wang were installed
adjacent to those by INFOLIPO. The dominant work was “Awaiting
Horizon”, a vivid kinetic animation that was projected
onto one of the walls. A non-digital work, kite-like
constructions hanging from the ceiling, offered an
interesting correspondence, demarcating and marking space
with shapes and language—especially since the digital
work nearby also depended on physical movement in space (but
in an entirely different way). Barras’ take-home
postcards also extended the digital project into virtual
space. The
first panel featured presentations by Giovanna di Rosario,
Alan Bigelow, and José Carlos Silvestre. Rosario
began by asking everyone assembled to petition the
University of Catalonia to reinstate the Hermenia research
site (see http://www.hermeneia.net/cat/).
Di Rosario retraced the Italian e-poetry tradition starting
from the visual artists Eugenio Miccini and Lamberto
Pignotti, who founded “gruppo 70” (1963),
focusing on "Art and Communication" and in 1964 "Arte and
Technology", where discussion touched on interdisciplinary,
interactivity. In the early 80s Gianni Toti began an
experimentation where he mixed poetry, cinema and electronic
art, creating a new language, "poetronica" (video poetry and
electronic poetry) a sort of union between poetry and cinema
elaborated with electronic art. Language is one of the
primary subjects in Toti’s work: Composed of a rich
mixture of idiomatic expressions, mostly in French and
Italian, but with a deep influence from all the languages of
the world. In his videos Toti is trying to say us that
language should be renewed, not technology. Another
important Italian e-poet is Nanni Balestrini who in 1961
created “Tape Mark”, a poem generated by
computer, actually a huge IBM calculator, first published in
the Bompiani Almanac. Briefly considers connections
to the “Total Poetry” movement (which is
expansive enough to consider food and perfumes in its
poetics). She introduces Lello Masucci, (whose creation “Poema
Notturno Rosso” was presented during E-poetry), whose
Poesia
numerica
takes full stock in the idea of “Global Art”
but at the same time suggests a fiercely private and
individual vision of reading poetry; it exemplifies our
Western culture at once so global, yet so powerfully local.
By entering the site, each internaut can create a poem by
clicking in different points on the blue frame. A few simple
and illogical mouse clicks draw strange shape, made up small
red cards which conquer the blue space. Once the internaut
stops clicking on the blue space his poetic composition is
finished. The internaut knows the poem’s form but he
doesn’t know the poem’s content. In fact once
finished his composition he should send it to the “author”
by mail by a deadline, and then after collecting all the
mails the poem finally will take its form and content. In
"Red Nocturnal Poem", Masucci rewrites texts drawn by
different authors, antithetical poems modeled by the
subjectivity of a software. Readers give meaning to the
work. Daniela Calisi’s Content(o)design
web site: she defines her poetry as “dynamic poetry”
(which is not totally true, in fact it’s dynamic only
if the reader interacts with the text). Cartografi
is written in free verses and its particularity resides in
the fact that some verse lines, which are found partially
indistinct on the background, come to the foreground, thanks
to the reader's action, replacing and/or modifying the other
textual segments, thus altering the structure and the sense
of those verse lines. In this dialogue between two different
perspective planes, the poetic text, in itself, loses its
characteristic of a complete object in order to become an
object in movement, which is transformed under the eyes of
its readers’, and at their will. The reading
possibilities, in this case, are multiple: one can read it
in the classical way, or intersect several segments,
attracted, for example, by the largeness of the letters.
Brings to the foreground the reflection of the words on the
graphic form: the differentiation between capital and tiny
letters gives a different impact to the same word. On the
contrary, the text positioned at the centre of the page, in
black, representing the classical text, becomes less
attractive for the reader, likely to be captured by the
other possible (subjective) paths. Presents evidence of how
the poetic verse and the game of entax interact in the
process of building the text. If syntax covers the assembly
operations of both figures and signs along the external
space of a sign system, a word is needed to indicate the
system of the operations which allows assembling the letters
inside the figures: it is the entax. The entax chairs for
example the combination of features, points, etc. which
compose a letter or an ideogram. The entax extends its
influence on interior space, syntax on external one. The
entax allows new combination of cognitive associations so
new meanings. A capital letter can suggest another path of
lecture, another interpretation. Rosario explains it wasn’t
easy to compile a list of contemporary practitioners,
suggesting this is probably due to lack of Internet access
in the country (only 32% has access to the Web), which is
unfortunate because of its rich tradition of visual and
concrete poetry. Caterina Davinio is cited as a leading
conceptual/digital artist whose work is “related to
letters”. Bigelow
showed a pair of his works that appear on his website,
Webyarns: Stories for the Web. The first was titled
“What
they said” (2008),
a vibrant multimedia piece replete with stroboscopic imagery
and loaded with Jenny Holzer (by way of Orwell)-esque
slogans (e.g., “Privacy is a Public Trust”, “Freedom
of Speech is not Free”, “We must limit our
rights to preserve them”, “We must register our
identities to keep them safe”). A wide range of
images, which more or less directly relate to verbal content
(e.g., a fingerprint is a prominent icon on the “identities”
quote), are included, some are generic, others seem like
family photos. The interface is basic—a slider at the
bottom of the screen is used to access each of the main
eight sections of the work. Bigelow’s second piece,
the third installment of a series of “comic strips”
(or, “brain strips”), was titled
“Higher
Math”
(2009). “Higher Math” is a playful hypermedia
narrative, featuring a sequence of allegorical multimedia
panels (text, sound, animation, video) relating to
mathematic themes; one section takes aim at the T.S.A.,
suggesting heightened security isn’t about terrorism
but about geometry. After completing each of the sections,
the user can check her/his “Higher Math Profile”—a
humorous interactive quiz. Bigelow narrated through
different sections of the work as they were projected.
Silvestre’s
paper was delivered directly, without adornment, and his
concision was impressive. He begins by showing the code of a
work of his own titled “Failed Fractals”, which
presents the reader with the algorithm for a “Julia
set” fractal. Rendering of the code creates an
infinite loop of fractals. His argument is that coding and
writing are separate, quotes Cayley on making “reductive”
correspondences between the two. Coding is a specifically
situated practice with its own conventions. Code poetry must
be aware of them. Shows an example of a Java that defines an
object called “Light” then instantiates it:
José
Carlos Silvestre, E-Poetry presentation 2009. The
line of text and the code, however, “do not stand for
each other” because when you name an object “light”
you do not expect them to have signified output—you
are writing text with the syntax of code. Silvestre proposes
a three-fold semantics—of source code, instruction
set, and output—which do not necessarily match each
other but nonetheless hold many possibilities. Invokes
Kittler, Shannon, then shows examples of works that require
that readers to read the code because there is no text
output. Identifying patterns within the code is necessary to
fully understand the work. It is the combination of the
source code, instruction set, and output that make the poem,
not one of the distinct parts (“a statement on the
materiality of infomatics”). In
the discussion that follows, ME asks. “In total
poetry, how did they use food?” GR: In total poetry
anything can be considered a poem. They did performances
using food, because of the long tradition in Italy about
food, so the work is about eating a poem. WB: In Tape-Mark,
how was syntax generated, how was translation done? GR:
Tape-Mark had an algorithm that assembled fragments of three
different texts written by men; randomness was a part of it;
the translation was done by humans. JC to JS: Commends him
on a nice job of presenting a poetics of code as code
itself. He wonders if the poetics is addressed to humans. “You
mention three things that have to be read—do you see
that as being a non-human culture, or is it entirely within
the realm of what pleases us?” JS: Code is a perfect
method, used to make something, with a machine also designed
for the purpose. There’s always engagement with human
activity, and he’s chosen a fractal, in which there’s
abstraction but also a symbolism that is human-specific. JC:
The choices you make in the source code are done with humans
in mind. Stated he had trouble with Silvestre’s use of
the term “creolization”, in terms of
linguistics. What you’re really saying is that
programming languages are designed to be read by humans, but
they usually don’t (and aren’t intended to be
read). WB: Seem to be talking about the difference between
statistics and aesthetics. JC: Some people would be willing
to consider an aesthetics that is non-human. Panel
of papers: Close-reading e-poetry: “Reading
the Last Performance.org”, “Creative Cannibalism
Remix: Authors & Network as Banquet”, “The
Lure of the Scrawl” The
second panel featured Rettberg, myself, and Stefans.
Rettberg prefaced his talk by calling it an “incomplete
close reading” of Judd Morrissey’s collaborative
work “The
Last Performance”,
which is described by its authors as “a
constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and
text-visualization project responding to the theme of
lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of
building, a final performance, and the interruption (that
becomes the promise) of community”. Rettberg begins
with description of a performance scenario of the piece—seamlessly
jumping from observation to quotation. His presentation
highlights the performative, playful, and seious aspects of
Morrissey’s stylish arrangement, in which “the
arcing texts seem to be arranged in patterns that have more
in common with architecture than they do with the stanzas of
a poem”. He explains that the visual/textual design of
the work (which can be viewed in microcosmic and macrocosmic
forms) is based on the structure of a Croatian mosque, as
well as by dance movements, and algorithms: “A sort of
double-reading takes place in that while the individual
fragments of text retain their individual identity, the
reader is also compelled to regard them as part of a larger
whole in one sense, as pure data in another”—there
is the stream of the daily present, happening within the
shadow of war. Also points out that the constraints are
ambiguous (e.g., “catalog of codes for impossible
tasks and mighty optical illusions”), having the
effect of pushing the writing “beyond the bounds of
the reasonable”. Rettberg closely analyzes a couple of
passages, but also makes clear that beyond offering
something that can be interpreted, “The Last
Performance” invites viewers to contribute text, to
write to the text (and are acknowledged as participants).
Rettberg’s paper also outlines the challenges of doing
a “close reading” of the work, how its capacious
and variable contents disrupt objective narratives, how
everything within the work is removed from its initial
context, and the need “to read the interface”.
He muses on clues to the work contained in its title. With
regard to “The Last Performance”, suggests it
invites atomistic reading, and that it is difficult to
distinguish between performance and audience, and between
textual artifact and participatory action (the latter seems
truer that the former, but what I think he means is that
those who contribute text become part of the performance).
Briefly considers, at the end, the work in terms of “cultural
anthropophagy”, how it differs as such (does not
completely cannibalize, a different angle on the context, “reading
and growing simultaneously”). His response was an
insightful explanation of a complex work, which in Barcelona
set the table (i.e., built anticipation) for Morrissey’s
staging of the work later in the afternoon. My
paper was built on the foundation of my E-poetry 2007 essay,
basically discussing two new avenues of the cannibalistic
tendency in digital poetry: generators that produce text by
remediating grammars and vocabularies of named authors, and
works that in real time cannibalize images and text from the
Web to create output. Brief discussions of Jim Carpenter’s
Erika, “The Electronic Muse” (Niss
& Deed), The Shannonizer, Flarf, and Google
Poem Generator were followed by more extensive demonstration
of Tissell’s Dada
newsfeed
and an introduction to Jim Andrews’s
dbCinema. I did a demonstration using the beta
(offline) version of the program, which is not publically
available because Andrews is trying to develop it
commercially. While these tools—which use mass media
feeds to make art—are fairly raw, I believe they “serve
as a model for the engineering of digital literary products
in the future”. Stefans
presented an informal version of his paper, to make the
point that when we talk about the materiality of text in a
digital work, it is acknowledged something not textual is
happening but often do not pursue the idea far enough.
Stefans’s purpose is thus to examine the visual
traditions that impose itself on the graphic design, and to
develop a “compositional vocabulary”. He
explains that his main influences are the New York School
poets and painters, and that his interest in making visual
poetry is to give non-readers (of English) something
interesting to look at. He describes his appreciation for
hand-wrought arts (which go against typographic norms),
citing works by Jean-Michel Basquiat (“gestural,
psychological content&expressive letterforms”
related to doodles, “an iconic hand”), Stan
Brakhage (painting on film), John Cage (mesostics, “lack
of symmetry”), Robert Grenier (works with ballpoint
pens), Phillip Guston’s cartoons, Al Hirschfield’s
“NINA” inscriptions (“When does scrawl become text?”),
Jasper Johns, Steve McCaffery’s typewriter works,
Jason Nelson’s use of scrawled writing in his video
games, and other Art and videogame examples as informative
influences. Poets have used material textual markings in
construction for a long time, like Emily Dickinson; Aram
Saroyan’s use of typographic slips (shifts?). Likes “vulgar”,
and art that points towards the dark side of psychology
rather than the cybernetic subject, sees no reason why
digital poetry can’t do that. Repetitive human actions
give a sense of creator as an algorithm. He also gave us a
tour of the backend of Scriptor, explaining how the
vibrating dynamic is achieved (through invention, much
intricate labor, and advanced technical skills), how he
likes to make his doodles “explode”. He shows a
version of W.C. Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”
in Scriptor form. His emphasis is not on making letters
explode but rather to control every element of a piece of a
graphic—to write an algorithm that makes them have
behaviors; his are simple but yet a visual complexity
happens. Refers to Piringer’s practice (seen the
previous night), which also involves enlivening letters and
texts in real time. Modestly calling it rudimentary, Stefans’s
showed what his “letter creator” looks like, how
it is possible to make and connect lines on a small grid,
change their color—this is how his vibrating letters
are made (out of coded numbers), seemingly by hand. These
constructions are meant to be projected, but processor speed
and resolution make a significant difference. In
the discussion, JC to BKS: breaking typography down to
fundamental units. Do they always wiggle? BKS: No, that’s
just what he’s doing now. As with the dreamlife of
letters, he’s building a vocabulary of movement of the
piece, not all will be that way. JC: You’re exploring
the liminality between letters and proto-letters? BKS: That’s
one aspect, an interesting component of the work. The idea
of reducing them to a simple set of numbers is that I can
control them through the programming. JC: What’s at
stake? You write poems in the sense that you write text, but
also explore the semi-permeable border between graphics and
letter. What is the connection between letter creation and
text? BKS: In Japanese calligraphy, weren’t you judged
by the fine-ness of your hand? One thing I’d like to
do with this is to make a graphics creation program. I don’t
do a lot of algorithmically generated texts but I think
algorithmically generated images are more interesting. AP to
SR: Putting together software, one of the most difficult
things is getting people to participate in whatever you
design. In The Last Performance, who uses it, why, what
strategies are used by the authors to maintain that
interest? Are these kinds of questions important to the type
of close reading you’re interested in? SR: Yes. Part
of the essay he hasn’t finished yet involves
collective narratives, but will be finished and published in
a book later this year. The architecture of participation is
very interesting in the piece. The collaborative community
is important to it. Takes time to get used to constructing
within and responding to what is presented. There’s a
process of seducing a reader to be a writer, getting used to
participating in a writing game. Compares TLP to Gaudi—the
author designs the architecture, and uses certain parts of
the structure, but then it opens up into a group
construction at points, coming back to the initial visions
and thematic boundaries. It is not just information
architecture, but something within which things are
constructed. JN to BKS: It seems like there’s a
tendency to equate things that are sketched with madness or
insanity. Do you think about that association, how they read
the work. BKS: You’re right. Mentions documentary on
R. Crumb, a notebook filled with just lines of illegible
text. Extensive auto-correction can lead to beauty but also
suggests a type of madness. But there’s playfulness to
it as well. MM to BKS: what you’re presenting is a
kind of process, connected to fine art. What are you doing
as a digital artist who is acting like a painter (Johns), a
build-up process. BKS: that’s another variable of the
work, that the number of times a letter is re-drawn on top
of itself is determined by the algorithm. The thick lines,
and the number of colors makes the eye more attentive to the
material. When McCaffery theorizes Bill Bissett through
Bataille and de Sade and excess, he does a poststructural
take on what the page means, and that kind of reality is
what I’m getting at as well. When you take away the
pre-packaged font, this romantic line between author and
screen is opened. SR: In thinking about your work and Jorg’s,
there’s creation of the instrument, which is the
artwork, but then there’s over time uses of the
artwork. BKS: I’d like for other people to access it
online, and create their own doodles and designs. I want to
develop it, and maybe try to patent it. CF: I think it is
not a bad idea to try and sell digital poetry& people
buy all kinds of crap&why wouldn’t they buy
something that was interesting and useful? BKS: If they ever
make the Kindle programmable, that could be fun too, though
they probably won’t. SR: There are some apps being
sold on the iPhone. KS to me: We’ve been talking about
cannibalism during the conference. Am I trying to remix the
use of cannibalism, or the implication of it, because I
seemed to shifted a little between cannibalism and remix,
and though those terms share some relation, there’s a
more positive valence in the way we use remix. Are you
ceding to the destructive sense of cannibalism, or giving
the more positive by emphasizing remix? CF: I wanted to make
the connection between “mashup”, sampling, and
the type of activity that was postulated by de Andrade and
anthropophagy. I have respect for DJ Spooky, I don’t
know if his work is as hardcore as it could be. Maybe there
are degrees of intention. But I believe he’s putting
out a polemic, as have the Concrete poets and others who
have embraced anthropophagy. Maybe remix is a lighter term,
I don’t know, one that indicates less taboo? I like
anthropophagy because part of de Andrade’s theory
involved transforming the taboo into something totemic.
There could be a specificity to the term that involves
things that we do not see much of today. Maybe this type of
activity, where we’re trying to have a cultural
transformation, may not be happening all the time. MM to me:
the images that you showed were from the Internet? CF: In
dbCinema the images are gathered from the net in real time—from
Yahoo or Google or any directory you specify—you could
put your own images up and point the software to it. Here
there was a bit of a delay, which I didn’t quite
understand but must have been related to the connection. It
draws images into the thumb browser, which can be removed.
You can customize it to include pictures tagged with words.
I like the randomness. It picks up the same general images
every time, but not always—I don’t know exactly
how Google images establishes its hierarchies. SR: The thing
I wonder about, and about selling it as well, is that at a
certain point it will be useful for advertising and
marketers. CF: This is exactly his target audience, from
what I understand. He wants companies to buy it so that they’ll
use it to make something that looks cool for them. I shouldn’t
speak for Jim, but that’s my impression. SR: He’ll
sell that to support his own artwork. CF: Right. JC: It is
important, crucial for us to discuss at this point. CF: Are
you worried that a digital poet could sell out? JC: It is
not a question of selling out, but it's a question of how
we're prepared to employ our time. The supposed aesthetic is
deranged in bit.fall, it claims to be cultural critique but
is not. It doesn’t do what it claims. It is beautiful,
has a wow factor, but can be equally applied to advertising
as a cultural critical practice. CF: As far as I know Jim
has said no more than this is a graphical synthesizer, he’s
not making claims for something else. JC: No, he’s
being straightforward about: he’s saying I want it to
stop being cultural critique while I am building it. I want
it to be something that is smooth and enter commercial
society without a problem, so that I can finally get paid as
a good artist. There are political problems that go with it,
and there are problems with this that we need to address, at
least occasionally. I think that Roberto did a good job at
showing this particular point [in his keynote]. SR:
Though he just left, my question for Roberto is how far is
he taking the assumption that this is a negative thing, that
the cannibalism of the text is becoming material. JC: RS is
unambiguous: he wants the text to be able to be read, who
thinks that language should be consumed as something
meaningful. SR: That’s why I’d say that
something that something like TLP complicates his thesis.
JC: TLP, for Roberto, isn’t literature. SR: But the
same sorts of cannibalizing text can be part of a literature
that can be read. A: Cannibalism is seen in a more positive
light by de Sade, associated with love; is this part of the
notion of remix? CF: I don’t know de Sade, sorry to
say. Digital
poetry performances: “Brewing Luminous”,
“The Inframergence”, “In absentia”, “The
Partickl-e”, “The Last Performance” After
lunch, digital poetry performances by myself, Jim Rosenberg,
J.R. Carpenter, Amy Sara Carroll & Ricardo Dominugez,
and Judd Morrissey (with Mark Jeffery). My show featured two
animations projected as a montage with simultaneous reading
of poems inspired by my participation in the Flarf
Collective. One visual channel was a scripted “playlist”
of “brushsets” Andrews and I created for the gig
(titled e-poetry, Barcelona, cannibalism, Machado); the
other was a fifteen minute text-movie I composed called “Brewing
Luminous”, which features a pair of kinetic
anagrammatic poems (“Barcelona Dreaming”, “Brewing
Luminous”) accompanied by a soundtrack made with
processed samples of Cecil Taylor’s music. My set ends
with the lines: “Rhode Island dreamed of Hollywood
stardom:/Associate seeing regularly,/helps to keep your
mouth in top shape”. Rosenberg—one
of the true pioneers in the field—followed, beginning
with some “procedural comments,” like observing
that Borrás had essentially organized two conferences
here (one when the support of her former institution was
presumed, then another when that was no longer the case).
Secondly, he noted the reality that important research
sites, such as Hermeneia, can be taken offline at a moment’s
notice; he insisted that everyone go home and backup their
websites, preserving in case of any similar unfortunate
events. Rosenberg read from an ongoing work, “The
Inframergence” (which we’re told is about 1/3
complete), explaining that the outer interface is a spiral,
which starts out being polylinear but as you go further in
the structure starts to emerge. The spiral is not entirely
obvious in the projection, and is essentially a gathering of
small lexia on the screen. He reads from the piece,
directing himself through the interface, voicing words
emerging from nested constructions at the same time. It
always amazes me to hear the author’s singular voice
reading these works, in which the words that appear are
meant to be read as simultaneities. Watching (hearing) him
read is instructive—seeing Rosenberg read his own work
gives us clues as to how we might read it too. When a single
voice pronounces the words, in fact occasionally stumbling
over the unconventional arrangement of unusually paired
words and phrases, the impossibilities of Rosenberg’s
complex concept come to the fore. In the onslaught of
language, only one line can be spoken (processed) at a time,
complete with pauses as different sections of the work are
accessed. As the moderator (Rettberg) commented during his
introduction, Rosenberg has been cultivating his aesthetic
for more than two decades, and the reading Barcelona was not
radically different than the first time I heard Rosenberg
read from his work in 1996. There is something powerful
about hearing the singular (I want to say frail, but that’s
not true) voice, making his way through the dense layers of
words, presenting abstract images, hearing something that is
not entirely unlike language poetry (e.g., “Sensory
sear score flush”, “tone mime scarecrow”, “dice-work
grip prolific”). Yet the diagrammatic syntax Rosenberg
so proudly cultivates on the screen cannot be reflected on
the stage, so the work becomes something different when
presented in such situations. As the poem accumulates it
becomes less abstract, and I have a tendency to read the
poem as a self-reflexive commentary on its elaborate process
(as commentary on itself): ““throat sling siphen
imagination windings/stall cure disguised shock mantra
digger”. Whether or not this is a valid way to receive
the poem, I don’t know. “The
Partickl-e”, by Carroll and Dominguez, was in
principle, a street performance that happened outside the
walls of conference venues, although it was packaged and
interestingly represented from the festival stage/space. The
duo integrated non-trivial performance features, some of
which I’d never seen before. In general, e-poets tend
to minimize theatrics in stage presentations—although
this was not the case here and with Morrissey/Jeffery’s
performance later on the bill. Both performers were dressed
in costumes: long white lab coats. During the presentation
Carroll sat at a desk on the stage, reading a text while
other text(s) (prerecorded video, technically documentation
of the work itself) were projected behind her. Dominguez
wandered through the audience with a handheld projector that
was attached to an iPod, also projecting documentation,
demonstrating what the projector does “live”.
Carroll began by projecting the “Particles
of Interest: Tales from the Matter Markets”
site and mentioning the current work of the Particle
Collective (which, beyond Carroll and Dominguez also
includes Diane Ludin and Nina Waisman)—they’re
currently working on a piece that involves the concept of
hospitality, and are doing fieldwork along the US/Mexico
border that involves more than the production of art. She
explains that other iterations of the work being shown
include a sound installation (background sounds could be
heard here, but uncertain of their source). The first video
projected began by showing words—word play, almost
Concrete, poetry—associated with the group’s
interest in nanotechnology (the subtitle of the above site
is “nanotechnology through experimental media”).
At first it is just words, but then it becomes clear that
the words are being projected onto bodies (these videos were
made on the streets of Barcelona during previous evenings
using the handheld projector—which is actually the
piece of art made for E-poetry). Carroll describes these as “poems
for nano iPods”. Using the textures of walls
(architecture), and projecting onto clothing/bodies is
visually compelling. Dominguez projecting onto the
projection: making impromptu montages, but mainly walks
around projecting onto people in the audience, the floor,
and furniture. Carroll sits on stage and reads a mashup of
texts (with “a manifesto-like quality”) she’d
written previously. At a certain point, she adds a new
animation, a pastiche of quotes and comments related to the
presentation (including Concrete poems by Augusto de
Campos), into the projected mix (it appeared as if Dominguez
also projected the same piece at times, as well as others).
Accordingly the presentation becomes a “hybrid”
text on several levels, reflecting a combination of imagery,
of horizontal (prose) cultural commentary and critique with
(vertical) lines of poetry and poetic references (e.g., she
may be the first person to reference directly Nate Mackey’s
work at E-poetry, referencing the title of his last book of
poems, Splay Anthem). Before beginning to read the mashup,
Carroll offers a few comments about the theme of
cannibalism, saying that the question for her (them) is not
co-optation, they’re not interested in postmodernism
or either/or schematics—for them it is always
both/and. So they’re “interested in the
relationship between the word cannibal and Caliban”
and are interested in the concept of the “Cannibal
Manifesto” in terms of Postcolonial theory and in
relation to Latin America. They’re interested in “postscripting
Posts”, operating after the Latin American literature
boom, engaging with Roberto Bolaño’s ideas.
Carroll’s speech is informed, bearing political
concern (global warming, transglobal corporations).
Addresses the sublime (or absence thereof) in the quotidian,
suggesting that nano is the future of the sublime. We’re
at a point of an “ironic reversal of cultural mandates”.
Introduces historical examples of activist/artistic efforts
(Mexico City, Adorno); forcing audiences to acknowledge that
in the vaporization(s) solids that vanish (e.g., World Trade
Center) do not disappear into thin air. Purpose: to
challenges the principles of reality. No regulations on
nanotechnology (particles). How does one intervene, use it
to alter the literary? “Paraliterary”: the
particle-ization of language. Particle (the group) engages
scientific spheres (qualified by Carroll as “dirty
science”), remembers narrative as a socially symbol
act, not set apart from science. Lab conditions, isolatable:
silence, to reflect on the politics of re-presentation, “on
what and who is omitted”. We are not bound to books,
literary can flow through the airwaves, breathed in through
nano particles. Multiple filters inform, enhance, enable
decision making in the “post-contemporary”.
Their routes (and routes) consider environmental-isms,
including re-engineering of cosmetic products (and how it
effects women), privileges of accessibility, what is
disposable, with a stance that is more than rhetorical. What
they are doing is done in conjunction with the “Particle
group’s larger investigations into nanotoxicologies
and dispersed force fields of writerly/readerly practices”.
The word, claims Carroll, “deserves to be massaged as
well as minced&the word is our transference point and
rejection”. Particle poetry replaces historical traits
with “nanotechnological method”—the ion is
the new line (riffs off of Blake, “particle particle,
burning bright”), “tweaking and casting a spell
on neo-liberalisms&pageantries of possession”.
Active pursuit of “particle capitalism” (see
website for some info on this idea of the project) in the
combination of bits. Instead of an academic paper with a
performance component (a la Purkinge, 1994), this seems
almost ritualistic—projecting language onto bodies
showing us different aspects of textuality—a kind of
spell to make us aware of our conditions? Carroll seems a
bit didactic at points, but certainly expensively so, and
probably necessarily so—for if minds (and planetary
conditions) are to be changed, direct, forceful information
and instructions are needed. Carpenter
sat at a table on the stage and did a demonstration of her
work in
absentia
(2008), reading some of the stories it contains. The piece—designed
by Carpenter but featuring contributions by “guest
authors” with various ethnic backgrounds and languages—largely
involves gentrification (and ironically the art gallery that
initially supported the work was evicted from its location
in Montreal shortly after becoming involved with the
project). The interface includes maps and area photographs
of the author’s neighborhood (Mile End), as well as
symbols and superimposed texts, which the viewer interacts
with to produce a narrative. Text passages also include
images; collage of text and images. Several texts included
are in epistolary form, others are diaristic (contemplative,
observational), and some include text from “roommate
wanted” ads that sound like relationship ads. A few
are culled from Carpenter’s novel Words the Dog
Knows. Combined, they have the effect of re-sounding a
conversation that describes (often with subtle humor) the
experience of living in a place. The
performance of (Morrissey’s) The Last
Performance begins with him sitting at the table on the
stage, reading from the work (what sounds like commentary on
the work). Two different projection areas are set up; the
title page (http://thelastperformance.org/title.php) is
projected in the background. Part one (“The Dance”)
is shown (both screens), Morrissey reads as it plays part of
the time, and at others lets the kinetic text do the “talking”
of the work. At the start of Part two (“The Dome”),
he is joined onstage by Jeffery, who begins to read a
different type of text (epistolary); the animation from Part
one remains projected on the side screen, the opening page
of “The Dome” appears on the main screen. When
he finishes reading Jeffery dons a full-scale goat mask
(horns and all), gesticulates to get into character, and
begins reading again. After finishing another section,
Jeffrey removes his shows and throws them against the wall,
then writhes on the stage and reads again. Emphasis was on
performance and vocalization of text by Jeffrey, not much
happening on the screen (or between performers) for awhile.
When Jeffrey finishes, he removes the mask, leaves the
stage; Morrissey activates the text and begins speaking
again—in part describing the concept of the
performance he is participating in and the work itself
(e.g., “I never took anything literally except for
letters themselves”). He reads from the “lenses”
of the work, and Part Three (“The Minaret”),
which seems to contain reflections on the work. Rettberg had
earlier delivered contexts and comment on The Last
Performance, and here we are given one possibility for
a live demonstration. Morrissey leaves the stage after
voicing the line “shut that door”; as the
animation continues he finishes by reading a few lines
offstage, concluding with the statement, “it is the
work of the dramaturge to see that the hammer bends the saw”.
In
the discussion JN asks JM: how long does this piece run in
other places? JM: There are lots of different versions, not
just because of time but because of space, the piece is
adapted to the site. At one show he used three screens, so
the text patterns extend across multiple screens; he has
also done solo, one-screen versions; time runs anywhere from
20 to 50 minutes. SR to JM: What is the relation of the film
to the project? JM: The film is one of three projects. Work
stems from a period of research with a performance company
that resulted in a piece for 5 performers, which extended
into the writing part of the project and the film. Research
led to multiple forms of output. The group (collective) was
disbanding after many years, so it really was the process of
ending. SR to CF: Can you talk about the process of making
the poems that you showed, remixing in your work? CF: I
began to make the anagrammatic poems when I was teaching my
students how to use Flash a couple of years ago. I was
inspired by works by Brian [Stefans], mIEKAL aND,
Talan [Memmott], and others, and started working
with it. I start with a word or phrase, which I run through
the Internet anagram server, usually getting thousands of
results. I select ones I think can be turned into a poem
then somewhat painstakingly compose them on the screen. I am
pleased with the montage effect I’m able to get with
projectors, and sometimes show multiple pieces at the same
time, like today. These works resulted from the phrases “Barcelona
Dreaming” and “Brewing Luminous” (a phrase
taken from the title of a Cecil Taylor record), from which I
pulled some samples and decontextualized by stretching them
way out of proportion. It is different every time. SR to JR:
is there computation underlying your process? JR: There’s
no computation that creates finished work. There are no
algorithms that write words or place them. It is all done by
hand. There’s computation involved in the behaviors
that support the work, there are classes for how the words
behave. The computation is pre-compositional. I have along
process, in which I write what I call a reservoir, which I
cut up, to permute it using chance operations to use as a
prompt sheet. Then I make another writing reservoir; I do
this about two or three times to get final a prompt sheet I
use to create a finished work, but it is just writing. CF:
Has anyone here ever seen a handheld projector before? That
was a truly remarkable presentation, and a way to use
technology—I was spellbound. SR to ASC/RD: Yes, and
could you talk about your work and how u see the
relationship between poetry and activism. RD: One of the
ideas we dealt with as the Critical Art Ensemble in the 80s
was the notion of perfomative matrix that would try to
disturb the audience, and part of that was to disturb the
question of poetic and activism, or develop “artivism”.
A lot of the work in the 90s was trying to create a poetic
encounter that could create a digital wave of unbearable
humanity in terms of code itself, in trying to find what was
missing. So whether it is in nanotechnology, or hacktivism,
or locative media, I always try to work with poets and
specific artists, try to amplify that as much as possible.
ASC is also thinking through the question via the
performative matrix but remarks that any poetic also
involves sublevels, direct statements. BKS to JRC: Did you
stretch the materials you presented into a novel? What was
the process there? JRC: The text here is a lot bigger than
it looks. I am better at reading my own text, so that’s
what I did today, although ended with one by someone else.
Some texts here are not in the novel, but a lot are. The
novel also remediates a couple of other e-literature
projects and some short stories. There’s a lot of
other stuff going on in the novel. Some of the characters
appear both in the online work and in the novel, the maps
(taken from Google) give the writing a setting. A
panel celebrating past and present winners of the “Ciutat
de Vinaròs” award (Jason Nelson, Rui Torres,
Ton Ferret) followed (Caitlin Fisher, also a winner in 2008,
could not attend but a section of her work was shown). This
international prize was established by Borràs (and
the Hermeneia research group). Submitted materials are
studied, taught, and (when applicable) used to promote
Spanish/Catalan literature. At E-poetry, each poet did a
brief demonstration of their work. Nelson, after “a
small bit of preaching” about the “incredible
potential” of digital poetry and the need to get it to
the general public, encourages everyone to try to spread
their (and everyone’s work) outside of academia, then
shows his work “The
Bomar Gene”
(2008). While navigating through the piece he reads a few
sections from this “hybrid” work (which also
includes sound). The story is strange—full of odd
facts, mixed with fiction—yet the prose, while
nonlinear, is not hard to understand or to follow. Nelson as
always is charismatic, entertaining, improvisational, and
self-effacing on the stage. Torres talked about the process
of making his work "Poemas
no meio do caminho"
(2007). Name (“Poems in the middle of the road”)
is inspired by a line in a poem by Carlos Drummond de
Andrade. Explains that the work is produced with a Flash
actionscript generator he developed with programming
collaborators, and is based on some of Pedro Barbosa’s
ideas. He does a demonstration of how the “categories”
in the piece are built, and adds content to the database
(which anyone can do by using a mechanism on the blog
associated with the work). Shows how multimedia can be added
(sound—500 prerecorded sounds are included), which
alters the combinatory processes. Torres makes unique poems
for the occasion. Different visualizations of the work are
available: there are vertical and horizontal (z-space)
versions of the work, the latter of which shows a different
view of the reading material (and looks great). The literary
value is that the list of words used to make the generated
works can be altered. Borràs comments that while
disappearance is a feature of many electronic works, Torres’s
piece actually preserves pieces that are added by users. She
comments that Fisher’s work, instead of migrating from
page to screen, moves from screen to page. Ferret showed his
work “The
Fugue* book”
(2008). His work requires the user to connect with Facebook
(the social networking site). He explains that the identity
of the reader is very important—“the protagonist
is the reader and his or her friends”, although though
the reader “is not free”. Once “The Fugue*
Book” has your email address, it begins to send
messages from imaginary people containing hyperlinks that
open up new sections of the “The Fugue”,
animates user tag clouds, and interacts with blogs. When I
experimented with the work afterwards, it appears as though
a posting to an eroticism blog was attributed to me (though
I can’t read what it says because the entire project
is written in Catalan). Ferret does a demonstration of how
the “story” works, explained by a computer voice
in English. Borràs comments that you can’t
escape your own personality in the work. A
short summary panel, featuring Cayley, Bootz, and
Borràs concluded the events; each panelist briefly
offered comments about the festival/symposium. Borràs
mentions certain subjects listed in the call for papers
attracted little or no interest; two are especially
significant: teaching e-literature and translating
e-literature. This circumstance gives us an image of how our
interests shape the field. Considers the possibility that
there’s no need for translation? (i.e., do we all
understand every language, or do we all write in one
language), but rejects the idea. Suggests that we do not yet
have academic space to use e-poetry as a teaching object,
and that the focus is now on practice and reflection; close
reading and code are the main topics. Urges everyone to
think about this because she has had “incredible”
experiences with teaching and translation: mixing both
allows us as readers to get deeply inside the pieces. These
are important topics for the future, which would show
maturity in field. She offers “E poetry in numbers”:
there were 44 papers submitted, 22 were presented; 92
artworks proposed, 45 were accepted; 2 keynotes; 90
participants; 5 venues; the event was in all the newspapers
and television; artists from 22 countries (38 different
universities); audiences were large. She notes that there is
website,
blog,
flickr,
and YouTube
site for the conference. Bootz celebrated the impressive
strength of the conference team, then noted E-poetry is a
discipline that is a work in progress. The challenge he
proposed in 2007 for this year’s events was to focus
on the literary nature of digital poetry. He believes we
successfully did so, and that teaching and translation are
challenges for the next gathering. Previously we didn’t
have so many papers that did close readings of works, now we
do, and can see that “comparative literature is coming”.
(He later also commented to me that he felt that there were
too many Americans, that there needed to be broader
international representation). Bootz notes that the next
E-Poetry is the ten year anniversary, and that Sandy Baldwin
will manage the event. The proceedings of E-Poetry are going
to be a book, which will be published before the next
E-Poetry. Cayley, “sitting in for Sandy and Loss”,
reiterates his gratitude to the organizers, and his
impression that the event was remarkable and stimulating. He
points out that the field continues grow, that we don’t
know where it is going, but reiterates the notion that
teaching and translation are crucial. Translation implies
that it has to be literary practice, shows that we’re
still dealing with language. He is keen that we see
ourselves involved with artistic practice–we are
engaged with the academy because we have to in order to
survive: “We have relationships with universities, but
nonetheless we need to see ourselves as art practitioners.”
Conceptually we belong in arts departments, not humanities,
because we make things—“we are here as makers”.
“We invite research as self-reflection, as critical reflection
on our own work, and on humanities scholars that take our
work seriously as work, and not to demo theory or for the
sake of theory only”. He is glad to know that the
E-poetry festivals will continue, and congratulates this
year’s group for an amazing, spectacular job.
None
of the above would have occurred without the efforts of the
primary organizers, Baldwin, Bootz, Borràs, and
Glazier. Borràs should be especially commended for
overcoming extremely unfortunate circumstances—including
the loss of her job and the passing of her father—while
engineering E-Poetry 2009. Despite the fact that funding she
had raised essentially disappeared, she successfully
coordinated all of the details of the events and was able to
engineer a successful gathering of significant scholars and
artists working in the field at present. |
