Video-Interview by e-lit author and scholar David Jhave Johnston in Chris Funkhouser's rural paradise studio on Feb. 9th 2012.
Interview by Randy Adams and Rita Raley.
An interview along with a discussion on digital concrete poetry and its reception.
The focus on the materiality of language, as privileged in concrete poetry, oriented without doubt this concretizing 'anthropophagism' of the poetry of other idioms.
An interview with Augusto de Campos on concrete poetry as international movement.
Talan Memmott is Assistant Professor of digital media and culture in the Digital Culture and Communications program at Blekinge Institute of Technology and an internationally known practitioner of electronic literature and digital art with a practice ranging from experimental video to digital performance applications and literary hypermedia. In June 2011 I met with Talan to discuss the history of beehive Hypertext Hypermedia Literary Journal, which he founded and edited.
TM: With Volume 1 of Beehive in 1998, the design, coding, editorial, curatorial were all done by me. So to a certain extent it was my view of what the field was, and my view of what could happen in terms of design. When I look back at what Volume 1 actually looked like (and this is interesting for me to think about), we started out with this very bold set of colours, and it was this really kind of vibrant honey-yellow, and deep black, and a crimson, or puce [laughs] or bright red – the hex code was #B90000, I remember that – that’s the ‘Beehive red’, to me …
Maria Engberg is a lecturer at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden, and a researcher in digital media and literature. David Prater interviewed her about electronic literature pedagogy as part of Cordite's 'Electronica' issue. The interview also features quotes from participants at the ELMCIP workshop on E-lit Pedagogy held in Karlskrona in June 2011.
There are some works that I would consider classics, but I taught that course over five years and what did really change was the examples – I really shifted them around. There are certain works you have to present in order to give a fair overview of the field. I’ve included afternoon: a story by Michael Joyce; I have included John Cayley’s works – usually riverIsland but I’ve changed that as well, in terms of an example of code work or engagement with algorithms.
A conversational interview between the with poet Kenneth Goldsmith and the literary critic Marcus Boon.
I mean, Duchamp is visionary but in a way, it is very useful; it’s a way to understand how to proceed. I think at some point, in Wittgensteinian terms, we’ll have to “drop the ladder.”
It’s amazing how adaptable we are to a brand new environment, however, we adapt to it better, I think, than we can theorize it or understand it. I just think that it’s so profoundly changing on so many levels that art remains a theoretical device for understanding some aspect of what we’re going through today.
In a way, if you have a movement or type of writing that’s predicated upon not reading you actually set up a way around the problem of primary, secondary, and tertiary languages.
So conceptual writing has actually got a huge international writership and anti-readership simply, based on the idea that nobody has to read this stuff.
I think that the thing that’s happened is a paradigm shift that’s called . . . that is the digital...We have the technology that does it so much better than what we were trying to do or actually distributes it, that which has already been written, so much of what has already been written much better than we’re able to do. Writing has to then reimagine what it can be in the digital age.
Yeah writing—the smallest morpheme (tk) of language, that’s what modernism taught us—is deeply associative,
We actually say that expression and content and meaning is all part and parcel of the information that we’re moving. It’s encoded. It’s DNA. You can’t get away with it! So why try so hard to express yourself when the content that you’re working with is full of expression anyway.
I always say, if I raised my kids the way I wrote my books I would’ve been thrown in jail a long time ago.