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Aesthetic Autonomy and Sensuous Appearing: Two Questions in the Aesthetics of Digital Poetry
In this paper I would like to consider the aesthetics of digital poetry with reference to ideas of aesthetic autonomy and sensuous appearing.
The notion of autonomy, whether of the art-work or of a mode of experience with which it is associated, has been central to the historical development of the idea of the aesthetic itself. Andrew Bowie defines it as ‘the idea that works of art have a status which cannot be attributed to any other natural object or human product’ (Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 2). It is an idea which has been seen as ideologically driven, as when Terry Eagleton suggests that ‘the idea of autonomy – of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining – provides the middle class with just the ideological mode of subjectivity it requires for its material operations’. Yet Eagleton also argues that aesthetic autonomy can provide a ‘vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thinking’, implying that it has potential for avant-garde or critical purposes (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 9).Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 16:05
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Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem
What is the status of digital literature in contemporary culture? After more than 20 years of production, the audience for digital literature remains small in comparison with the audience for "serious" or popular fiction. Many scholars and practitioners assume that digital literature constitutes a contemporary avant-garde, which does its work of experimentation outside or in opposition to the mainstream. Recent comparisons of digital poetics and early modernist art practices (e.g. by Scott Rettberg and Jessica Pressman) indicate continued interest in this issue. The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future. Important theorists (e.g. Huyssen, Drucker) have argued that the avant-garde is no longer viable even for traditional media and art practices. On the other hand, the avant-gardes of twentieth-century modernism made claims about the function of art that remain surprisingly influential today, within the art community and within popular culture.
Maria Engberg - 28.03.2011 - 16:47
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Code, Interpretation, Avant-garde
Code, Interpretation, Avant-garde
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.08.2011 - 17:14
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Acoustic and Visual Imagination in Poetry from the Neo_Avantgarde to New Media Poetry in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Poetry
At the beginning of my text I will consider contemporary interpretations of the visual and acoustic aspects of poetry. The main references will be texts written by American poets, performers, artists, theoreticinas such as Charles Bernstein, Michael Davidson, and Johanna Drucker. Shortly, I will point to the history of these phenomena in the West. Special attention will be given to the concepts of plurivocality and plurality of visual projections in different kinds of experimental poetry.
In applying these concepts in considering Yugoslav Avant-Gardists: Franci Zagoričnik and OHO group (Slovenia), Vlado Martek (Croatian) and Katalin Ladik and Awin authors (Serbia) I will first discuss the status of experimental poetry in so called small cultures. Then I will show the range of experimentation in the work of the poets I have mentioned, who worked within the Yugoslav socialism and post-Yougoslav postsocialism.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 30.08.2011 - 11:25
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Warfare and Conventionality: How avant-garde computer-generated text can be
Computer generated text has been considered warfare carried out against conventionality and was accordingly tagged “cybernetic Dadaism”, which seems to be obvious given that most computer generated text is nonsensical. However, there are attempts to have the machine generate meaningful text ideally indistinguishable from text by a human. This is where the problem starts. If a machine aims to be as good as a human writer, can it still afford to do what a human writer may aim at: writing like a machine? Wouldn’t any idiosyncratic style – which might in conventionally generated literature be understood as avant-garde – be perceived as a failure of the program? In other words: Can literature be avant-garde (or rather: advanced) in both, its way of production as well as its style? The lecture will discuss the issue with a closer look at Michael Mateas’ and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama Façade.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:44
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Bob Brown's Reading Machine and the Comic Experience of Electrified Reading
A recent essay by Jessica Pressman explores Bob Brown's The Readies (1929) as an important predecessor of electronic literature. Pressman argues that Brown's reading machine, which was designed to automatically unfurl scrolls of magnified text before the reader’s eyes in a way similar to a film projector, exemplifies a “machine poetics” that emphasizes the mediation of reading itself, much in the way that electronic literature often does. Brown’s description of his reading machine does indeed seem to offer an uncanny prophesy for subsequent developments in visual poetry and in reading technologies, as Pressman and other critics, including Jerome McGann and Craig Saper, have pointed out. In emphasizing the futurist possibilities of Brown’s machine, however, critics have tended to ignore or downplay the willfully comic aspects of the manifesto in which he proposes it. The tone of Brown’s writing suggests that we ought to count Rube Goldberg, as much as Thomas Edison, among the inspirations for the machine.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 13:55
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Digital Poetry Beyond Avant-Garde Readings: Proposing a Digital Lyric
Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 17:10
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UbuWeb, the archive and the gallery
As a seemingly limitless and comprehensive resource, UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) has put together a map of the past hundred or so years of ‘experimental’ writing, film, video, and sound art. It resembles the archive in its breadth and depth, in its relentless collecting, in its inherent totalizing tendencies. My argument is that UbuWeb, while not an ‘archive’ per se, does have a cataloging logic, though it is not apparent, and that its specific logic is based on the commodification of the artwork and the effects of that commodification on its exhibition. To understand that logic, I want to situate UbuWeb at the latest point in a series of discontinuous institutions and discourses that have all taken the ‘artwork’ as their object.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:13
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A Cross-Medial Close Reading of Swedish Digital Poetry
In the work with my thesis on digital poetry I aim to highlight the following three axes
1) A theoretical reflection considering language in interaction with the visual and auditory modalities as well as an investigation of the relation between language and technical media, using theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Friedrich A. Kittler.
2) An analytical, methodical approach, which investigates digital works of poetry and their intermedial relations and effects of meaning.
3) Putting into perspective the historical concrete poetry and avant-garde movements – primarily from Scandinavia.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:44
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Out of Bounds: Searching Deviated Literature in Audiovisual Electronic Environments
In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects.
Scott Rettberg - 04.10.2013 - 11:54
