Article in a print journal

A discussion of the emerging pixel aesthetic in the late 90s, through a meditation on the Pixelvision 2000, Kasparov versus Deep Blue, and analog video art aesthetics.

This essay, a discussion between two esteemed e-poets for whom collaboration is an integral part of their creative practice, appeared in the "The Collaborative Turn" special issue of American Book Review, guest-edited by Davis Schneiderman. In their discussion, Montfort and Strickland survey several common types of e-lit collaboration and provide links to representative examples. Strickland explicitly links the material aesthetics of code poetics to literary theorist Timothy Morton's call for critical thinking that engages the universe's enmeshed interconnectedness, which he dubs "the ecological thought."

In this keynote for the Digital Poetics and the Present seminar, RIta Raley offers a reading of David Jhave Johnston's Sooth, a cycle of six video poems, where the reader's clicks draw out lines of poems superimposed on video that drifts around a natural scene. Raley argues that Sooth is emblematic of a recent shift in digital poetry towards a concern with ecology, where non-human actors are animate and lively. She describes this as a step away from the intense focus on the code, the technical and computational processes that dominated digital poetry at the start of the last decade. Jhave's project, Rita Raley argues, is to create digital poems that respond as though they are animate, alive. This isn't about artificial intelligence or simply about emulating life but about prompting (in us, the readers) an embodied recognition of life.

Robert Kendall describes his work in electronic literature from 1990 to 1995, and presents the field in general to a general literary audience. The article in its online form includes many links. This is also an early use of the term "electronic literature" to describe the field.

"[A] particular modernism has finally fully arrived, about a decade behind schedule, but making up for lost time. Part of the task of this essay is to docu- ment the emergence of this return and to provide evidence of a ten- dency that plays out across media, indexing and exemplifying one of the defining conditions of its cultural moment. Because these works fall outside the genres and styles likely to be familiar even to many readers of avant-garde literature, this documentation will require a certain degree of descriptive cataloguing (although it is worth noting that the catalogue itself, not coincidentally, is a key component of the works I will itemize). With the series of examples that follow, I further hope to show that this particular trend in contemporary literature is uniquely hinged, not only recovering one of the dreams of its literary past but also looking forward to what may be the nightmare of our digital future. This second claim, for the history of digital poetics, starts from the premise that a poem may well have a greater affinity with works from other disciplines or in other media—in this case Internet applications, software, and digital video—than with other poems. Following Lev Manovich’s insight that certain artistic forms predate the media that best accommodate them (Language 248), I will argue that these poems are proleptic: their striking forms anticipate the computerized new media that would seem to be their ideal vehicle" (30).