cultural policy

In 2013, as a part of the Culture Programme of Ireland’s EU presidency, The Poetry Project was set up by the Kinsale Arts Festival in partnership with Poetry Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. In the project, poems by established and emerging Irish poets were coupled with works by Irish video artists. The resulting collaborative works were published each week, for nine months, on the project website and emailed to recipients in Ireland and in more than one hundred countries around the world. This presentation focused on how the verbal, visual and auditory elements of the works published within The Poetry Project simultaneously enact and reflect the challenges and discontinuities related to representations of place, space and landscape in the poetry of the digital era.

Contrary to what one might think, institutions play an important role in the production, preservation, and funding of electronic literature. Due to the absence of traditional gate-watchers like publishers and newspaper critics, the function of selection, distribution, and reception of this work has been taken over partly by anthologies, reviews and criticism that are produced in an academic climate. Artists need the necessary channels for preservation, distribution, and critical evaluation of the work, channels that have the power to create “cultural capital”. Even the production of work often takes place in an academic or institutional setting. Literary festivals, conferences and workshops form temporary communities in which planned collaboration takes place. This article addresses institutionalized and planned collaboration and its effects on the production, the presentation, and the content of digital literature.

(Source: Author's abstract)