Ian Demsky on Joseph McElroy’s Ancient History and welcome interruptions.
Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.
Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.
Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media.
The term "post-hierarchical" may some day turn out to carry the same nasty irony as the words "postmodern" or "postwar" in the aftermath of Desert Storm: welcome back to the future, same as it ever was.
This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by one of its images. He also critiques that “most humanities scholars (McLuhan included) are ignorant of the raw technical complexity of neurology and data plumbing.” Considering that Jhave has named his website Glia after an essential component of the nervous system called Neuroglia, it is clear that he knows a thing or two about the brain and its mechanisms.
This poem is presented in several short stanzas along with quotes by McLuhan, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, replacing the poem and quotes piece by piece on a 4 second schedule, and looping back to the beginning when they reach the end. The videos are longer in duration and are also looped, changing the image-text juxtapositions as you reread the work. At the heart of this poem is an explanation of its title, extending the primary idea behind his earlier work “Typeoms.”
The poem does a beautiful job of showing how thought and words are grounded in the body and how other media (books, television, computers, Kleenex) shape the human body and its practices, softening dichotomies (body & intellect, content & form, medium & message) into feedback loops.
(Source: Leonardo Flores)
