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Digital Poetics or On the Evolution of Experimental Media Poetry

The academic and literature critical discussion on new media poetry or about digital texts swings to and fro, in method and conception between two poles: one is the 'work immanent' approach of structure description and classification, and the other the deduction of abstract media esthetics. At a tangent to this the communication on media, culture and media art has been more or less committed to the priority of technological reasoning since the nineties at the latest. The concern with technology remains a dilemma: Technology has to be taken into account when dealing with concrete structure analyses of works of digital poetry, but some traps lie in wait. Is the knowledge accounted for here really sufficient? I would say that few of those taking part in the discussion who do not actually work in the specific area artistically are capable of programming digital texts (the same may be said of some artists). Another problem is something I have casually termed a new techno-ontology: a ‘cold fascination’ for technological being (also of texts), which flares up briefly with each innovation pressing for the market in the respective field.

Patricia Tomaszek - 14.09.2010 - 14:16

E-literature

Eric Dean Rasmussen - 07.03.2011 - 08:48

Textual Material in the Digital Medium

Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2011 - 14:31

The Gravity of the Leaf: Phenomenologies of Literary Inscription in Media-Constituted Diegetic Worlds

John Cayley reports on writing and the practice of literary art in the immersive 3D audio-visual environment of the Cave at Brown University, addressing the use of text-as-surface in a three-dimensional space. He develops a conception of new media as “complex surfaces” based on Cave writing courses to confront the relationship between language and embodiment, language and materiality—always attempting to develop a specific literary aesthetics.

(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)

Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 15:10

Inner Workings: Code and Representations of Interiority in New Media Poetics

'Inner Workings' addresses itself to the methods, properties and practices of writing systems, including human writing systems, whose very signifiers are programmed. What does programmed signification tell us about the inner human writing machine? John Cayley's essay participates in relevant metacritical and metapsychological discussions - reexamining Freud's Mystic Writing Pad in particular - and is specifically sited within the context of debates on code and codework in literal art. Rather than revealed interiority, code is the archive and guarantee of inner workings than reside beneath the complex surfaces of poetics in programmable media.

Patricia Tomaszek - 27.05.2011 - 23:29