We live in an age where language and screens continue to collide for creative purposes, giving rise to new forms of digital literatures and literary video games. Towards a Digital Poetics explores this relationship between word and computer, querying what it is that makes contemporary fictions like Dear Esther and All the Delicate Duplicates—both ludic and literary—different from their print-based predecessors.
In Digital Poetics, Loss Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier's work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium. Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avantgarde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web pages and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate space of poesis. Digital Poetics will attract a readership of scholars and students interested in contemporary creative writing and the po
Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects – screenshots, tagging, selfies and more – the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, it investigates how the ‘given’ world we inhabit is given through media. This book is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.
Digital Poetics celebrates the architectural design exuberance made possible by new digital modelling techniques and fabrication technologies. By presenting an unconventional and original ’humanistic’ theory of CAD (computer-aided design), the author suggests that beyond the generation of innovative engineering forms, digital design has the potential to affect the wider complex cultural landscape of today in profound ways. The book is organised around a synthetic and hybrid research methodology: a contemporary, propositional and theoretical discursive investigation and a design-led empirical research. Both methods inform a critical construct that deals with the nature, forms, and laws of digitality within a contemporary architectural discourse that affects practice and academia. The chapters spiral at, from, towards, around, outside-inwards and back inside-out digitality, its cognitive phenomena, spatial properties and intrinsic capabilities to achieve, or at least, approach Digital Poetics. The book presents speculative and small-scale constructed projects that pioneer techniques and experiments with common 3D and 4D software packages, whereby the focus lies not on the drawing processes and mechanics, but on the agency and impact the image (its reading, experience, interpretation) achieves on the reader and observer. The book also features a preface by Frédéric Migayrou, a philosopher and curator, and one of the most influential cultural engineers of the contemporary international architectural scene. The book is linked to a website, which contains a larger selection of images of some featured projects.
This book examines contemporary forms of digital poetry in emerging technologies such as drones, machine learning, Instagram, virtual reality and mobile devices. Theoretical frameworks that engage with posthumanism, multimodality, hermeneutics and eco-writing are used to examine the changing shape of the literary artefact in the second age of machines. The book contextualises the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach for a complex artefact and gives a broad overview of the field and history of digital poetry as a subset of the genre of electronic literature. Naji examines Instapoetry and the literary algorithm, haptic hermeneutics and poetry apps. The discussion also engages with eco-writing and drone poetry, poetic mirror worlds, and mixed reality poetry, concluding with an examination of the future of poetics and literary expression in the second age of machines.
A collection of writings by a digital artist that blends personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. It tells the early history of a net art world "gone wild," while constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements the author's own artistic practice
Explores pioneering works of digital poetry and demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period. Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication. In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.
Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives � ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic � the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of �official verse culture,� refers to as �frame lock� and �tone jam.� While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with �screen memory� (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of �found� materials.
As poets continue to use digital media technology, functionalities of computing extend aesthetic possibilities in documents focusing attention on crafting verbal content. Utility of these machines and tools enables multiple types of compounded articulation (combinations of verbal, visual, animated, and interactive elements). Building larger public awareness of the mechanics of digital poetry, New Directions in Digital Poetry aspires to influence the formation of writing with media in literary society of the future, specifically as a record of a particular technological era. Emerging from these studies is that digital poetry as a WWW-based, networked form happens 'in stages', 'on stages'. Few works require singular responses from viewers - both composition of works and viewing them are processes involving multiple steps and visual scenarios. For anyone interested in the interplay of poetry and technology, this book provides an informed look at digital poetry in its contemporary state. In the process of performing "close readings," Funkhouser makes suggestions and provides methods for viewing works, for audiences perhaps unfamiliar with mechanical and semiotic conventions being used.
Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.
