Article in a print journal

This essay serves to promote a broader awareness of the pioneering efforts in videographic poetry produced in Portuguese in the decades leading up to the formation of the WWW. At present, documentation of such works in books and journal articles in English is particularly weak; the only title that even partially introduces such works is a now out-of-print issue of Visible Language that focused on New Media Poetry (Vol. 30.2). Thus, these historical predecessors to contemporary animated poetry are barely known in the United States. Prior to the 1990s only a few poets used video; much of what occurred transpired outside the realm of English (and some even outside the realm of language, as illustrated in the essay).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This paper is a theoretical approach to videopoetry. The concept of videopoetry as distinct from videoart came as the result of experimenting with video for creative and poetic production using verbal and nonverbal signs in 1968. It was not until 1985 that I had the opportunity to develop a new body of video work. Videopoetry soon became a new kind of poetry in its own right, with its own grammar and semantics. Thus videopoetry is a challenge for poets and readers as we are drifting away from Mallarmé’s galaxy and cannot escape the worldwide information sphere.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Forthcoming 2014.

Rather than being a continuation of print-based literature, e-literature is a novel practice of experimental writing that foregrounds the new media specificity and the new approaches to writing in programmable media by demonstrating that the institution of the author and literariness as we know it are at stake. Along with the new media specificity (e-literary text is displayed on the screen, stored in digital storage devices, and controlled by software), the e-literary text is embedded in the social in a way that demonstrates some of the key features of current social paradigms. This article explores the shifts of new social paradigms that have influenced e-literary writing and contributed to the birth of the e-literary world as an institution, which enables new media-shaped e-literary pieces to be recognized as works of e-literary art. In doing so, the concept of e-literary service is introduced to describe the specificity of e-literature in terms of goal-oriented and performative practice that leaves aside the institution of stable e-literary work. This article also places great emphasis on understanding the very specific nature of e-literature through its interactions with the new media art.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

Jaka Železnikar’s works are written as algorithms, which ensures that they function “naturally” on the computer. On the other hand, as literature, these works participate in creating a new—similar, but different—literary experience. Železnikar writes visual poetry using literary algorithms. ASCII art using linguistic characters to produce images is a functional new medium for generative visual poetry. During this period, Železnikar programmed several visual poem generators and typing machines, which focused on the interface layer of the new media object and on the gesture of typing. Železnikar referred to his works from 1996 to 2005 as “net.art,” and afterwards he began writing browser extensions and “networked narratives” for the web 2.0 environment. Since 2008 he has been creating “networked e-poetry” incorporating on-line social media such as Twitter. Srečo Dragan, a new media artist with a background in conceptual art practices, video art, and painting, addressed the literary aspects of new media art in a series of techno-performances from 2005 to 2010. These projects involve verbal articulation of what is seen, or otherwise perceived, and are intended to actively integrate and change the mental archive of the visitor (i.e., previous experience, psychological condition, and social and cultural background) within the frameworks of a happening. Dragan’s Mobile E-Book Flaneur references digital reading as a nomadic practice: the reader strolls through the database of the linguistic corpus streaming from the internet at one time, and on another occasion the reader is an urban nomad, where the city is layered with databases containing cultural artifacts. The city can thus be “read” at the level of the spatialization of the text on the map, at the level of memory and oblivion of past cultural events, and finally at the level of reading the literary texts displayed on mobile screen devices.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading,” which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works—of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature—and through it the surrounding world—are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)