Scripting Writing and Reading in Jim Andrews's Digital Poems

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of kinetic poetry for studying the interaction between language, digital media, and signifying processes. Several writers have been using digital poetry to investigate meaning production as a function of formal operations upon linguistic, computational, and other cultural codes. Interactive kinaesthesia, the main algorithmic trope examined here, enacts the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading in medium-specific forms and genres that call attention to the way their machine and human processing happens. The cinematic enactment of time in the combined motions of computer-executed code and human-activated display will be seen in digital poems by Jim Andrews. His scripts are analysed as models for specific semiotic and interpretive processes. Computer performance and reader performance become co-dependent and intertwined as an entangled field. (Source: Author's abstract at MIT Tech TV)