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1. 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

2. 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 The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future.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

3. Event and Meaning: Reading Interactive Installations in the Light of Art History

   Roberto Simanowski demonstrates in a close reading of two interactive in- stallations that they do not simply create an event as “a period of time to be lived through” (Bourriaud 15). Looking at Still Standing by Bruno Nadeau and Jason Lewis and Zachary Booth Simpson’s Mondrian, Simanowski maintains that these pieces do not only offer two different concepts of the interactors’ actions and hence body experiences; they also engage in a very difficult way with the issues of inter- and transmediality and thereby refer to the history of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

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

   Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 11:50

4. "No Preexistent World": On "Natural" and "Artificial" Forms of Poetry

   Peter Gendolla pursues a paradox accompanying the literary avant-garde from Romanticism to the most current electronic installations; namely, that they want to bring back the cold, dead culture into “natural” life and that they are doing this with the most advanced technological procedures. They become more and more “technical” with the impulse not only to dissolve the division of the genres but also to transfer art at least by way of literary means into “natural” forms of life; thus, they are continually developing new forms of aesthetic difference that have to be differentiated from either nature or culture.

   Scott Rettberg - 24.05.2011 - 11:43

5. Code, Interpretation, Avant-garde

   Code, Interpretation, Avant-garde

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.08.2011 - 17:14

6. 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

7. Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures

   Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 20.10.2011 - 08:50

8. Kenneth Goldsmith

   A conversational interview between the with poet Kenneth Goldsmith and the literary critic Marcus Boon.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.10.2011 - 13:29

9. The Imaginary Solution

   "[A] particular modernism has finally fully arrived, about a decade behind schedule, but making up for lost time. Part of the task of this essay is to docu- ment the emergence of this return and to provide evidence of a ten- dency that plays out across media, indexing and exemplifying one of the defining conditions of its cultural moment. Because these works fall outside the genres and styles likely to be familiar even to many readers of avant-garde literature, this documentation will require a certain degree of descriptive cataloguing (although it is worth noting that the catalogue itself, not coincidentally, is a key component of the works I will itemize). With the series of examples that follow, I further hope to show that this particular trend in contemporary literature is uniquely hinged, not only recovering one of the dreams of its literary past but also looking forward to what may be the nightmare of our digital future.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 05.12.2011 - 13:38

10. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

    In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:03

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