procedural poetics

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now?

What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate in the shaping of these ideas.

(Source: Ugly Duckling Presse)

In this paper, I aim to discuss the differences and similarities between three separate works of art spanning three decades- Delany’s Dhalgren was published in 1974, Mark America’s Hypertextual Consicousness [beta-version (http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/111/htc/title.html) in the late 1990s while Memento was released in 2001. All three pieces share a number of similarities: characters and narrators who wander in landscapes where the interior and the exterior intersect; the characters in the Delany and the Nolan movie are in the process of recovering and recreating via memory recuperation and rewriting personal and collective history while the reader-user of Hypertextual Consicousness [beta-version]  attempts to prise meaning out of an unstable critical narrative questioning the notions of textuality, identity and the self in cyberspace; the discourse in all of these pieces is fragmented, disjointed or continually overturned. All of these pieces display a complex attitude to the relationship between the corporeal and the discursive; the urban-primitive mythology and ritual of tattooing and grafting in Memento, the seemingly boundless, seemingly flickering online identity in Hypertextual Consciousness [beta-version] &the personal-collective palimpsest-mythologies of Delany all seem to illustrate the fact that the constitution of the self is entwined with the intersubjective and interdiscursive constitution and representation of the mechanics of forgetting and remembering.  It is intriguing to observe how all of these discourses seem to overturn the notions of the representations of identity and self in order to replace it with selves, identities and  texts in constant upheaval and change. All three narratives illustrate the multiplicities of identity as they are actualised in response to the traumatic event of amnesia and the subsequent rebuilding of memory.