digital poetics

This paper (presented at Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Bergen 2000) proposes a digital poetics, which focuses on the possible digital transformations of writing and reading with examples from current cybertextual literature. The paper discusses how programming structures (algorithms, cybernetics, object oriented programming, hypertext) can be interpreted as literary forms. The outcome is a literary way to read programming structures and a discussion of a digital literary poetics. As a consequence this paper argues (by taking some initial steps) for further crossdisciplinary research in the field of digital writing between literary theory and computer science as a way to understand the general cultural impact of the computer and as a way to further develop creative innovation.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This conference paper discusses the visual tropes of the window and the screen in the work of Derek Mahon and Alan Gillis. More specifically, the focus is on how the architectural window and the digital screen operate as framing devices in their works, and how they enable the poets to interrogate the interrelationship between poetry as verbal discourse, and visual representation. The shift from the architectural window to a digital window on the screen also marks a shift in understanding questions of viewpoint and perspective in contemporary culture.

In recent years, the field of digital poetry had at least three major critical monographs
discussing the genre and its state-of-the-art. Loss Pequeño Glazier (2002), Brian Kim
Stefans (2003) and Christopher T. Funkhouser (2007) have not only introduced new
critical perspectives, but have also discussed the genre’s problematic definition and its
denominations’ variety: e-poetry, cyberpoetry and digital poetry.
Considering Theo Lutz’s Stochastische Texte (1959) as the first work of
programmable poetry, one should note the genre’s long history of practice in spite of
its shorter history of critical writing. Therefore, the way authors have been coining
and defining the genre itself claims for a theorization standpoint and helps shaping the
field towards a specific path and perhaps a crystalized historical construction.
Do the referenced terms position their authors in a similar flow of thought? By
following a concept’s trajectory and the author’s choice, one must consider the fact
that its crystallization will shape future critical writing. In this sense, it is important to
discuss this diversity and track important differences. Therefore, I argue that one
needs to identify an option towards genre definition and keep a solid and accountable
reference to it. For that matter, I find digital poetry a suitable concept to adopt when
considering works of poetry that take advantage of networked and programmable
media.

This essay analyses the concepts of poeticity and literarity in digital poetry by meains of a comparative analysis of the works by Philippe Bootz, Belén Gache and Óscar Martín Centeno in order to isolate the features that define digital poetry. On the basis of this analysis, the essay then tries to demonstrate which elements of poeticity remain that allow us to continue to classify as poetry its new digital manifestations, and which elements have changed, so as to make us modify the idea of poeticity and to redefine what we have traditionally understood as literature.

Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full critical understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement attentive to the 'reader-plays-poet dynamic' that is a feature of any ‘Dadaist poem’. This approach is then applied to present-day interactive poetry generators via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode that draws on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the work of concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer. This analysis serves to assert the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and, more importantly, establishes some ways to critically fix a textual object for which flux might be said to be a primary characteristic. Previous to the advent of the web, the failure of literary criticism to engage with poetry generation might be excused, as the critic’s access was limited by problems of distribution and resources and a lack of specialised knowledge. In the contemporary online environment, however, this failure is no longer tenable. This paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with interactive poetry generation and the recognition that these programs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque's other ‘traditions’ in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of poetry generation.

Computation and networking are changing language, the art of reading, and the act of writing. Multimedia digital poetry allows for the creation and simultaneous display of visual, sonic and textual patterns with unprecedented mobility and typographic capacities. This interdisciplinary form encourages an exploratory art-research practice-based investigation using a blend of theoretical knowledge ranging from literary criticism, phenomenology, aesthetics, affective computation and neurological research. In contrast to software-centric theory and/or materiality analysis, this thesis argues for the continuing relevance of the lyric, expressive affect and aesthetics in contemporary digital poetics. It examines the evolution of digital poetry with a specific emphasis on online poetry. In the context of this thesis, poetry is considered to be an ancestor of computer code. Poetry is also considered as information visualization of emotions. Emotions are considered to be complex embodied patterns; poetry expresses those patterns in language.

Source: Author's Abstract

Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.

The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.

These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.

‘The text’ is thus suspended somewhere in between each iteration as it appears to the user, and the overarching structure provided by the code. Niemi selects the program’s vocabulary, the rules which it must adhere to, the inputs which a user can make, and the probabilities which determine the text’s production, but remains one step removed from the text as it appears on screen. Some control, in the shape of the buttons at the bottom of the screen, is given over to the user- who plays the role of glamorous assistant to Niemi’s conjurer and follows his prompts as the poem/game progresses.

The only serious attempt to critique this relationship as it exists within Stud Poetry is available on C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Poetry website after it was omitted from the print version. Funkhouser’s reading is fundamentally flawed as he misreads the code and believes it impossible to learn from each hand. The value of the words is calculated only once, at the beginning of the game and not at the beginning of each hand as Funkhouser has it. Through experience of the text, the user gains increasing control of it as they understand the value of each word, and can predict with increasing accuracy the way the poem/game will proceed, while recognizing that an element of uncertainty is involved. The element of competition quickly creates a narrative.

With its random-generation and interactivity, Stud Poetry is authored by Niemi without being controlled by him. He uses internet poker as a form, as a print poet might use a sonnet, but his is the more radical utilisation as it challenges what can be conceived of as literature, and where ‘the text’ may be in a work of this kind. His poem/game embodies the challenge which electronic literature poses to print literature, and should be recognised with discussion at a major conference rather than becoming an anomaly or outlier of the Electronic Literature Collection.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013)

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four strata of designing multimodal texts, are inadequate to the job of helping readers understand new media from a rhetorical perspective. I also explore how literary theory, specifically Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) description of acts of interpretation, can help audiences understand why readers are often unable to interpret the multiple, unexpected modes of communication used in new media texts. Rhetorical theory, explored in a discussion of Sonja Foss’s (2004) units of analysis, is helpful in bringing the reader into a situated context with a new media text, although these units of analysis, like Iser’s process, suggests that a reader has some prior experience interpreting a text-as-artifact. Because of this assumption of knowledge put forth by all of the theories explored within, I argue that none alone is useful to help readers engage with and interpret new media texts. However, I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts. I describe that heuristic in the final chapter and discuss how it can be useful to a range of texts besides those labelled new media.

This presentation looks at electronic literary practices and the modes and methods of meaning-making there in. Using his own creative work as an example, Memmott discusses how the poetic formation and rhetorical outcomes of the work are integral to the ‘text’ of the work, and integrated into what could be called an environmental grammatology. From programming to visual design, the word to the image, user interaction to instrumentality -- we have moved from “Work to Text” to Work...

The black-and-gray background of the splash page for the performance artist Stelarc’s website appears to be an abstraction of memory blocks, logic boards, and input/output pads. Into it is plugged a block of small white introductory text, a blip of red text listing devices necessary to access the site, and a sketch showing a body wired with EEGs to catch the brainwaves, ECGs to trace the heartbeat, EMG’s to monitor the flexor muscles, and an array of contact microphones, position sensors, and kineto-angle transducers to chart everything else. In this integrated circuit, voltage-in probes the body; voltage-out extends it. In case the point is not yet clear, two neon-bright chunks of text in the middle of the page blink on and off to announce it: “THE BODY IS,” the first lines read all in a rush, then slowly, spelling it out, “O-B-S-O-L-E-T-E.” In this paper, I would like to argue that the transformation from an organic, industrial society to the polymorphous information system Stelac enacts allows us to think back to machine-human collaborations overlooked in expressivist approaches to poetry. Rather than try to defend traditional boundaries between organisms and machines, this paper examines three instances of their breach: the camera-eye of documentary poetics, the amplified voice of tape poetics, and the co-processed thought of digital poetics. Although Donna Haraway positions sci-fi writers as the theorists of cyborgs, this paper makes a less intuitive claim: poets, purported guardians of the interiority of a bounded organic “self,” have also—and importantly--experimented with the body electric. Like Stelarc’s performances, their cyborg poetics demonstrate the integrated circuitry between humans and the technological devices through which we conceive and construct both our subjectivities and our sense of the world.