aisyalam

The lecture on Electronic Creative Writing went well, although the first half of it wasn’t televisual enough. When will I learn that there has to be more than spoken language during a lecture (especially at an institution called Multimedia University) ? Soon, hopefully. The latter half, when I was showing works (see http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/mmu/2/2links.html, was, on the other hand, delightful. Not only were students engaged with the materials, they were entertained. The group discussion afterwards was provocative, most likely because the students had never (maybe even never remotely) been introduced to the type of writing that was illuminated during the session. One student asked if I believed this was a reflection of how people actually think. To which I could only say yes. He didn’t agree that randomness and abstraction were typical ways of organizing expression; I tried to explain that minds were not always as shapely as we might think, and that using language the way it has been used for centuries had been widely challenged for at least the past 60 years or so (actually I went further back, to the French Symbolists, as evidence). Another mature student wondered whether or not “form is never more than an extension of content” really applied to this type of work. This is a really interesting question, although when I asked him for a specific work that defied Creeley’s dictum he opined that Maria Mencia’s didn’t seem to fit this formula. In hindsight, I’m thinking that his point is really valid, although it was fairly “Birds Singing Other Birds Songs” did seem to fit into this model. In any case, I think I need to address this matter more thoroughly at some point in the future: there’s definitely a challenging essay to be written that could grapple with this subject. In all, I felt the session was most successful by introducing totally new approaches to writing to them, thereby giving them permission to pursue any sort of creative idea they might come up with. While the impact may not have been immediate I’m sure in the long run something will emerge from one of them that otherwise would not have been created.

Accordingly, some neologisms gleaned from running today’s lecture through TRAVESTY (again): letternative, transmissional, processary, Fundamention, invential, stractices, presearch, physicallent.

Otherwise, beyond a few distractions (like reading a review of Kamau Brathwaite’s new book on The Constant Critic and checking out links suggested by Jim Goar in comments on Friday’s blog entry) the rest of the day was spent preparing next week’s presentation on digital poetry, which is the most important of all the lectures, as everyone keeps asking me what digital poetry is. I will be offering a succinct answer, verbally and by way of demonstration, during the session. To that end, while Sau Bin was visiting my office before lunch, and joined the ranks of asking me what DP was, I read him a paragraph I composed on the subject, which he thought was quite good. Should I let the cat out of the bag now? Why not? Here’s an excerpt:

The strongest definition of the genre is found in the introduction to the volume p0es1s: Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, which proclaims that digital poetry: “applies to artistic projects that deal with the medial changes in language and language-based communication in computers and digital networks. Digital poetry thus refers to creative, experimental, playful and also critical language art involving programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communication” (13). The authors of this essay (Friedrich Block, Christiane Heibach, and Karin Wenz) identify the form as being derived from “installations of interactive media art,” “computer- and net-based art,” and “explicitly from literary traditions” (15-17). Digital poetry is a reasonable label to use in describing forms of literary work that are presented on screens with the assistance of computers and/or computer programming. A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or processes (software, etc.) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combinations of texts). The genre combines poetic formations with computer processing or processes. As Janez Strehovec writes in the essay “Text as loop: on visual and kinetic textuality” (2003), digital poetry incorporates “kinetic/animated poetry, code poetry, interactive poetry, digital sound poetry, digital ‘textscapes’ with poetry features, and poetry generators” (Text n. pag.). As a genre, it “intersects the literary avant-garde, visual and concrete poetry, text-based installations, net art, software art, and netspeak” (n.pag.). Given these observations, it can be asserted with confidence that digital poetry is a genre that fuses crafted language with new media technology and techniques enabled by such equipment.

At about the same time Sau Bin was visiting, I was very pleased by the arrival of a Mac G4 in my office, which will allow me to show platform-specific works by Cayley, Rosenberg, Hartman, and others during next week’s presentation. As a way to make the DP lecture more visual, I also spent a bunch of time today preparing a slideshow of visual works using 25 images that are slated to appear in Prehistoric Digital Poetry. This along with showing text-generating programs, animations, and hypertexts will hopefully do the trick.

The other addition to my arsenal came by way of acquiring Adobe Acrobat, which I’ll be using tomorrow in order to move towards completing the e-book I’d like to have more or less in the can by the end by mid-March. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure, these weeks remain full of work.

I’ll close today with the electronic epigraph (the text projected at the beginning, and at points during) for today’s session:

How often I wonder whether this is only writing, an image in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one's self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one's self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature again?

[Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (1963)]