New Directions In Digital Poetry Ct Funkhouser

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Introduction
The present work is the inaugural text in this new book series,
International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, of which, as
founding editor, I should say something regarding the rationale for its
existence, particularly in relation to the field of contemporary art and
literature. This series exists to provide a platform for rigorous schol-
arship in the now-prominent rise of new media studies as relates to
their specific relevance to the aesthetic and the poetic – architecture,
the arts, and literature. In the last four decades, significant schol-
arship in electronic art and literature has emerged, as evidenced by
an observable rise in the number of journals, books, conferences,
and festivals devoted to this field. In the mid-1980s, computer
science scholarship emerged for the study of the then-novel process
of hypertext and its place in the creation of literature whose reading
was interactive and combinatorial rather than strictly temporal or
linear in narrative. The primary venue for this scholar
ship was the
annual Hypertext conference of the Association for Computing
Machinery. The adoption of literary and aesthetic work by computer
scientists with interests in the literary and visual arts was a natural
outgrowth of experiments carried out on the effect of on-screen
organization of text and image on readership styles as well as on
the persistent question of whether it was possible to program a
computer or other electro-mechanical system to create new kinds of
visual or literary experiences. Principally in the United States, Latin
America, and Europe, scores of now-classic systems were designed
from the 1980s to the 1990s for automatically creating literature,
poetry, and visual art. These systems in turn generated thousands
of works of literature and art that were rendered on computer
monitors, projected on walls, printed on large-scale plotters, or
realized as autonomous moving systems of sculptural performance.
Hypertext and other approaches to electronic literature were almost
completely ignored by scholars of traditional print. Regarding visual
studies, too, some artists involved in this line of effort, including
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viii Introduction
Nam June Paik and Jean Tinguely became documented within the
art historical canon – largely because they were in contact with
art critics of their day – but most worked in obscurity. However,
electronic art and literature remained fertile ground for creative
experimentation and by the late 1990s, events like the first Digital
Arts and Culture conference in Bergen, Norway made explicit the
continuation from original trajectories that were first inaugurated
much earlier with Cybernetic Serendipity, the landmark exhibition of
computer art shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in
1968. From the early work of these four decades and since then, the
creative directions currently followed by certain new media artists,
critics, and authors, media studies scholars have produced important
historical, conceptual, and critical documents that have begun to lay
a foundation for a domain of study that works with, but productively
extends, art history and literary theory.
However, precious little of scholarly interest in what we might
call new media studies (a vague domain of study that has assumed
many monikers) has rigorously focused on the essential in literature,
and even less on visual and performing arts. Much writing has
often looked at the instrumentation, particularly historical, arcane,
and obsolete media, that creates literary or visual experience. That
emphasis, which has been termed media-historical, is somehow
distinct from the experience of the literary, poetic, or aesthetic. The
analysis of experience, while not wholly independent of the media
that deliver creative works, is nonetheless sufficiently autonomous
that there remains something far beyond the physical or material
support which, as in the past, stands in need of rigorous examination
on its own terms. That is why the series of which the present book
is the inaugural volume contains the indication of that focus – critical
media aesthetics.The first word in that term reminds us that philoso-
phy’s notion of the critical, particularly in German and French efforts
during the twentieth century, assumed a position of distance from
observable phenomena, and from that vantage, could objectively
question the many ideologies of instrumental ideology (for all instru-
ments are ideologies). Hence, a critique of media aesthetics (rather
than of media alone) implies that the creation and reception of word,
image, and object are now complicit with new media but must be
examined in a rational rather than an instrumental perspective. Were
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Introduction ix
John Dewey alive today, he most certainly would not be thinking
about machines, but rather of the creative forces that obtain in any
setting regardless of medium utilized.
Thus speculations about the relationship between creative
impulse and the way that it is organized over a medium must come
before discussions of the medium itself. That mode of organization,
for example, informs the idea of genre in any creative practice, so
that one of the ways in which visual art and poetry connect intimately
is through play with the materials of the medium, but that play is first
determined by artistic imagination, not by the medium. In the poetic
work, one explores not merely a question of meaning but also an
encounter that is a play with language, structured and conveyed for a
new level of meditative realization. Much of what is fulfilling in both a
visual work and in a poem is the sense that what is brought to us is
interesting, while the materials, the medium, the context of support
– these, too, are equal constituents of what could be called the
poetic or aesthetic experience.This conjoining of medium with effect
is not unique to works of art or poetry, nor is it a new experience, for
as Manfredo Tafuri reminds us, the arcades and department stores
of Paris, like the great expositions, were certainly the places in which
the crowd, in addition to the architecture, became the spectacle.1
As with the experience of traversing an arcade, meandering through
the structures of digital poetry brings us to the realization that the
environment is as fluid and crucial to the reflective experience as is
the visible content itself.
This expedition, more necessary now, after the appearance of
new kinds of dynamic web-based media, of installations, and of
other kinds of ‘arcades’ through which the poetic work can be
acquired, has made the present book indispensable as a guide and
as a conceptual companion to the structure and interpretation of
whole classes of poetic works in realized and deployed through and
within electronic media. Sharing the manuscript with two colleagues
versed in traditional print literature, I saw the same reaction – it was
one of surprise at the uniqueness and variety of the relationship that a
reader encounters in digital poetry with new structures and methods
that evoke the poetic aura so familiar to anyone who has glimpsed
the essence of a poem. For, as with his 2007 book Prehistoric Digital
Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995, and following its arc,
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x Introduction
Funkhouser again brings us an array of close readings of electronic
poems – comprising works created after the World Wide Web
– that can be read as a layperson’s guide to the process of experi-
encing digital poetry at present. In this approach, discussions of
interface behavior interweave with questions of symbolic inference
as emerges from the text’s own content, and the unified experience
makes evident that whole new modalities of reading are afforded the
reader. Read after his 2007 book, the present work’s case studies
address the question, ‘What happened to poetry after the birth of
the Web?’ And in the work of many poets of electronic form – John
Cayley, Deena Larsen, Jim Rosenberg, Alan Sondheim, Jody Zellen,
Serge Bouchardon, Jim Carpenter, Angela Ferraiolo, Mary Flanagan,
Aya Karpinska and Daniel C. Howe, mIEKAL aND, Eugenio Tisselli,
Eric Sérandour, Philippe Bootz, Talan Memmott – the medium has
opened new creative terrain that is unprecedented in its creative
potential, and Funkhouser’s careful treatment of both poet and work
is unusual in breadth and probing depth. Several typological differ-
ences in the structure of poetic work comprise the logical divisions of
the book, most notably regarding works that rely on the World Wide
Web for replication, although each copy operates as an autonomous
and hermetic poem, versus those that co-opt the global network
by harnessing its data streams, its ability for synonym generation,
and its image and text retrieval capabilities, so that the engineer’s
notion of ‘real-time’ serves the poet’s work as an additional aleatory
dimension.
The emphasis on structure and organization of material process
over that of the functionality of a medium is present not only in
Funkhouser’s approach in this book, but is also exemplified by the
striking image on the front cover. The work in question, belled, is
by the digital artist Henry Mandell, whose own approach is both
typographic and visual. Using text as the raw visual ingredient in
his work. Mandell transforms a written passage about the acoustic
properties of temple bells by means of individual manipulations of the
text’s typographic characters. Since they exist as objects of vector-
based typography, Mandell’s works lie at the intractable intersection
of the textual and imaginal. These properties – which are not device
independent – allow the visual elements of the work to be stretched
unremittingly until the constituent text loses its symbolic quality and
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Introduction xi
presents instead an indexical image of the acoustic properties of its
subject matter. Perhaps that chrysalis is the best descriptor of the
aim of the series, and of the present book.
Francisco J. Ricardo
Cambridge, MA
September 2011
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1
Poetic mouldings
on the Web
They are all laid out before us: the genuine post-modern
text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great
‘either/or’ and embracing, instead, the ‘and/and/and’1
Jane Yellowlees Douglas
The creative task of digital poetry often involves an artist
observing and making connections between separate but poeti-
cally associable entities and then using technological apparatuses
to communicate to an audience through compelling presentations.
Jim Andrews’ online digital poem Arteroids, for example, borrows
its stylistic cues from a 1980s video game called Asteroids.
For years, I have introduced students to this work, perplexing
them with an assignment unlike anything they have experienced
before: a video game featuring fragmented language proposed
as poetry – or poetry designed as a type of game without
competitive structure. Upon study they begin to understand
how digital poetry functions as something other than poetry
presented on a computer, involving processes beyond those used
by print-based writers, and that poetry made with computers has
unusual qualities – representing something inventive and worthy
of engagement.
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2 New Directions in Digital Poetry
Students in the Senior Seminar on Literature, many of whom
are familiar with the original game, appreciate Andrews’ work from
a variety of viewpoints.2
Their responses reflect how they access
literature through novel perspectives located well within the domain
of contemporary culture, and enjoy and learn through the provocation
of receiving crafted language amidst non-traditional methods. The
engagement becomes exciting due to atypical demands foisted
upon them as they explore and discover ways to understand the
experience.
One recent student in the course clearly understood distinct poetic
attributes of Arteroids and identified the artistic function presented
through its language: ‘I noticed two levels of meaning in the words:
the first was that the words themselves represented the context of
the player and/or what the player was doing or feeling.…On a second
level, the words when put together in random context made phrases
that not only made sense but related to the poem: ‘Destroy poetry’,
‘create poetry’, ‘make me what I am into another’, were phrases
relating to what I was doing as a player to the ‘arteroids/words’.3
In this regard, Andrews’ work (as well as other examples of digital
poetry) may teach its viewers something similar to what Dada did:
that a string of phrases appearing to be nonsensical on the surface in
fact contains meaningful poetic logic. An accumulation of fragments,
taken as a whole, can assert profound recognitions. Another student
working to cultivate a literary background observed the work from an
alternative perspective, receiving a different type of learning lesson:
I am slowly growing to develop a substantial appreciation for
poetry and ‘dullness’ is one of the things I tend to struggle with. I
was indeed battling different colour variations of the word ‘Poetry’,
which I found to be symbolic, like I was actually carrying out the
goal of making poetry suffer; physically the game started to get
more stressful as I was surrounded by words that were related
to prior forms of poetry and it was almost like an assault. As I
continued to play I became less involved with the words and more
engrossed with destruction and survival.4
Here the student looks for and finds something exciting within
Arteroids, despite distractions presented. She begins to see and
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Poetic mouldings on the Web 3
sense poetry as a concept requiring action, and experiencing
Andrews’ piece engages her; the activity and concept of poetry
becomes personified through the game, and serves as a reinvention
of the form.
Comments such as these show how a digital poem can have
multiple personalities, and that different viewers see and attend to
dissimilar attributes emanating from within the same work. Digital
poems can be self-reflexive with regard to what the reader does and
what the poem does, and also ignite other types of cognitive activity
through its multi-sensory layering. Most students find ways to value
the vivid experience of Arteroids – that they do more than just ‘stare
at the computer’ and that they can, given Andrews’ design, create
their own custom word base with which to populate the game.
Approaching composition interactively, in the form of a simple game
with a quirky soundtrack and variable database, impresses them
because it completely changes the act of reading (or writing) a poem
and creates an ambiance previously unknown to poetry. Unique
settings and multimodal expression for artworks proliferate as digital
technology and networks develop.
Foreground
Noah Wardrip-Fruin defines digital literature as ‘a term for work with
important literary aspects that requires the use of digital compu-
tation’.5
As such, it takes on many forms (as works presented on
PCs or mobile devices, as installations, as performances), and
presently exists as a creative possibility for artists around the world.
Communities of different types of digital writers have blossomed.
One of its major subsets, digital poetry, to its credit, cannot be singu-
larly defined. Authors of digital poetry engineer artworks featuring a
wide range of approaches and styles (forms) of construction rarely
presented as straightforwardly as poems composed for the page.
Digital poetry can be seen as a type of organism, as an approach
to expression having properties and functions determined not only
by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the
character of the whole parts, and by relations of parts to the whole.
Thus far, in its relatively brief history, an ever-present variability has
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 3 12/12/2011 14:30

proven itself as a primary attribute of composition (and thus presen-
tation). Digital poetry, as a literary and artistic form, is an equivocal
organism, with many identities or iterations. As an expressive form,
it matters not only as a free-ranging serious practice, but because it
invites vibrant, transformative multimodal engagement for its practi-
tioners and audience alike.
This book gives an account of processes involved with experi-
encing and understanding digital poetry, a genre complicated by the
variety of forms it embraces. My analysis focuses on the World Wide
Web (WWW), at present the public’s predominant point of inter-
section with digital poetry, where audiences privately absorb and/or
interact with texts.The WWW offers an unprecedented venue for the
circulation of digital poetry, some of which depends on the network
in order to function. Writers and artists create with computers in
ways that do not simply document the poetic forms of bygone eras:
they are reinventing the possibilities for poetry. Computer processes,
still relatively new to the world and artists engaging with them, adorn
poetic features unavailable to previous generations of literary artists.
The intimate, yet often impersonal, location of the network often
demands negotiation of an exorbitant amount of information, which
tends to obfuscate the encounter.
Digital poetry may faintly – and not so faintly – remind us of
various types of historical approaches to writing or verbal articu-
lation. At times we see contemporary enactments of previously
established approaches to vibrant artistic expression drawn from
multiple forms (e.g. multimedia collaborations at Black Mountain,
or Fluxus), although these mediated combinations rarely yield a
clear-cut presentation of materials. Many titles do not reify poetic
forbears; highly calculated, complex digital poems on the WWW
achieve previously unattainable literary effects.
Digital poetry appeals to me because it offers forms of artistry
inviting (and uniting) processed interconnections between sound,
image and language. Further, while variably inscribing each of
these components, digital poems avoid simple iterations of them –
permitting their use, often accentuated with degrees of randomness,
fracture, and even poetic disconnection between media. Literary
work, on the network, excitingly transpires on multiple registers: on
thematic levels, by using artful language, and through responsive
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technical achievement. Advancements resulting from technology
innovate to profound degrees: practices discussed below inten-
tionally present poetic alternatives to the WWW’s general ontology
of promoting products and serving up data at rapid speeds. These
endeavours result from cultural predicament, as a foil to operative
conditions now predominant on the network.
Interconnection insinuates a whole made of parts, or hybridity.
Hybrid approaches to the construction of language, with or without
media, requires use of fragments, as in choosing letters and
phonemes to make words. Digital literature, generally speaking,
exhibits fragmentary authorship – its penchant for fracture and decen-
tralization are proven, and multimedia poems partake of this tradition.
Considering this subject, we must acknowledge that by definition
this implies something broken into pieces, whose parts may never
fully reform. Artworks employing atomic (or, culturally speaking,
post-atomic) techniques engage with such conditions, often repudi-
ating complete sensibility. Even the most heavily disjointed works,
however, provide ways for readers to make stimulating connections.
If a work’s contents are not, and cannot be, fixed, we can, even if
momentarily, ‘fix’ or build potentially profound understandings of
these works on an individual basis (if not within larger, all encom-
passing categories); patient, observant perusals offer rewards.
While synthetic in essence, and brittle in terms of longevity,
digital poetry’s fluid states prevent us from considering works as
being plastic. Yet because they never harden, works of digital poetry
always maintain plasticity in presentation on the WWW. They exist
in a state of being moulded, receiving shape, made to assume many
forms – often seeking qualities that depict space and form so as
to appear multi-dimensionally. When biological organisms with the
same genotypes have the capacity to vary in their developmental
pattern, in their phenotypes, or in their behaviour according to
varying environmental conditions, scientists say they have plasticity.
While the organic component of digital poetry primarily involves
human input in production and consumption, recognizing plasticity
as an aesthetic foundation establishes a valuable metaphor for
generally qualifying the results of electronic writing to date. A given,
though gradually increasing, number of formal foundations exists for
authors to work with, yet titles abundantly vary due to technological
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 5 12/12/2011 14:30

flexibility. We have, in digital poetry, both aesthetic dependability
(overt foundations) and deep bendability.
Attaching significance to the medical connotations of this
metaphorical aesthetic sensibility sheds further light, I believe, on
what digital poets add to the parameters of literature. Plasticity refers
to the capacity for continuous alteration of the neural pathways and
synapses of the living brain and nervous system in response to
experience that involves formation of new pathways and synapses
and/or modification (or elimination) of existing ones. As readers
of digital poetry, we must ourselves become mouldable, capable
of reshaping ourselves and our expectations on a text as a whole
depending on what we encounter on the screen. These artworks
require reformed conceptions, extending parameters and dimen-
sions of reception beyond those we ordinarily use to absorb or
experience expression.
The great extent to which authors choose to render plasticity
complicates processes of reading. Innovative poetry has always
challenged readers who seek straightforwardness, but use of media
compounds the intricacies of expression. Beyond making literally
difficult-to-read works via material obstruction or speed of presen-
tation, authors commonly implement unconventional, disconnected
syntax and phraseology; verbal elements found in these works
rarely present ordinarily arranged language. Engaging with digital
poetry requires more from readers, who face multimodal, human-to-
machine transcreations where texts initially presented in one state
transform into others. These assets assist in elevating contemporary
titles to poetic realms, but decentre the text proper’s authority. As
poetry becomes a networked form, its poetics explodes and singular
measurements of its pliancy resist finite definition. Digital writing,
on and off the WWW, does in part borrow processes and combine
methods from the past. What emerges sometimes corresponds with
efforts by artists whose unmediated inclinations resisted convention
through openness to form and abstraction, with vibrancy and diffi-
culty now added due to technological foundations and the breadth of
range in these new practices.
My 2007 book Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of
Forms, 1959–1995 provides a detailed account of how artists (and
programmers) used computers to foster the new genre of digital
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 6 12/12/2011 14:30

poetry,6
illustrating how computers gave poets new modalities with
which to present language-based expression in various types of
activated, visual, interconnected forms before the WWW existed.
At the time, I felt it was important to engage with research in this
area because descriptions (and understandings) of the types of
poems appearing on the WWW rarely included fair references to the
works which preceded them in the literary continuum. Prehistoric
Digital Poetry illustrates how most of the mechanical groundwork
for digital poetry was already established by the time the WWW
became prominent. The genre’s fundamental building blocks and
textual parameters – cohering as generated, visual and hyper texts
– were essentially solidified by the time the first webpage was ever
made. With its versatility and capability to bring the disparate forms
of expression together, the WWW marks the place where expressive
digital forms synthesize, become more widely circulated, and with
the increase of demographics and technological advancements, a
flexible genre – partially associated with its written counterpart –
forms. At the juncture when the WWW appears, the prosody of
digital poetry already includes text generation, flexible and collab-
orative language, interactivity, intertextuality, and applications of
various visual and sonic attributes. More than a decade later, different
conditions for presentation exist, yet principal elements of the genre
remain central, even if progress and innovation occur by way of works
drawing directly (i.e. instantaneously) from the network for content.7
In terms of historical trajectory, recognizing that most digital poems
appearing on the WWW in its first decade did not specifically rely on
the network is important; these works do not depend on the WWW,
but benefit from it as a publishing platform and the manner in which
the WWW’s attributes enable presentation of multimodal works.
Instead of being formally distinct, the building blocks of composition
begin inextricably (if variably) to merge with one another within a
single title.The genre has not so much expanded as it has evolved to
fuse its disparate characteristics and perpetually invents alternative
approaches by which to stage and facilitate its plasticity.
For accessibility and focus, this book concentrates on publicly
accessible work, made with contemporary technologies and circu-
lated on the WWW. In contrast to Prehistoric Digital Poetry, the
majority of subject matter remains available; anyone with an Internet
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 7 12/12/2011 14:30

connection can view these digital poems. That said, a few programs
I studied and wrote about while composing this book have disap-
peared, and may be gone from public view forever – a significant
factor of digital textuality. Eventual hardware, software and network
modifications (e.g. ‘upgrades’ that squelch capabilities of previous
versions of programs) make inevitable the extinction of certain, if not
entire swaths of, works. Unfortunately such departures can happen
quickly and unexpectedly. For example, two works profiled in the
case studies below, Erika and Google Poem Generator – emblematic
of types of poems produced during the WWW’s first decade – no
longer appear on the network.
The present study partially surveys the initial phases of digital
poetry on the WWW. Hundreds of worthy digital poems have been
authored, of which I discuss a few, covering a fraction of what
has been produced. To write a complete history of digital poetry
since the WWW became its primary textual staging area, given the
proliferation of creative expression and development of progressive
formations on the network, would proceed endlessly. A compre-
hensive survey analyzing every significant title would entail more
pages than a book could hold. Instead, I take up a new objective
by directly, pragmatically addressing the matter of, and processes
involved with, viewing and grasping the varied and sometimes inter-
active works gathered under the rubric of digital poetry.
Given its plasticity, one of electronic literature’s foremost
challenges, understanding poems designed for presentation
on computer networks, requires guidance. While preparing this
book, I gave a talk at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities (MITH) titled ‘Digital Poetry as Scrabble: Making from
Given Materials’, during which I showed examples of digital permu-
tation poems. The audience included several literature professors
whose research focuses on conventional poetry written long before
the digital era. They became curious, even fascinated, by the
material, but confessed they had no idea how to read what was
shown.8
These readers, uninitiated in the process of approaching and
comprehending a digital poem, needed a guide. Beyond delivering
contexts for the artistic practices involved, this book discusses of a
variety of titles indicating what readers may expect while perusing
digital poems on the WWW, and how to handle observing and
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 8 12/12/2011 14:30

participating in such encounters. Since the WWW has emerged,
dynamism and intricacy of presentation of works produced in the
genre have increased.These developments complicate the reception
of literary expression due to their lack of general uniformity, even if
the majority of titles predominantly feature similar foundations as
works pioneered before the WWW era. Aesthetically speaking, as
acknowledged in Jane Yellowlees Douglas’ 1991 observation about
encountering hypertexts (used as epigraph above), viewers of these
poems do not confront texts containing one attribute or another, but
rather texts inscribing multiple attributes combined together. Points
of identification in digital poems always shift and have capacity to
contain many variable attributes. In Douglas’ words, they embrace
the ‘and/and/and’, an effect that characteristically mystifies their
reception.
WWW as mechanism
Because technological apparatuses used by digital poets directly
influence what they produce, I will now briefly trace the development
of some of the tools that significantly enable works discussed in this
book. Mediated capabilities inherent in the WWW have gradually
expanded since its initiation in 1991 (as an extension of the Internet),
endowing it with resilience and artistic potential. Initially proposed as
a ‘large hypertext database with typed links’, the WWW’s purpose
was ‘to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and
documentation’.9
Hypertext, a concept and non-linear textual practice
first introduced by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, envisioned writers
and designers creating ‘branching’ structures in literary documents
(including video), connected by links embedded in texts and imagery
presented. Early iterations of the WWW, however, prohibited the
fluid transmission of such media, and a complete realization of this
objective did not begin to occur until 1995, when HTML code10
,
readable by WWW browsers, began to enable embedded scripting
codes (e.g. JavaScript), thus expanding expressive capabilities of
the network by supporting integrated multimedia in addition to
hypertext linking capabilities.11
Two other developments elevated the
network’s capabilities, increasing its versatility for artists: in 1999,
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the bandwidth became 2.5 Gbps (Gigabits per second);12
a year
later, refinement of Internet Protocols responsible for the delivery
of ‘packets’ occurred, which ensures the correct delivery of data.13
As the Internet expanded and many more computers came online,
these developments crucially enhanced the functionality of the
network and made an impact on the types of materials artists could
produce with confidence (although it should be reiterated that most
works will function offline and do not actually depend on the WWW
for their presentation). Increased bandwidth meant files containing
larger amounts of information, as in videographic material, could
be more rapidly transmitted and received across the WWW. For
example, QuickTime movies, produced using software technology
made available in 1991, became a more feasible way to present art
across the network.14
During the 1990s, an array of video software
programs (and players) influenced the conception and presentation
of digital poems.
In the WWW’s early years, cultivation of software and integrated
computer programming, along with advancements in network
performance, significantly altered the organization and rendering of
the new modalities of literary expression.15
With the release of the
software program Macromedia Flash 3 (1998), the ability to produce
animations and interactive documents through simple scripting
commands became much improved.16
As of 1999, MPEG-1 (mp3)
technology enabled production of audio files in a highly compressed
format conducive to computer playback. Shortly thereafter, Flash 4,
which supported the use of mp3 files as well as the ‘Motion Tween’
function, diminished labour in authoring animations. The importance
of Flash – a program with which works are composed on a ‘stage’,
using a timeline – on the manufacture of digital poetry in the early
WWW period cannot be understated. Because, as Nelson observes,
Flash is ‘essentially a complete platform – a complete program
package with all forms of graphics, interaction and communication’,
multimedia poems of all sorts have blossomed.17
Notably, Flash
software, written in C11, evolved to include an object-oriented
programming language (ActionScript 3.0). Thus the program itself is
a hybrid compilation (or formation) of programming codes.18
Many new technologies developed since the mid-1990s contribute
to innovation and make an impact on the aesthetic conditions of
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digital poetry.19
For example, digital poets began using cascading
stylesheets (CSS, see Stir Fry Texts, Ch. 3), which, in addition
to other tasks, facilitates the uniform appearance of pages in a
complex work. Scripting interfaces such as ASP (Active Server
Pages, developed by Microsoft) effectively created unusual automati-
cally generated poems across the network, as in Leevi Lehto’s
Google Poem Generator (Ch. 5). Numerous artists have used Java,
an object-oriented programming language, to build interactive and
animated poems with dynamic content on the WWW.20
PHP (1995),
another object-oriented scripting language, acts as a filter taking
input from a file (or stream containing text) and outputs another
stream of data in HTML; such processes importantly contribute to
the cultivation of dynamic web pages, as in Eugenio Tisselli’s work
(Ch. 5). Lesser-used but effective methods and programs, some
of which involve object-oriented paradigms, also materialized (e.g.
Squeak, used in Jim Rosenberg’s Diagram Poems, Ch. 3).21
Altered conditions for textuality and a pluralized, unfixed aesthetics
result from these advancements. Mechanisms permitted by the
WWW literally and figuratively heightened the visibility of digital
poetry on the Internet.22
With every new browser release, the
WWW became more versatile, easier to use, and more interesting.
Sites were static at first, e.g. Diana Reed Slattery’s 1996 title
AlphaWeb, then animations and artworks containing sound – multi-
media art and poetry – began to appear with frequency e.g. Christy
Sheffield Sanford’s ‘Flowerfall’ or Mark Amerika’s Grammatron,
both produced in 1997
.23
For media-inclined poets, the WWW’s
technological growth brought expressive opportunity and variety,
providing continuum and stylistic advances. Multiple surfaces and
components layer in the poetry – already a complex expressive form
– a compound of written/visual/audio/mental expression with code,
software and the network, fluidly enabling media and intertextual
potential. In this book, we observe the impact of these factors on
poetic forms becoming evermore refined, interactive and composite
in the WWW era.
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Fused Forms and Types
Increased levels of interactivity, and the ongoing elimination of
barriers between digital forms of writing (generated, visual, hyper
texts), reposition digital poetry’s textual conditions. WWW technol-
ogies enable modalities combining text, graphics, animation/video,
sound, interactivity, generative properties, randomness and permu-
tation. Identifying singular aesthetic considerations upon which
to define forms and types of digital poetry is now a burdensome,
if not impossible, task. In this sense, digital poetry is unques-
tionably ‘noisy’, to borrow a construct from Brian Kim Stefans’ 2003
title Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. Distinctions between
forms, incisively established for somewhat more primitive (but not
always quiet) works in Prehistoric Digital Poetry, remain useful as a
way to identify individual components or methods used by digital
poets, but can no longer be used to divide them categorically. In
many examples discussed below, forms that had been previously
separated now fuse together, enhancing and boosting the density of
works produced in the genre.
Prehistoric Digital Poetry establishes three major forms of artistic
production, as well as a few fringe areas. The first digital poems,
then sometimes called ‘computer poems’, came from programs
generating poems by uniting a database and a series of commands.24
While this fundamental practice (using computer code to process
language) has continued on the WWW in works such as Jim
Carpenter’s Erika, Millie Niss’ The Electronic Muse and many other
titles, core materials now capably incorporate graphics and other
multimedia effects. Visual and videographic poems exhibit lively
generative features, as in Angela Ferraiolo’s The End of Capitalism,
and generative texts surgically draw from extensive online resources
(such as Google, in the case of Lehto’s Google Poem Generator).
Poets not only write programs to compose poetry but programs
that automatically synthesize alternative media elements into digital
poems, as in Tisselli’s Synonymovie or Andrews’ dbCinema.
Visual digital poems and videopoems started emerging in the
1960s, successfully literalizing the cliché ‘poetry in motion’. In some
regards, contemporary practice follows historical models, but since
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the demographics have broadened, deviation from the principles
of concrete poetry and other historical predecessors has occurred.
Visual poets such as K. S. Ernst, Geof Huth and others, continue
to create digital works, and most digital poems contain noteworthy
visual aspects. Combinations of text, image, movement, sound
and myriad types of stylistic shaping are imagined and produced.
Many members of the extensive international community of visual
poets use computers to produce graphical alphabetic works. Blogs,
websites and listservers, such as Huth’s dbqp: visualizing poetics,25
Crg Hill’s poetry scorecard,26
and mIEKAL aND’s Spidertangle,27
are respectively among the many resources serving as outlets for
dissemination of information and archiving works in this realm. Visual
poetry is, in my view, a particular branch of digital poetry – but also
exists independently, as part of the continuum of the great and
varied lineage established by analogue visual poets. Though many
artists work with computers, not everyone assigns significance to
the fact that images made using Photoshop involve automated digital
programming even if artists employ it to enact manual processes and
manipulations. Digitally processed alphabetic information substan-
tiates these works, and a finite study of the influence of computers
on visual poetry should be written. Digital poetry inarguably relies
on visual elements (through static, animated and videographic
imagery, or graphical and visual treatment of language); graphical
components are often central, even though works vary widely in
terms of dynamics (note the difference between aND’s Seedsigns
for Philadelpho and Jason Nelson’s I made this. you play this. we are
enemies), and may feature non-linear or generative elements.
Numerous factors prevent establishing definitive, fundamental
distinctions between poetic forms embracing digital media. Beyond
‘the variety of approaches to digital poetry’, writes Memmott in
the essay ‘Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of
Reading’, ‘the transitive aspects of its elements, and the transactive
quality of its applications, make the development of a consistent,
stabilizing taxonomy difficult if not impossible.’28
In contrast to the
pre-WWW era, very few literary hypertexts (poetry or fiction) present
only text; even examples privileging text usually contain graphical
design components. We might thus be tempted to regard all digital
poetry as hypermedia, but cannot ignore that the hyper- prefix by
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definition assigns a non-linear dynamic to the work. Many works on
the WWW, despite rich uses of media, perform linearly, even when
authors produce sophisticated interactive structures within their
visually-based verbal constructs, as in Serge Bouchardon’s Loss of
Grasp (Ch. 4).
Authors/programmers assemble works using two primary presen-
tational strategies: projected and participatory. Projected digital
poems do not entail interactive involvement; participatory poems
require a reader’s contribution to the production of narrative, and
sometimes enable viewers to add new content within the partic-
ipatory structure. Borrowing Michael Joyce’s categorizations for
hypertext/hypermedia forms in Prehistoric Digital Poetry, I identified
two distinct approaches describing readers’ roles, the ‘Explorative’
and the ‘Constructive.’29
Shifting the meta-framework for the now
largely integrated, hypermediated WWW-based works to ‘projected’
and ‘participatory’ represents a re-positioning of textuality that falls in
line with Espen Aarseth’s senses of ‘ergodic’ and ‘nonergodic’ works
respectively.30
Just as digital poetry has become more dynamic, and
in certain senses has made poetry more contemporary and dynamic
by moving away from a fixed state, ways in which works can be
theoretically and aesthetically built and categorized are multiple and
fluid.
Digital poetry’s plasticity invites inventive critical perspectives.
For example, Stephanie Strickland introduces imaginative frame-
works through which to understand contemporary practices in
several essays, including ‘Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of
E-Poetry.’ In this piece, Strickland outlines eleven ‘entangled’ condi-
tions of ‘Poetic e-writing’, rather than charting poetics through more
narrowly defined formal attributes.31
Strickland’s loose and even
abstract contexts (e.g. ‘3. Time, become active, stratigraphic, and
topologic, is written multiply’) contain value as concise, inventive,
knowledgeable views that remain open to interpretation.32
‘Writing
native to the electronic environment’, observes Strickland, ‘is under
continual construction’; in this statement she acknowledges the
transitory/transitional condition and ‘instability’ of the craft.33
In
order to cultivate a system open to invention, critics and practi-
tioners benefit by not opting to evaluate digital poetry on technical
or theoretical bases, or by speaking in absolutes. As digital poetry’s
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supple characteristics become more widely known and accepted,
critical observations mirroring the artistic practices, suggesting and
illustrating flexible contexts while reading examples of crafted works,
bear fruit. Anyone can understand the values of Strickland’s states in
‘Writing the Virtual’ because she effectively limns what she sees as
the most profound issues in the historical moment, and envisions
a way to catalogue components of literary activity in the electronic
writing environment. Her essay creatively, insightfully delineates a
poetics of digital writing. Beyond its value as a plausible guide to
the range of conditions of text under consideration by digital writers,
Strickland’s list of structural dimensions and complexities could be
used as a basis for comparing the settings of digital poetry today
with those of the previous era. Rather than seeing Strickland’s
viewpoint – or any thoughtful viewpoint – as timeless, I see them
as a contemporary snapshot of textual launch points. States of
textuality in Strickland’s 2006 foreground indicate tendencies toward
writing initiated on the network itself, affected by time on multiple
levels, and inclined towards cybernetic operations. Titles reflecting
issues Strickland outlines appeared on the WWW at this juncture
because the network enabled them to form in a way previous
technologies did not. A single, or singular, apparatus through which
to view and understand the work defies construction because of the
‘constantly shifting eventfulness’ apparent in the historical course of
digital poetry, and we find ways temporarily to gauge the practice.34
A critic may find many perspectives through which to chronicle
the onset and significance of vivid, wide-ranging experimentation in
digital literature. ‘Quantum Poetics: Six Thoughts’, another essay by
Strickland, emanates the influence of scientific thought in building
a framework for digital poetry. Emphasizing ‘Quantum Poetics’ as
a focus, biological components found in works (or made possible
by them) come to the foreground, indicating a move away from a
technical or even an aesthetic orientation in analysis. Strickland again
notices time as a component playing a role in digital poetry, but also
considers the anti-spatial orientation of works, the meaning of the
acts of multitasking, media resonance, translation, and the implica-
tions of layering information in transition on our minds, bodies and
texts. ‘There is no seamless information environment’, she writes,
‘only increasingly extended forms of attention and inter-attention,
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cross-modes of attention, muscular, neural, endocrinological, visual,
acoustic, kinesthetic and proprioceptive.’35
Strickland’s musings on
the possibilities for digital poetry using a non-technical approach
not only represent the trend surrounding digital poetry to merge
the arts and sciences, but also indicate the widening of the critical
(as well as creative) outlook. While many aesthetic schemes for the
genre understandably find roots in a work’s technological aspects,
Strickland’s perspective usefully interjects alternative philosophical
and scientific accents that broaden and fortify an expanded sense
of what poetry consists of, and the profound yet unconventional
levels it operates on, without losing sight of the details of the work
itself. Too often in the field of digital literary criticism (or poetics), the
minute particulars of works – and deliberations about them – are
overshadowed if not obliterated by theoretical considerations.
Dynamic poetry first appeared on the WWW in 1995; essays
observing this development, including my own, immediately
followed. Several volumes have focused on how writers use the
global network to invent new forms of poetry and literature. The
anthologies Media Poetry: An International Anthology; New Media
Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories and A Companion to
Digital Literary Studies contain insightful essays; scholars such as
Roberto Simanowski and Jessica Pressman, to name just two of
many critics now focusing on electronic writing, have written and
published ‘close readings’ of WWW-based poems. The abundance
of articles appearing in journals and anthologies makes it difficult
to keep track of every critical and creative development in the field;
many high-quality essays on digital poetics, approaching the subject
from countless perspectives, have appeared in recent years.36
The availability of these writings makes evident the hetero
geneous sense of context for digital poetry and poetics. Most of the
essays in these books report on the complexities embraced by the
authors of digital poems, and confronted by readers of the work.
Essays included in New Media Poetics and Media Poetry particu-
larly expand the critical scope, veering away from literary (or even
artistic) foundations much of the time. Authors often address the
consequences and significance of layering texts and meaning using
complex, interactive methods. These volumes provide a broad-based
view of artistic practices, exposing inherent multiplicities (histories,
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contexts). They explain individual writing strategies, authorial
concerns, and the significance of our participation in such texts,
illuminating digital poetry’s adaptability and how varying senses of
sequential events impose new thresholds of difficulty (and delicacy)
to readers unacquainted with mediated expression.
The large range of critical approaches taken thus far confirms
aesthetic dimensions and the overall character of digital poetic forms
as being far from fixed or undemanding. Every element of digital
poetry made for presentation on a dynamic network declares fair
premises on which to discuss the topic, and variables within these
forms absolutely complicate reception of the work, proven by the
number of ways critics have invented to discuss them. Struggling
to understand intentions behind a specific conglomeration of textual
elements or explaining the reasons for an author’s material choices
inspires plentiful perspectives. Beyond matters of pure content and
issues raised by traits such as indeterminacy, e.g. made-at-the-
moment variable pathways, multiple endings, many factors amplify
interpretative opportunities given the prevalent hybridity of forms.
Collecting Electronic Literature
In the opening chapter of Electronic Literature, N. Katherine Hayles
writes, ‘Will the dissemination mechanisms of the Internet and
the Web, by opening publication to everyone, result in a flood of
worthless drivel?’37
In order to subvert the possibility, she co-edited
the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC),Vol. 1, stamping approval on
a wide range of digital texts worthy of preservation.38
Many examples
of digital poetry circulate in this quasi- canonical compendium. The
editors – Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Strickland –
compile the first major institutionally funded collection of electronic
literature, a historical event inasmuch as it provides crucial documen-
tation of text representing the initial WWW era, artworks that Hayles
asserts ‘test the boundaries of the literary and challenge us to
rethink our assumptions of what literature can do and be’.39
Expanding these boundaries in their own terms, the editors
identify more than fifty general categories (style of work, software
used or other demographic) to use as keywords describing the
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contents. Their signifiers classify apparent traits, establishing a clear
vocabulary of terms enumerating both creative potential and worthy
critical concerns: Ambient, Animation/Kinetic, Appropriated texts,
Audio, authors from outside North America, Cave, Chatterbot/conver-
sational character, Children’s Literature, Collaboration, combinatorial,
conceptual, constraint-based, procedural, critical/political/philo-
sophical, database, documentary, essay/creative non-fiction, fiction,
flash, games, generative, hacktivist, html/dhtml, hypertext, inform,
installation, interactive fiction, java, javascript, locative, memoir,
multilingual or non-english, music, network forms, non-interactive,
parody/satire, performance/performative, place, poetry, processing,
quicktime, shockwave, squeak, Storyspace, stretchtext, TADS,
textual instrument, text movie, 3D, time-based, translation, viral,
visual poetry or narrative, vrml, women authors, wordtoy (ELC).
This anthology represents the major historical forms of digital
writing, in many synthesized forms. Digital literature has for more
than three decades resisted, as if by definition, the need to embody
a singular set of mannerisms, and this publication verifies the wide
span of identifiable attributes and approaches used to produce
works. Such editorial openness – integrating a diverse range of
compositions – provides a true representation of the aesthetic
identity of the genre. Looking closely at these works reveals how
strategies towards making digital poetry has overtly evolved and
diversified during the past two decades. For instance, readers
familiar with digital poetry’s past will discern that text generators
are now easier to use, and often more versatile and participatory
than their historical predecessors; a user no longer simply presses
a button and watches the generated poem appear as ASCII text.
Visual works have progressed beyond a state of static rendering;
hypertext performs more viscerally than in the past. The anthology
contains historical works both participatory and projected, such as
Jim Rosenberg’s Diagrams Series poems and Stefans’ the dreamlife
of letters. Rosenberg’s online extension of his ground-breaking
HyperCard work uniquely projects multilayered expression in which
readers cull verbal content while negotiating visual information using
syntactical formations invented by the author (see Ch. 3). Stefans’
visually spectacular animated concrete poems provide a stunning
example of how elastic and expressive letters themselves can be
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when an author employs new media techniques with great sophis-
tication. Literature conceptually unites with computer games (e.g.
Andrews, Ch. 3). A high level of interactivity employed by authors
in the collection indicates that a greater number of works aspire to
position viewers as players on a field rather than spectators in the
grandstand – a disconcerting (yet potentially captivating) condition for
those untrained to negotiate participatory works.
As a critic investigating this discipline, looking to identify its
multifaceted characteristics, contributions to the anthology by early
practitioners of the genre (e.g. John Cayley, Deena Larsen and Alan
Sondheim) interest me not only for their plentiful artistic qualities,
but also in terms of how authors who produced electronic work in
the pre-WWW era have (and have not) shifted their compositional
strategies, and, again, how the mediated properties of forms in
general change over time. Hypertext, for instance, becomes more
dynamic (although in certain regards possibly less sophisticated)
than it was offline. Looking at Larsen’s Carving in Possibilities,
anyone familiar with her title Marble Springs (Eastgate, 1993) cannot
help but notice how drastically hypertext techniques within a digital
poem have changed. Instead of building links and nodes, presented
and mapped separately, navigated by clicking with the mouse (as
in Marble Springs), viewers now confront all the links at once; the
process involves no clicking – moving the mouse across a given
image unveils content. Several pieces recall historical works, such
as Emily Short’s Galatea, in which a ‘chatterbot’ emulates a conver-
sation with the user (à la Eliza or MOO ‘bot’), or the layered rays of
text in Dan Waber and Jason Pimble’s ‘I You We,’ which resemble
the pre-WWW aesthetics of Marc Adrian’s ‘Computer Texts’ or Carl
Fernbach-Flarsheim’s The Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter.
While contemporary authors may not know these earlier projects,
digital literature remediates their techniques in these recent titles,
its fundamental formal building blocks perpetuated and advanced
by a different cast of authors using a distinctive set of tools. Works
gathered by the editors of this collection confirm the congruities and
complexities of digital literature, showing how tremendous variety
predominates in conglomerations of multimedia elements.
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Polyformally Advancing
In a 1975 article titled ‘Computer Art,’ an early practitioner of
digital poetry wrote: ‘We need to find those things which uniquely
suit these new media, which can only be expressed with their
help, and thus make the effort worthwhile. I look for the fresh
wind of ideas from the new wave of art students who will be
literate in the information sciences, and conversant with interactive
computers and the new processes which they can help visually
explicate.’40
Surveying the background of the digital poets whose
mediated works I examine below, we find undisputable pluralism.
Few have formally (institutionally) studied art. Works reviewed in
my case studies were composed by individuals with backgrounds
in mathematics (Andrews, Rosenberg), information science and
communication (Bouchardon), education and business (Carpenter),
chemistry (Ferraiolo), Chinese language and civilization (Cayley),
social science (Mez), computer engineering (Tisselli) and English
or creative writing (Larsen, Sondheim, Baldwin, Nelson, Strickland).
Zellen, Mez and Flanagan studied art, but holding a degree in art
is clearly not a prerequisite to becoming a digital poet. What has
happened instead largely reverses Mezei’s speculation: writers,
mathematicians, and scientists and engineers of various sorts have
become literate in programming and digital media and art.
These integrated artistic approaches, from wherever they arise,
present new demands and expectations on viewers of digital poetry.
Studying particular qualities and quantities contained in projected
and participatory digital poems, while weaving a narrative about
the process of understanding the poems, is my task. Building my
investigation directly from groundwork established in my previous
study might be sensible, but I only partly use Prehistoric Digital
Poetry’s groundwork as a foundation due to omnipresent fusion of
forms. Instead of using formal attributes as modes of demarcation,
while respecting the value of celebrating continuum in the genre, I
bridge the historical and contemporary by devoting the first of three
analytical chapters to a discussion of digital poems presented on the
network by authors whose practice begins in the ‘prehistoric’ era
and now extends to the WWW. How do pioneers, those who worked
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in the field at an early stage, expand or alter their work via the
network? As textual multiplicity reaches potentiality – as opposed to
more strictly delineated formulations – how do the authors employ
contemporary tools? A second analytical chapter explores titles by
artists garnering attention subsequent to the WWW’s emergence.
Are these works less constricted than those made by artists who
initially composed with fewer available possibilities? How, if at
all, do they differ in orientation from those produced by artists of
a previous generation? Works examined in both chapters extend
historical forms, some forging unique inventive presentations, which
are in turn advanced even further by works reliant on the WWW’s
mechanical properties (Ch. 5).
The field of digital poetry exists in a non-commercial realm. One
might attempt to evaluate scientifically evaluate and rank practi-
tioners based on the number of works they have created, or by
how many performances or installations they have been invited to
prepare or publish, but such equations would be problematic for
many reasons. Many accomplished works have been produced, but
only a few bring much public attention to the field. In the concluding
chapter of Prehistoric Digital Poetry, I expressed a belief that no
masterpieces had been created in the early years of the genre. The
point is debatable, but the visibility of the practice in general is still
limited due to various factors, not the least of which are difficulties
brought on by the plasticity inherent in most works. Many artists
have produced fantastic titles, some have been rewarded with jobs
and paychecks as a result of their accomplishments, and a few
artists receive exposure through exhibitions in major museums and
galleries. This means an audience exists, and works are valued by
those who are able to value them, but also that digital poetry is still
nascent and maturing as a pluralistic artform. Artworks examined
in this book represent important efforts produced by accomplished
figures (although not the only practitioners); however, I sense the
challenges they present may be prohibitive unless an audience is
prepared to embrace them.
Works of digital poetry use computer technologies automatically
or interactively to animate, shift (between content), shuffle and
generate poems – interconnecting disparate textual or mediated
elements persist at the nucleus of every digital work. Because
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materials vary from piece to piece, one cannot anticipate what to
expect from a digital poem. In some cases text transforms into text,
images transform into new images as text(s) transform from one
state to another. We must remember the absolute rule of electronic
text – the elemental key that puts it at odds with printed materials, a
discrepancy so perfectly stated by Joyce’s axiom, ‘Print stays itself;
electronic text replaces itself.’41
Every example of digital poetry,
by definition, steadily imparts content alternative to what initially
appears; each screen stages different information, perhaps uniquely
– and every change, each mediated shift, holds potential conse-
quence. These conditions require keeping our attention focused on
many disciplinary variables. Contemporary readers should not be
fearful of embracing something new, or looking at possibilities for
literature from all angles, and should enjoy the process. Plasticity
and difficult consequences brought on by digital poetry and the
superabundance of possibilities inherent in the genre need not lead
to frustration; poetical celebration with exuberance, excess and
surprise, conducted through media dynamics, has the capability to
enthral once the organic functionality of the work is identified and
understood.
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2
Encounters with a
digital poem
Reading remains a practice that is not reducible
to information or to digital data1
John Lavagnino (2007)
Context(s) for Reading
Readers of Shakespeare would concur that difficulties in reading
poetry arose long before sophisticated technical engineering
began to influence literary works. Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s
poem ‘Looking for Poetry’ (2002) reminds us how preparation plays
a crucial role in any encounter with poetry:
Come close and consider the words.
With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces
and with no interest in your response,
whether weak or strong,
each word asks:
Did you bring the key?2
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Digital poetry’s significant dematerialization and ductility and the
granularity of its treatment of language (atomic abstraction, fleeting
dispensation), only further increase demands placed on its audience.
Artists engaging in technological processes compound poetry’s
already complex foundations, resulting in the need for viewers to be
prepared to approach the task of reading in new ways.
John Cayley’s essay ‘Writing on Complex Surfaces’ (2005) explains
why all forms of writing present challenges: ‘The surface of writing is
and always has been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpreted
membrane, a fractal coast- or borderline, a chaotic and complex
structure with depth and history.’3
As chronicled in Prehistoric Digital
Poetry, a relationship exists between digital poetry and its Modern
and Postmodern precursors. Acts of reading contemporary pliant
forms, however, require a more participatory audience; as Bruce
Andrews writes in ‘Electronic Poetics’, the reader becomes, in digital
circumstances, ‘the (modifying, reconfiguring) playback device, not
the target of it’.4
As such, readers must absorb, edit (or compile),
and cognitively retain unconventionally presented data in order to
approach comprehension.
Digital poetry presents difficulties, and exists at the fringes of
literary arts precisely because of demands it imposes on audiences.
Stylistically, modes of expression found in conventional and machine
modulated writing differ greatly – a schism observed by Jed Rasula,
who writes, ‘In a curious way, Internet poetry can be compared to
the American colonies circa 1760: full of enterprise and ingenuity, but
a world apart, a realm of negligible consequence to an unheeding
mother country and its culture.’5
Poetry, for most, already represents
an artistic aberration – something moving away from conventional
diction and presenting perceptual challenges; digital poetry’s inflation
of this, through mediated expansion, may very well create too
large a separation from norms and thus impedes garnering a larger
readership. Similarities to typical conventions may exist in a digital
poem – the output from a text generator often resembles a poem
on a page – although many types of reading within the genre simply
do not compare. Language and other pertinent content presented
in multiple visual layers and sublayers within the interface, often as
fragments of a textual whole, increase the cognitive demands on
its audience. Since such a range of perspectives and media – not to
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Encounters with a digital poem 25
mention speeds – can be accessed, exploring digital poems involves
encountering incomprehensible materials that in their mode of
presentation mean to have an effect on the viewer. A mix of direct
and indirect communication can provide a range of possible inter-
pretations worthy of reception, and requires new approaches to the
task.
Beyond the readability of text, another important context to
consider is how verbal impressions transpire on the Internet. Even
someone who values visceral stimulation through language may not
be prepared for the types of perusal invited by the WWW. How does
reading occur on the WWW? ‘By navigating or surfing,’ Christian
Vandendorpe has observed, ‘reading is broken up, rapid, instrumental
and oriented towards action.’6
The act of reading online, in parallel to
the types of writing under discussion, is fragmentary. Contents of
a digital poem require more than the interpretation of mere infor-
mation – putting it at odds with normal approaches to consumption
on the WWW. Johanna Drucker more explicitly examines connec-
tions between print and electronic reading practices, discussing how
electronic environments for reading and authoring require studying
‘the basic units for viewing and organizing text/image materials, how
are relations among them ordered for reading and sequencing, how
are they viewed and annotated’ in order to comprehend computer
presentations.7
Drucker sees graphical elements (not new to poetry)
as ‘not arbitrary or decorative’ but as forces that ‘serve as functional
cognitive guides’,8
emphasizing how writers of all types seek to
‘create a stream of relations’.9
Poetry’s problem, for Drucker, is the
tendency for critics and readers to see books as artifacts instead of
seeing them as demonstrations of ‘living, dynamic nature of works
as produced by interpretive acts’ such as those we experience on
the WWW.10
In this processual, active context, digital poetry qualifies
as less of an artifact than an active, energetic (if ephemeral) form
of expression produced as a result of acts by author and viewer.
‘Driving a computer as a reader/speaker/chatter/correspondent/etc.
is an active thing,’ writes Jim Andrews, ‘and one is presented with
all sorts of choices along the way be they via the hyperlink or other
interaction, not the least of which is the interaction that happens just
in the way we read and think and choose even when we’re reading
a plain old book.’11
Establishing a correspondence between on- and
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offline reading practices is possible, but inevitably the demands of
network-based reading are greater because its methods require
actions, such as the elucidation of visual and other stimuli, adding
intricacy to the activity. Beyond reading, viewers of digital poetry
must absorb, interact with and interpret images, sounds and other
elements; the experience demands it. Importance of text (written
language) in digital poetry cannot be over-emphasized but nearly
every form of electronic literature involves more from the audience
than interpreting language. In conjunction with the ways they
contrast general modes of consumption privileged on the WWW, the
primary, integral attributes of digital poetry complicate processes of
perceiving what authors intend to communicate.
Once the domain of the mechanism is understood, how deeply
must a reader be prepared to analyze a digital poem? Is what occurs
on the screen’s stage enough to build a reasonable understanding of
a work? A willingness to enter an engagement begins the process
of initiating understanding; being ready to evaluate digital poems
fully enhances the experience. In the following chapters – after
deliberating about various conceptual dimensions within the tasks
of reading – I prioritize the examination of textual particulars in
completed works, illustrating the qualities a reader should expect to
look for at any moment while discussing the ramifications of finite
mediated properties surrounding the poetry.
What to look for
David Shepard’s observation that ‘a digital work is represented
simultaneously by multiple signification systems and interpreted by
different agents’ cannot be refuted.12
Shepard outlines three funda-
mental areas of programmatic involvement in any work, which he
identifies as the ‘executed layer’ (i.e. what is seen in the browser
window, or ‘the work’s process as it is experienced’), the source
code, and ‘the execution of the code, based on the language
structure’.13
This book focuses on a digital poem’s executed layer
in order to facilitate instruction on how to embrace digital poetry
perceptively. To understand the executed layer properly, Shepard
writes, ‘we must define the work’s process, that component of the
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work that produces what the user experiences insofar as the user
is aware of this process.’14
The need to understand process in digital
poetry, as demonstrated in the case studies below, necessitates
discussion on expressive, technical and poetic registers. Underlying
processes do inform the surface of the work through sublayers, but
in fact the perceived implications of textual combinations existing on
the surface adequately serve to provoke consternation and are thus
prioritized in my explorations. In any event, gaining the best under-
standing of a digital poem requires efforts beyond what readers of
print-based works are accustomed to, and alters critical parameters
due to expansions of form brought on by the medium’s components.
Every study involving digital literature remarks on common ground
the practice shares with other genres of electronic art that combine
language and code and result in the emergence of multi-modal condi-
tions. We can, however, discriminate between genres according to
form of inscription of language in a given work, as well as by any
stated authorial intent. A screen, being used as a multi-purpose
surface or active stage, nonetheless widens the boundaries of the
literary. Computer screens ‘can recreate filmic illusions, in which
case the screen reflects and reinforces conventional visual assump-
tions’, writes Hayles, adding, ‘on the other hand, it can also perform
as a dark window through which we can intuit the algorithms gener-
ating the display.’15
As the surface context through which the viewer
experiences content, what happens on the screen is primary. While
relevant in a technical analysis, Hayles’ latter point is not as important
for audiences uninterested in looking/reading on this level (at least at
first).16
On the authorial side, manipulating code, being capable of making
finite adjustments to the sublayer of a work, may effectively increase
its poetic values.17
In this study, I introduce and discuss details and
anecdotes regarding coding when relevant to the aesthetics of a
particular work. Reading mediated works can be, Hayles writes,
‘a complex performance in which agency is distributed between
the user, the interface, and the active cognitions of the networked
and programmable machine’, requiring detailed analysis of each
part of the equation.18
Her point is legitimate, but in the interest
of explaining the mechanics of digital poetry to a non-scientific
audience (i.e. describing processes of reading a digital poem), I focus
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on a text’s surfaces. Text on screen does not divulge everything, yet
provides ample grist for deliberation.
Intermediation
A computer, via program/design, unquestionably has the power
to produce ‘a performance partaking both of the programmer’s
intentions and the computer’s underlying architecture as symbolic
processor’, in which ‘authorial design, the actions of an intelligent
machine, and the user’s receptivity are joined in a recursive cycle
that enacts in microcosm our contemporary situation’.19
To orient
a theoretical framework describing digital practices that intervenes
between human and machine cognition, Hayles coins the term
intermediation.20
The term calls to mind Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin’s concept of remediation (refashioning old techniques using
new media), and even more directly (homonymically) Dick Higgins’
experiments in Intermedia (crossover between artistic forms).21
Electronic Literature, on the whole, profusely considers remediation
in the practice of writing (an entire chapter is devoted to ‘Print
Novels and the Mark of the Digital’), and uses intermediation to
describe a textual process (or relationship) which unites body and
machine while prioritizing neither entity.22
The experience of the
encounter with digital texts, writes Hayles, ‘can be understood in
terms of intermediating dynamics linking human understanding
with computer (sub)cognition through the cascading processes of
interpretation that give meaning to information.’23
For Hayles, inter-
mediation introduces computation at an elemental level, although
a connection to Higgins’ original context is somehow ignored in
the co-optation. I note it here (and return to it later) because of
its relevance to understanding practices of digital literature and
poetry, which seems at least as important as emphasizing issues of
embodiment.24
Theorizing the body and technology, Hayles emphasizes the
‘recursive’ feedback loops integral to many works of digital liter-
ature. Her theme is relevant because many digital poems depend
on user participation, which has the effect of inscribing such ‘loops’
in the work. Representing the feedback cycle (i.e. between self and
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other, body and machine) in the intermediation model foregrounds
how within digital textuality’s dynamics users decisively determine
displayed effects. The implications of intermediation reveal some
of the basic tenets of electronic literature, which do contribute to
difficulties in the process and experience of reading. Hayles outlines
several properties of electronic text that may cause difficulty for any
reader: ‘in-mixing of human and machine cognition’; ‘reimagining
literary work as an instrument to be played’; ‘deconstruction of
relation between sound and mark’; ‘rupture of narrative and reimag-
ining/representation of consciousness’; and ‘deconstruction of
temporality’.25
In the mixture of human and machine cognition, not
only do new syntactic and linguistic forms arise, but this condition
may also involve issues of trust (i.e. suspicion of machine’s partici-
pation), or even worse, disappointment or confusion by what is
contributed by the machine. Engaging with discrepant forms of
information, along with the Postmodern condition requiring an
audience’s integral involvement in the composition of meaning to
be heightened, positions the reader/viewer/user so that she or he
is required to respond to an amorphous set of textual structures
or circumstances. Trained audiences will be prepared to do so, yet
this may be a tall order, if not a complete barrier, for those unaccus-
tomed to such significant degrees of participation in a literary
document.
I accept – if not take for granted – the cyborgian body-machine
coupling as a given condition or apparatus, and prefer to focus on
exploring the details and experience of texts proper. Observing a
digital poem (on a computer monitor or elsewhere), and partici-
pating in its appearance, we commune with the screen. By using
the mouse or keyboard we physically interact with the machine, but
I would not wholly qualify the experience as unification, and opt to
qualify the encounter as watching and sometimes manipulating what
occurs on the poetic stage. ‘User’ is a term commonly employed
to describe the reader or viewer of digital work. I am inclined to
describe the role variably – if a work contains mostly words I might
refer to the audience as readers; if it is largely visual, perhaps viewer;
if a participatory program is being used, user could be appropriate;
there is no singular role we play, given the panoply of digital poetry.
When an author uses software or program code, tinkering with the
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digital device, she or he creatively merges with electronic media
in an expansive formation of expression that uses the screen as a
virtual staging area. Thus my interests in the elements and results
of composition supersede a focus on theoretical implications of the
tools of reception.
A broadened sense of intermediation that draws in Higgins’s
aforementioned concept helps to understand categorically the
foundations of the digital poem. Higgins coined the term Intermedia
to identify art that combines ‘aspects of two heretofore separate
types of art’.26
In his ‘Intermedia Chart’ (1995), Higgins graphically
outlines various ways approaches to expression are combined within
the sphere of Intermedia (Diag. 2.1):
Diag. 2.1. Dick Higgins. “Intermedia Chart” (1995).
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Higgins’ chart provides a useful map of global polyartistry, showing
how crossover between forms indicates a new model of textuality
rather than the inflation of a particular form or movement. Here, an
imagined plane of the chart, drawn between ‘Concrete Poetry’ and
‘Science Art,’ which passes through ‘Sound Poetries’, ‘Poesia Visiva’
and areas unknown (‘?’), directly illustrates the areas of digital poetry
demonstrated at E-Poetry 2003,27
as well as in subsequent E-Poetry
events.28
Digital poets utilize pluralistic forms foregrounding visuality
by letter, picture and animation. Among other effects, imagery or
graphical effects populate works, often more dramatically presented
on a scale larger than (or apart from) language. Beyond animation,
manipulation of positive space, shading and other forms of visual
texture, pictures, colours, and other factors shape digital poems.
Concretism and Fluxus gave permission for poets to explore the
composition of these alternative modes of articulation, and subse-
quently a gradual textual evolution that runs parallel to concurrent
technological developments may be recognized. Intermedia as a
practice became more common in the twentieth century as artists
sought unexplored approaches to expression. New technologies,
which evolved to include computers, also gave artists and writers
devices suited to handle multiple aesthetic associations with much
less difficulty. Given the historical evidence, digital poetry and other
forms of electronic literature represent more than a simple techno-
logical experience – they are manifestations of Intermedia, in which
visual, verbal and sonic forms merge within projected or interactive
artistic structures.
Our literature and literacy have changed: previously we learned
how to read in order to understand the contents of a book; with
expanded modalities we need to re-learn how to experience the
literary-artistic encounter.
Making Choices
A non-linear, often interactive condition of textuality presents the
reader/participant with choices, through which she or he takes part
in a possibly unique reading experience. As demonstrated in studies
of hypertext such as The Electronic Labyrinth, primary challenges
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presented in the unfamiliar textual constructions include disorien-
tation (getting lost in the expressive structure), cognitive overload
(having to process mentally an abundance of information), and
identifying ‘context clues’ (finding subtle, potentially valuable infor-
mation).29
The ways in which digital texts perform amplify the need
for its audience to unravel artistic information in new ways.
Projected and participatory texts are performative events emerging
‘across codes and circuitry within the computer and in response to
interactions from the reader’.30
One of the most important charac-
teristics of electronic literature is that for readers ‘the goal is not
reaching the end … but rather the journey itself’.31
To surmount the
variable contexts and conditions or predicaments of digital poetry,
the audience needs to attend to the structure of the surface of the
poem closely, be willing to inhabit a mentally active state in order to
orchestrate its elements, absorb content, and build a sense of the
work through the accumulation of a series of textual encounters. On
the other side of the production, contemporary modes of compo-
sition offer authors an abundance of choices. Deliberate decisions
faced by authors, made available amidst a wide range of possibilities,
function to establish overall parameters and the ultimate appearance
of the digital poem. In an interview with Marina Corrêa, Augusto de
Campos observes that digital poetry opens up many possibilities for
the reception of poetic forms. While acknowledging interaction may
be limited to ‘incisive forms, suggested by the author’, he makes
the point that, with digital means, poetic form(s) can be recon-
structed in ‘unlimited ways’ and ‘offers resorts of all types, even of
entirely automatized compositions that are free from the personal
interference of the author and the receptor’.32
Further, celebrates de
Campos, ‘anyone can do whatever he wants with any text’; in the
quantity of possibilities, each of which contains its own particular
challenges, the genre thus ‘ends up inducing a search for quality’.33
Negotiating the combinations of creative attributes of language (and
other expressive modes) and media/technology is still a relatively
new task, which remains a largely experimental activity even if a
classifiable genre exists. What digital poems materially consist of
predicate whatever meaning(s) emerge.
In her E-poetry 2003 lecture ‘It’s Not That, It’s Not That, It’s
Not That: Reading Digital Poetry’, Lori Emerson openly celebrates
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the ‘openness of interpretation and creation’ in digital poetry.34
That digital poetry conglomerates multiple artistic genres, while
complicating communication, permits freedoms for author and critic
alike. Yet if efforts are not made to instruct new audiences how to
approach the consumption of digital literature, and why works are
meaningful, a wider audience may never materialize. I aim to do so
by way of intuitive, circumstantial readings of various works in the
following chapters.
Possible Approaches
I once drafted, and could present, point-by-point instructions on
how-to-read a digital poem. This abandoned document offers basic
technical advice, such as ‘reload the browser to see if the interface
changes’, and portrays reading as a regulated, technical act, repre-
senting only a part of the overall experience of approaching a digital
poem. Classifying, in the broadest of senses, the types of receptive
engagement prompted by new media forms presents little difficulty.
We capture projected works with our senses and mentally process
them; participatory works are mentally captured, and we respond
according to sense or impulse. Critically, this means there are many
possible subjective approaches and frameworks upon which to build
impressions. Sensory registers at play only partly differ from those
demanded by poetry. Stimulation by envisioned sight and sound
effects instigate thought and mental provocations, inciting sensi-
tivity, personal sensibility and response. The media involved create
an atmosphere more expansive than that delivered by printed matter,
involving eyes and ears in a different way, demanding different types
of reception, recognition and interpretation. Expressive variability for
authors leads to multifarious variability in terms of the way readers
can approach and experience the work.
Most of the writing we encounter in our everyday lives essentially
holds straightforward information. Thus the concept of literature
customarily presents itself as an expressive form containing larger
meanings, as something that we expect to take time to become
absorbed in, perhaps in search of discovering something we are
unable to see ourselves. Referencing Jerome McGann, Hayles
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makes the point, however, that ‘meaning is not something literary
texts produce but that for which they search.’35
Thus, in preparing
someone to read a digital poem, or any form of electronic writing,
it is appropriate to issue a warning that ‘meaning’ can be pursued
– or construed – in the assemblage of expressive elements, but
it may not be found. For instance, observing Stuart Moulthrop’s
Hegirascope, one critic writes, ‘you are now entering a labyrinth
where you will not only be clueless as to where you are at any
given point, but your own progression will be decided by the work
itself’, creating a circumstance where ‘we hope to acquire enough
knowledge to get a clear view of the work itself through our explo-
ration of its maze.’36
To invoke an age-old poetic conceit, viewers of
digital poems are advised, as much as possible, to cultivate negative
capability, a sensibility John Keats encouraged where one is ‘capable
of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason’.37
Doing so helps any reader to pass
through oxymoronic, non-sequitur associations and uncommon or
unfamiliar occurrences so often found within digital poems, and may
help in the process of discovering its vitality.
Communication between the vehicle and receiver in printed and
digital materials differs. Conversing with Stefans about reading digital
poetry at E-Poetry 2009 – where critics emphasized close readings
of works produced and artists focused on developing new interfaces
(including games, use of mobile devices) and creating instruments
through which to conduct electronic literature – he opined that the
textual scenario for digital poetry currently involves ‘not compre-
hension but experience’.38
Indicating that the process of reception
involves more than information and data, Stefans’ point succinctly
pertains to the focus of this chapter and this book. Clearly, all sorts
of expressive devices drive contemporary works. Many (if not most)
digital poems on the WWW involve more than text – segments,
sections, components that cannot be read as a poem can be read on
the page.
The staging of digital poems on the screen is my starting point.
Audiences for these works are required to watch closely, registering
what the assemblage’s language contributes. Another helpful notion
worth practising is finding a ‘meme montage’ within the work – a
combination of indicative, perhaps gleaming moments of the text
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revealing what stands out.39
A text can fulfil its purpose by delivering
or enabling a revelatory (transformative) experience in a sequence
that can be of any length. My approach in the case studies below
involves the application of multiple observatory lenses. I study the
overarching shapes of each work – its forms, visual impressions,
language and technology – addressing specific details of importance
and what makes it distinctive. I consider particulars from within each
example, in order to make assertions about a work’s overall results
and position in the genre’s historical continuum.
Collective, or collectible, memorable moments of the poem,
engraining senses – if not sensibilities – are locatable in the
finest texts. In works that include media (sound, etc.), we cannot
escape from its effects, which may partly distract us and must be
considered as part of the overall experience of the poem. During
and after projected pieces, we may consider the experience from
whatever angles we individually identify. In interactive pieces, we
have permission to be intuitive but can also consider organized,
methodical approaches in order to absorb cognitively as much
information as possible. Being patient in building a personalized
perspective on a work and knowing to expect everything will not be
delivered at once, as in a book, are crucial. Remaining open to any
possibility is the best way to proceed in the process of perceiving
digital poems.
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3
Case Studies 1:
continuity
diversity in online
works
mIEKAL aND
Seedsigns for Philadelpho (2001)1
Mesostics for Dick Higgins (1998)2
mIEKAL aND has been an important avant garde publisher since
the 1980s (Xexoxial Endarchy) and one of the first hypermedia
poets in the United States.3
He has engineered and participated in
a range of digital poetry and related projects, some of which are
catalogued at his JOGLARScrossmedia beliefware site.4
In this case
study I will look at two commemorations he produced for colleagues
in the contemporary poetics community.
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In 2001, the Brazilian ‘Intersign’ poet Philadelpho Menezes died in
an auto accident. When aND heard this, he composed a multiphasic
Flash movie called Seedsigns for Philadelpho5
(with Allegra Fi Wakest
on vocals) for Menezes. This work begins with a mournful chant and
epigraph and evolves into a sound and animated visual poem that
introduces the narrative’s characters, portrayed as letters made with
seeds. The epigraph presents a quote by Menezes which addresses
specific purposes of the ‘Intersign Poetry’ Menezes cultivated: to
‘confront the realm of visual and sound effects and … try to find
ways to organize signs, in order to fill the technological products
of poetry with the richness of ambiguity and complexity that signs
contain when they are worked as ambivalent phenomena aimed
at interpretation’.6
Let’s look at the way in which Seedsigns for
Philadelpho matches this objective.
Graphics in aND’s ‘prehistoric’ Macintosh-based works were
rudimentary due to the software (and terminals) he used in the
1980s. Comparatively, a much less raw – i.e. a smoother and refined
– realization of these effects is found in Seedsigns for Philadelpho,
which at points embodies the frenetic textual characteristic of aND’s
early kinetic works, while alternatively offering a gentle and spirited
testimonial for Menezes. Using Flash’s capacity to orchestrate
animated synthetic (i.e. processed) images and sounds, aND put
into motion visual elements chosen so as to represent growth that
could arise (or result) from Menezes’ passing through the ideas he
cultivated while living. Seedsigns was made with the eight letters
of Menezes’s name (i.e., p, h, i, l, a, d, e, o), combined with a
polyphonic, haunting soundtrack featuring percussion and voice; the
results are fluid and cinematic.7
The audio-verbal component consists
of a chant that begins with Menezes’s first name followed by syllabic
soundings of the letters; together these establish the work’s aural
foundation. A linear, projected narrative begins by introducing each
of the seedsigns, spelling the subject’s name letter-by-letter. As the
animation progresses, words formed by these kinetic anagram-
matic seedsigns (‘pop,’ ‘pod,’ ‘pad,’ ‘had’) are mirrored, enlarged and
layered, as in Diag. 3.1.
Letters in Menezes’ name continuously transform into a series
of smaller words, each containing thematic significance – as in
‘pop’ above, which represents something that has suddenly burst,
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Case Studies 1 39
i.e. the poet’s life. aND transmits plausible messages regarding the
forcefulness of Menezes and his ideas in combinations found in the
seedsigns’ fleeting strings; ‘had pop pad,’ for example, indicates
intersign methods as an explosive tableau on which a writer can
operate. Concluding this phase of Seedsigns for Philadelpho, the
letters p, l, o, d, and e enter from different areas at the edge of
the screen, forming a line from which the word ‘ODE’ emerges
and expands, at least partially indicating the work’s function as an
exalted song for a fellow visual poet. Multifaceted visual aspects of
the animation, texturally interesting due to the character and colour
of the seeds, do not impede reception here; rather, they bestow on
the work a type of intrigue that responds to intersign poetry’s call
for ambiguity. aND’s use of language (seen and heard, mono
syllabic
and polyphonic) transcends decorative identity and is, thus far,
decipherable.
aND then imparts a stylistic shift through his use of kinetic permu-
tation, which begins to obfuscate the poem. Anagrams have been a
feature of poetry since at least the third century B.C. when Lycophron
included anagrams on the names of Ptolemy and his queen, Arsinoë,
in a poem about the siege of Troy entitled Cassandra.8
Anagrams
have served various functions in poetry, particularly to cloak names
and other types of information. However, aND’s use of anagrams
Diag. 3.1. mIEKAL aND. Seedsigns for Philadelpho.
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Case Studies 1 41
is far more complex – and certainly more demanding on viewers
– because permutations occur quickly. Four letter words appear on
four lines, set up on a loop, each of which repeats a different number
of times, atop a shifting background pattern of visually processed
seeds, enlarged and green in tone, as in Diags. 3.2 and 3.3.
Rapid transitions between words pass too quickly to be read
conventionally.9
Given the number of words in each line (6, 3, 5, 4),
360 word combinations are possible, and while every combination is
not presented, an exorbitant amount of visual activity occurs during
this approximately eighteen-second section. By varying the number
of words in the loops of each line, aND enables more deviation of
appearance in the combinations appearing on the screen. A viewer
has to register words, mentally connecting those that stand out
to form a poem; along the way the viewer may discover a type of
lyric within them, given the possibility of rhyme (as in ‘dial’ and
‘pile’ in Diag. 3.3). Words chosen by aND are poetic in that they
provide openings through which the receiver momentarily transfers
perception or consciousness from one place to another. Positing the
poem as homage, we can see how language begins to function in
this capacity by virtue of the words chosen for the opening line, e.g.
‘heal,’ ‘hope,’ ‘held,’ ‘heed,’ ‘hide,’ ‘head’.10
Screen captures, as above,
can be used to isolate sensible fragments of poetic speech, e.g.
hope/deep/loop/pile, Diag. 3.2, which perhaps self-reflexively reveal
instruction as to the work’s meaning (or what messages it contains).
Invoking ‘hope’, for example, we cannot know the author’s exact
connotation, but several come to mind. Is it inspiration – finding
hope in the idea that Menezes’ artistic and theoretical work becomes
known and/or more widely realized? Is hope itself a deep looping
pile? Should we look for hope in aND’s poem, which gives back, in
gratitude, for Menezes’ efforts?
aND’s composition serves to transform grief for loss into
something positive. In other words, ‘Heed’ (Diag. 3.3) represents a
call to listen to, perceive and learn from the departed subject. Words
selected have an overall poetic function through their suggestive
(but not conclusive) properties, method of presentation and level of
variability. Viewers familiar with Menezes’ work may contemplate
connections between words chosen, how they are arranged and
Menezes’ genre-fusing theories.11
Rather than incorporate archetypal
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forms of intertextuality, Menezes promoted a ‘network of connec-
tions based on technological links made available by hypermedia;
a network of associations set up between the data of the poem,
which refer to each other’.12
He practised this in a context that privi-
leged suggestion over explanation. aND, by mechanically associating
words (anagrams) with diverse yet pointed connotations in combi-
nation with radiant, strategic images, clearly draws from these ideals
while orchestrating Seedsigns for Philadelpho.
Drawn into the poem by language and other effects, viewers
capture fragments, possibly to the point of being temporarily hypno-
tized by mesmerizing sounds and flashing, layered imagery. Although
different interpretations of the combinations of words are possible,
any viewer should begin to grasp a sense of the poem’s scope after
watching it several times. A direct message in the arrangement of
letters is sometimes unclear if not insensible, but the poem estab-
lishes its domain through its mode of strict order, reflecting the
way nature and organic communication offer creative possibility.
Perhaps aND could have fashioned an aleatoric setting or a script
that randomized the permutation, thus making them different each
time, but that may have subverted his intention to pay homage to
Menezes.
Seedsigns for Philadelpho is a classic animated digital poem: a
linear presentation of media elements synthesized through Flash.
At least two of aND’s authorial approaches make the work difficult
to read: the poem does not follow ordinary syntactical arrangement
and the anagrams appear in series of briskly changing lines. The
words assembled do not straightforwardly elicit meaning, and speed
of presentation inhibits the ability to read with ease. Its hand-spun
elements – combining organic iconography and digital technology –
propel and elevate the aesthetic qualities of the poem, rendering rich
poetic principles. A grouping of letters (individual units in appearance
and sound) become multifaceted characters in the work, collected
and then energetically recollected to deliver expression. The poem
sustains itself through a type of recycling in its verbal components.
Working directly with a piece of hardware (a scanner) and carefully
arranging hundreds of seeds into letters, aND regulates shape and
colour so as to present visual contrast, texture and change. Formal
elements in the work – a coded articulation and an articulation of
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 42 12/12/2011 14:31

Case Studies 1 43
language – contain poetic symbolism and offer a spectacular setting
for the solemn yet also frenzied verbal manifestations found within.
Now let us look at another commemoration created by aND,
Mesostics for Dick Higgins. In contrast to Seedsigns for Philadelpho,
aND’s Mesostics for Dick Higgins is monophasic; its sensorial
staging is homogeneous throughout. The poem’s rendering is by
design consistent, never varying from its jarring kinetic depiction of
language. However, in spite of this ostensible one-dimensionality,
aND achieves artistic valency through his choice and method of
representing verbal content. Fragmentary linguistic delivery and
overall technical processes combine to complicate its reception.
Dynamically, despite the differing compositional approach,
computational methods and appearance, Mesostics for Dick Higgins
corresponds with Seedsigns for Philadelpho in two respects. As a
foundation aND implements automated loops of words, the compi-
lation of which produces mesostic poems commemorating Higgins.13
aND’s poem, mined from Higgins’ book foewombwhnw (1969)14
,
arranges words into successive, incessant eleven line formations (a
line for each letter of the subject’s name), as in this example:
subsiDized
Is
reCultivating
worK
someHow
antI-religious
judGes
brinG
utilItarian
meaninglessNess
juStified.15
In this poem, words shift tectonically and almost uniformly. As in
Seedsigns for Philadelpho, aND programs looped lines to appear in
the same ordered pattern for a set amount of time when the piece
is activated, in this case for one second, according to the code.16
However, the timing sequence becomes skewed or disjointed
because each of the eleven lines constantly opens and closes, and
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 43 12/12/2011 14:31

the volume of processing necessary at every moment varies the
speed of presentation depending on the local computer’s capabil-
ities. Delays of computational processing create an ongoing visual
stagger, practically ensuring that output on the screen is never quite
identical; it is always close to being co-ordinated but is not. Without
concretely synchronized lines, text appearing on the screen – which
passes too quickly to read any single iteration as a whole – steadily
varies. A reader faces a constantly shifting poem that eludes full
capture, unless s/he preserves a screenshot of it.17
Since aND does
not present the poem as a series of still images, however, we know
the work is intentionally bombastic, purposefully inundating the
viewer with a panoply of Higgins’ words.
When a fragment of the poem is captured, readable passages
emerge – abstract on the surface and in need of creative inter-
pretation. Engaged readers can take time and piece together,
word-by-word, overall results of the pre-structured but automated
utterance. Even then, however, specific meaning may be elusive.
Analyzing the example presented above, for instance, separate
sensibilities can be cobbled together: that assistance (subsidization)
of some sort serves to further promote (recultivate) labour, and
that people without something to believe in (anti-religious judges)
bring useful meaninglessness. Establishing connection between
the two parts involves effort. The poem turns at ‘someHow’; fusing
the seeming disconnection between beginning and end is the
reader’s responsibility. How does the partly happenstance conglom-
eration of Higgins’ vocabulary form to say something about people
who are not religious? Do ‘antI-religious/judGes’ justify ‘utilItarian/
meaninglessNess’? Is ‘utilItarian/meaninglessNess’ something to be
celebrated, or not? Significant work is already required of readers
who get to the point where they ask such questions and they must
exercise further poetic interpretation to proceed. The fact that this
poem can spark such interpretations with words removed from
their original context demonstrates the provocative qualities of the
original choices and source of language, fortified by the digital poet’s
treatment of them.
Many different, fleeting sets of verbal juxtapositions occur. Some
combinations are less comprehensible, and reading the poem as
it runs prohibits such clinical availability (fixity) of any emergent
9781441165923_txt_print.indd 44 12/12/2011 14:31

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