poesis

Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.

Source: Author's Abstract

Being fascinated by the dynamics and the potential which medial technologies offer for the artistic investigation of materiality and the individual and social use of language, the poetological concept of the show formulated a key idea which is still reflected in the subtitle of the recent “poiesis”-exhibition: the difference between program and pixel, or between a perception proposition and the ‘underlying’ code. In his foreword to the small catalogue from 1992, André Vallias describes this crucial distinction from the code perspective: “Data dissolve the borders between bodies, surfaces, sounds, words, dots, tones, letters and numbers”.1 Accordingly, the show’s title “p0es1e” exemplifies the difference by intertwining the sign systems of perceivable writing and the digital code normally used to program in an ‘unobservable’ way what can be perceived. Observing the unobservable in language, is surely one of the core characteristics of experimental poetry. The conceptual fusion of different dimensions and uses of languages is still a prominent procedure of poetic reflexivity. Dick Higgins had formulated his concept of poetic intermedia along these lines, in 1965. And so a light is shone on the very ‘nature’ of language, its material, semantic, and performative phenomenology, which is constantly changing under social, media technological, and aesthetic conditions.

Contrary to Walter Pater’s celebrated maxim that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, it is claimed here that the real aspiration is towards poetry, above all if we consider it as synonymous to poiesis, to creation in the broad and also extensive sense. Derived from the Greek term meaning ‘to make’ it can be applied to the whole invention of language (construction of forms) and to the reading of things (the cosmo-view of the world, of reality), it is more encompassing and applicable to the plural universe of records and the support of art and poetry. Furthermore, it would be oriented more towards poetry in the sense of reading not alienated from things, as Roland Barthes would say; in short, for a language other than the reified, repressed. This perspective is far from the particularly abstract ambition (almost of another world) that shows off music and sound, and approximates to the solidity and distance of poetry, because in essence it always dissolves between sound and feeling, between the concretion of language and its more distant and abstract materialization. Between the known feeling and that which is created. One understands poiesis as a live cell first, amplified, not just of poetry but of art. Poiesis as a defense of the inaugural creation of a language of another habitability, transverse writing, axial, as in a verse by Waly Salomão (“Poetry is axial”).

Being fascinated by the dynamics and the potential which medial technologies offer for the artistic investigation of materiality and the individual and social use of language, the poetological concept of the show formulated a key idea which is still reflected in the subtitle of the recent “poiesis”-exhibition: the difference between program and pixel, or between a perception proposition and the ‘underlying’ code. In his foreword to the small catalogue from 1992, André Vallias describes this crucial distinction from the code perspective: “Data dissolve the borders between bodies, surfaces, sounds, words, dots, tones, letters and numbers”.1 Accordingly, the show’s title “p0es1e” exemplifies the difference by intertwining the sign systems of perceivable writing and the digital code normally used to program in an ‘unobservable’ way what can be perceived. Observing the unobservable in language, is surely one of the core characteristics of experimental poetry. The conceptual fusion of different dimensions and uses of languages is still a prominent procedure of poetic reflexivity. Dick Higgins had formulated his concept of poetic intermedia along these lines, in 1965. And so a light is shone on the very ‘nature’ of language, its material, semantic, and performative phenomenology, which is constantly changing under social, media technological, and aesthetic conditions.

Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.