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Grappling With the Actual: Writing on the Periphery of the Real
This essay considers literary realism in relation to two of my own recent works of digital literature: This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Poem for Phones, and The Pleasure of the Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. Both of these web-based works grapple with the actual world we live in: a post-digital world, in which invisible layers of data inform our daily thoughts and actions; a post-human world, of vast oceans and ceaseless winds. These works use the affordances of the internet to call attention to the historical, colonial, elemental, and material substrate of the internet; both attempt to represent the reality of the vast corpus of non-human writing which lurks beneath the mere appearance of the screen. Methodologically, this essay grapples with the material and contextual actualities of these works by turning its attention to earlier analogous moments in the intertwined histories of technology, science, and writing. In particular, this essay is concerned with the technology of the ship, the science of measurement, and the writing of the vast non-human systems of coastlines and winds.
J. R. Carpenter - 27.08.2021 - 12:54
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A Platform Poetics: Computational Art, Material and Formal Specificities, and 101 BASIC Poems
My digital art is highly computational, or process intensive—it is more about code and symbol manipulation, and less about data, the visualization of data, or multimedia effects. But beyond this, what I do often explores specific computer platforms. In this essay I describe how my project 101 BASIC Poems is part of a platform practice engaging the Commodore 64, the Apple II series of computers, and the BASIC programming language. My project 101 BASIC Poems is an initiative to develop just more than a hundred computational artworks, each one not just a digital text but also a computer program that can and should be run. On the computational end of things, a major inspiration is 101 BASIC Computer Games, a collection of BASIC programs that fired the imaginations and scaffolded the programming ability of many people in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nick Montfort - 15.11.2021 - 00:24
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Nested Folders: On Birds in Digital Poetry
Digital poets have long explored the representation of birds’ physical presence and their mediation through visual and sonic technologies. Noah Wardrip-Fruin attributes the “first experiment with digital literature and digital art of any kind” to Christopher Strachey (302). The word “duck” appears in Strachey’s Love Letter generator, programmed on the Manchester University Computer in 1952. The word is used as a term of endearment; it does not refer to a specific bird. Birds and bugs intermingle in Jörg Piringer’s early iOS app, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (2010). In this piece, the winged creatures are not represented pictorially, but rather, by behaviour. The user selects letter forms from the edges of the screen, which then soar, in the case of birds, or jitter, in the case of crickets. Maria Mencia’s earlier work, Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs, was first exhibited at the Medway Gallery in 2001. As is the case in Piringer’s app, the birds are composed of letter forms.
J. R. Carpenter - 25.04.2022 - 10:42
