digital media

‘In a strict sense, I don't believe there's any definition of poetry that applies to all poets. Different poets have different goals. Different poets have different things in their hearts that they’re trying to express in different ways that they want to express them. Are my videos where I'm running around in the woods talking about YOLO and dogs and dads – are these really poetry? Why call them poetry?’ 

These are the words of Steve Roggenbuck (https://www.youtube.com/user/steveroggenbuck), a twenty-something self-proclaimed video artist and poet who released YouTube videos from 2010 to 2017. Roggenbuck’s video poems comprised clips of his stream of consciousness, often filmed while he rolled in the grass or ran through natural scenes, screaming. Amongst random - and, frankly, weird - comments, Roggenbuck inserted motivational moments urging viewers to appreciate nature and follow their dreams. Many videos have been edited to include musical accompaniment, green screen-facilitated backgrounds, and/or additional graphics.

Over seven years, Roggenbuck’s fanbase grew larger and more devoted, with Roggenbuck being established as one of the alt-lit (alternative literature) movement’s most renowned contributors. In October 2018, though, Roggenbuck’s fans turned their backs to him as he confirmed allegations of sexual misconduct: allegations that followed numerous others made against alt-lit contributors.

There are, to be sure, many Internet and alt-lit poets. Roggenbuck makes for a particularly interesting case study because he embodies various facets of Internet culture: visual and aural disjointedness, conscious contempt for grammatical correctness (a poetic license, so to speak), premeditated performance of personality, and – as he has confirmed – sexual harassment brought to light in the #MeToo moment. His online persona embodies the complexities of human connection in an increasingly digital context. Rather ironically, though, most of his videos aim to ignite viewers’ passion for the natural world. ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’ he excitedly screams as he runs through a desert in one video. ‘Fucking llamas! Llamas! Whales are so big!’

This paper introduces readers to Roggenbuck’s poetry, and explores its place within poetic traditions by highlighting the distinctive stylistic features of his work. It considers how Roggenbuck’s video poetry represents a kind of electronic literature that both reflects and parodies meme culture for young adult viewers less inclined to engage with poetry in printed form. This paper also considers how the allegations against Roggenbuck impact interpretations of his work. It aims to start a conversation about negotiating literary value and socially unacceptable authorial behavior on digital platforms with new expectations and potential issues. To use Roggenbuck’s own words: ‘I am the bard. I am the poet. And to be a poet while the Internet exists. Man, we got an opportunity.’ The ‘opportunity’ offered by the Internet allowed Roggenbuck to rise to fame. It was also his demise.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

In this paper I explore blurry intersections and cracked interfaces between page, screen and speaker, analog and digital practice. With reference to the work of Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery, Talan Memmott, Claire Donato, Shelley Jackson, Ian Hatcher, Brian Eno, Rob Wittig, Rachel Zolf, bpNichol, David Jhave Johnston, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Erín Moure, Douglas Kearney, Tan Lin, and others, I think about the ways digital material practice extends the post-structural field, as page-based practices are (further) destabilized by computer-based experiments. These writers treat language itself as a janky technology that works (at least temporarily) through its own failures, so that digital mediation serves to further break and rewire language operations. The “speaker” component of my research refers both to experiments with decentered (if not quite dematerialized) poetic voice, and the sonics of actual voices and other digitally mediated and manipulated sounds. One of my foci is the nature of the digital archive, and how new media artists reconfigure the archive as an active, collaborative, generative commons while foregrounding its (digital) materiality. For example, Jhave’s MUPS is an interface for the PennSound audio poetry collection that provides access to multiple files at once, and also allows reader/listeners to span and braid files. In practice, this redefines access in terms of the digital, and it does so without atomizing the archive as space. It also calls attention to the voice as sound object. A related concern is the ways that digital media projects themselves are archived, or resist archivization. The story of the adaptation and emulation of Nichol’s First Screening, and the gaps in accessibility via obsolescing media formats over the years since its appearance in 1984, is explored as a foundational example. This has been discussed by others, but what I wish to add to scholarship is a consideration of the new layers of digital (and janky) materiality added by each recuperative or emulative restoration/adaptation, and the potential for creating new, hybrid works based on such an archive. Another prong of my research has to do with sonification and the study of waveforms, which I consider as hybrid audio-visual objects that can be materially sculpted and analyzed. I have developed this thinking with reference to Pierre Schaeffer’s Treatise of Musical Objects and Allen Strange’s Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques and Controls. These texts and others have guided my experimentation with tools including the Korg MS-20 mini monophonic synthesizer and the Sony WM-D6C cassette recorder, in conjunction with production and analysis software, as I explore analog-digital interface. Along these lines, I am carrying out a systematic exploration of analog and digital voice recording and analysis related to my experimental prose poem, The Portal, that is adjacent to the Janky Materiality project. This field work also raises questions about improvisational performance, sequence, and multiple temporal and spatial consciousness. With Janky Materiality I am developing a theory of becoming-digital, where interface is a matter of thinking and acting between and among embodied and conceptual, analog and digital realms, whether we are thinking about a technology like language or a tool at hand. As I draw from this work for presentation at ELO, if given that opportunity, I would think in relation to the Mind the Gap! call, whose description and topics speak intimately to my project. One of my overarching concerns is to explore and perhaps help bridge the gap between experimental poetry communities and Digital Language Arts.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

A presentation by Piotr Marecki of UBU lab at Jagellionian University, and a discussion of different lab models for e-lit and digital culture.

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)

I will outline my understanding of how writing through digital media extends the practice of self-translation (an area which has recently attracted attention in translation studies) and writing in general. As an example of technogenesis, writing with and against the intelligent machine opens a wide spectrum of interaction where the human actor both adapts to and resists the influence of the digital media. Writing through this type of translation becomes a self-reflexive practice, in which the translation functions as a mirroring device that prompts the writer to return to the “original” and then again to the “translation.” Ultimately, the outcome is a back-and-forth process in which the binary between original and translation collapses.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)