A circular interview on "Becoming Digital" conducted by J. R. Carpenter, with responses from Brian Stefans, Stuart Moulthrop, Darren Wershler, David Jhave Johnston, Lori Emerson, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland in an anthology on experimental poetics edited by Amy De'Ath and Fred Wah, out now from Banff Centre Press.
Charged with representing the digital aspects of the In(ter)ventions program in this anthology I determined to ask a number of past faculty, guests, and participants a variation on one question. A question of becoming. The idea being that one person's answer might leads into the next person's question.
If I were asking myself the sort of question I have in mind, it might be something like: How does your web-based work come from the photocopy machine?
J. R. Carpenter
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.
Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today. On February 17, 1950, he said:It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.
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.