Monica Danci
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
danci_monica@yahoo.com
Digital Poetry at the Beginning of the Third Millennium
Abstract: The term “digital poetry” covers a wide range of poetry from simple electronic mimicries of printed texts on the internet to experimental and playful language art, involving programming, multimedia or animation. In this essay, I restrict myself to the digital poetry created around the beginning of the third millennium, which exposes, and sometimes subverts the various binary oppositions that support the reader’s dominant ways of thinking, making possible a richness of reading and getting “completed” only in the process of their performance. These works are meant to affect the reader’s non-virtual world, in order to give him a deeper understanding of life, of processes. But in the end, what else does poetry do but alienate clichés?
Keywords: Digital literature; Interactive language; Hypermedia; Creative reading; Three-dimensional environment.
“… everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”
Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography[1]
Internet technology has opened up new possibilities for the dissemination and also for the creation of poetry. The sites containing archives with the poems, biography, bibliography and even the photograph and audio recording of a poet, the poetry exhibits organized around themes, the forums where anyone can post their own work, the extensive links to other sites show that poetry is one of the most popular subjects on the Internet, having an extraordinarily large audience.
Still, it is difficult to talk about poetry on the web because of the divergent directions poets are going within the new medium. A search for poetry results in hundreds of seemingly unrelated sites covering a broad area that often ranges from simple electronic mimicries of printed text on the internet, poetic spaces on weblogs and the archives of ‘old print’ poems, to incorporate creative, experimental and playful language art involving programming, multimedia and animation, to which the term “digital poetry” usually applies.
Digital poetry thus refers to kinetic, interactive or digital sound poetry, digital ‘textscapes’ with poetry features, poetry generators and text-based installations, intersecting literary avant-garde, visual and concrete poetry and software art.[2]
In this essay, I will restrict myself to the digital poetry created around the beginning of the third millennium, which usually integrates diverse simulated medial layers modulating and transforming into each other and to which can be attributed characteristics like integration (the combining of art forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression), interactivity (the ability of the user to manipulate his experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media), hypermedia (the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal associations), immersion (the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional environment) and nonlinear presentation.[3]
Although digital poetry has often been criticised for its mannerism, for its self-centred technological effects, referring to nothing but itself and its aesthetic qualities, for its depthless image which lacks profundity and hermeneutical depth, for its shift from symbolic concerns to sensual stimulation, for its limiting codes and databases, almost all its important concerns can be traced back to its historical predecessors, the reflection upon the concrete language material, the transgression of genre boundaries, multilinearity and the exploration of spatial structures, movement and interactivity being key strategies which are vital concepts in the historical avant-garde.
Likewise, many digital poets and critics consider that computers finally put into effect the conceptual ideas of the previous avant-gardes: conceptual movement becomes actual movement, static becomes animated, while the verbivocovisual structures explored by concrete poetry are technologically enhanced with graphic and audio software.[4]
As Anna Katharina Schaffner says, “the signs that the digital poets use are substantially different from the signs that concrete poets used: firstly, they can move across the screen, they can be animated and programmed to perform a predetermined routine, and thus also gain a temporal dimension. Secondly, they can explore all dimensions of the sign at the same time simultaneously. Thirdly, they are equipped with a halo of technical meaning, and are, in some cases, both message and code at the same time. Fourthly and fifthly, signs are changeable “flickering” images rather than fixedly inscribed marks. And lastly, digital signs gain an additional volumetric dimension: relationships of depth, foreground and background, proximity and distance can be simulated.”[5]
Indeed, in digital poetry letters shrink, shimmer, flicker, shrivel, twitch, shake (Emmett Williams, “The Voy Age”), fulfilling the tasks of images (Ana Maria Uribe’s series of “anipoems”), float over the yellow screen, provoking semantic confusion (Giselle Beiguelman, “Recycled“), they can be superimposed upon others, viewed from all sides, rotated and turned around their own axis (Mary Flanagan, “[the House]“), cut into pieces and recombined with alien letter material, drawn and deleted (Marko Niemi, “Concrete Stir Fri Poems”), audibly distorted (Takaumi Furuhashi, “Kotoba Asobi”).
Describing the many possibilities for the spatial use of language onscreen, Stephanie Strickland also describes the perpetual change of these dynamic signs through the effects of rotation, pan, zoom, scaling, translation, split screen, flip, pitch, yaw, roll, overlays, speed control, fly-through, highlighting, generativity, micromovement, stratification of content, and navigational choice.[6]
In the same time, programmed and networked media require a surfing, multitasking, creative kind of reading, a deep, focused and mobilized attention. The user is allowed to alter the position of words by means of clicking and dragging (Julien d’Abrigeon, “Horde d’ordre et de horreur”), to change the speed and colour of the gliding text, to determine its direction (Takaumi Furuhashi, “Kotoba Asobi”), to “do”, “stop” and “discipline” the poem that drifts around on screen (Jim Andrews, “Seattle Drift”) and even to shoot the fragmented poetic sequences entering the field of vision, collapsing the boundaries between poem and game (Jim Andrews’ “Arteroids”).
The speed and the duration of reception can also be staged in advance. Talking about e-literature, Stephanie Strickland notices that it requires a new and different kind of time-space experience that is inherent in a networked environment. Among the screen options for language time, the reader can find the ability to pace the text’s appearance, the ability to change the appearance based on whether it is a first or later reading and the creation of time lapses, time scans, sequences, replays, freezes, resumptions of text, altered speed, stroboscopic flashing.
The time of the privileged instant, providing for the time of multiple outcomes, the time for putting things back together, creating new forms of continuity—all of these are aesthetic issues with a poetic history in the play of metamorphoses […][7]
Still, meaning and significance are not completely dependent on the material itself, for they form in the mind of the reader, who synthesizes various tiers of influence.
The assembling, reassembling and disassembling of the texts in ongoing, potentially infinite ways are often related to the “cut up”. “If we acknowledge that our ideas are drawn not always from a blank tablet but are instead indebted to the work of those whom we have read and heard and seen, we see that much of what we do, however original, is cut together from the work of others. More generally, the language we use is gotten not from a blank tablet but from what has gone before. So there is a sense in which even this sort of writing is a cut up or cut together.”[8]
Even if the „cut up” implies a rupture, there is no danger of permanent disruption, for, as says, „one of the things you’d like in a cut up is meaningful association, not just widely combinatorial permutation.” There is something about the cut up that is always eluding the reader, that is compelling and beyond him.
In the same time, the technique of the cut up is strongly connected to the idea of materiality. “William S. Burroughs said about audio tape that when you cut it, the future spills out. When writers and artists use cut-up techniques of all kinds on all types of media, when sound is an inscribable, editable object just as language is—and the same goes for video and other digitizable material information—then language is indeed cracked open in the sense that the fundamental symbols of writing are no longer simply the letters in the alphabet and other typographical marks. Writing is now a larger thing.”[9]
In the arrival of the beeBox (2003), the reader becomes engaged in what … calls “a random- creative reading (a readerly version of William Burroughs’ cut-up and fold-in method) that can be classified under Katherine Hayles’ modus of cyborg reading”[10] with layered strata, hidden openings, crosscutting pathways, links between different world levels, in a spatial-temporal process of word-objects shaping, reshaping, appearing and disappearing that becomes increasingly chaotic as the reader starts to interfere.
In learning how to navigate in this immersive and multisensory field, the reader can rely on his embodied existence, for our relationship to space is structured by the experience of the body. The poetic experience is enhanced as he acquires or invents new reading patterns that depend on spatial arrangement:
Space in which bodies may travel implies a space that may be shared. The private space of the printed book is associated with solitary reading or one person reading aloud to a group. The space of a three-dimensional environment will be able to accommodate public, concurrent readings. I propose literary environments where the amount of text revealed increases as more people join in to read. Getting the whole story would require a critical mass of readers.[11]
The three-dimensional text draws the observer into the object of vision, within and among the letterforms. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional perspective, no one point of view is given precedence, movement in the text-space producing an ever-shifting field of view, modifying the apparent relationships between words-as-objects. As the reader changes position, words from different verses merge and add another layer of reading while his use of language changes accordingly, capturing the ambiguity that goes hand-in-hand with multiple perspectives and shifting connections:
The beeBox likewise ushers an explorative kind of reading that resists the sense of an ending. There are hints of the evanescence of the momentary (‘this is a collection of moments gone by’; ‘each moment shows a different face’), scattered allusions to crowds and loneliness, to dancing, to speed and velocity – but then you discover that you can discard linear reading strategies and simply pick a phrase to go with another: ‘this is a collection of moments gone by/ to protect me from loneliness’, or ‘this is a collection of moments gone by/ when our blinking memories/ in the stuttered flow of uneven rhythm/ sharpen one mind against another’.[12]
These artificial allusions, effects of representations that are in turn the effect of other matrixes, remind us of the dizzying abyss of Nelson’s Another Emotion: “…I am standing on what looks/ like a rock, near the centre/ of what appears to be an ocean”. Even if it appears to be solid and unmoving, the rock is merely a simulation, far from being a solid anchor point. For there are “more rocks, with more patterns,/ concealing others who are also hiding”, while the reader can see other patterns emerging from behind the text blocks.[13]
The act of giving something a meaning is an infinite process because every signified ends up being the signifier of another signified.
Still, is it all right to give things a name? Let us remember Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift”, in which the irony results from the contrast between the poem’s pretending to have lost its original disposition and the result of restoring it. Commenting on the poem, Roberto Simanowski[14] observes: “I drifted from the scene, says the poem when it is in proper order, but ends up all the more in the void when you try to help it. As if the order of the lines went against the real order of being, an order of permanent shifts and of the unspeakable. As the theory of différance, whose playful adaptation “Seattle Drift” seems to be, tells us, to name something is to reduce it.”
Talking about “Asteroids” the same critic reminds us of Rilke’s mourning on those strong in giving names which ends with the claim to abstain: “Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern./ Die Dinge singen hör ich so gern./ Ihr rührt sie an: sie sind starr und stumm./ Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um.”[15]
In their “unfinished works”, which get „completed” only in the process of their performance, making possible a richness of reading, digital poets often seek to expose, and sometimes subvert, the various binary oppositions that support the reader’s dominant ways of thinking, in order to affect his non-virtual world, in order to give him a deeper understanding of life, of processes. But in the end, what else does poetry do but alienate clichés?
Digital poetry is continually redefining itself. The massive growth of the internet and the festivals dedicated in recent years to this kind of poetry have introduced artists to each other’s work, giving birth to a global community on whose ingenuity and poetic thought relies its vitality.
Bibliography
Andrews, Jim: Arteroids at: http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/indexenglish.htm
Andrews, Jim: DIGITAL LANGU(IM)AGE. Language and image as objects in a field Andrews, Jim: Seattle Drift at:
http://www.vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDriftEnglish.html
Andrews, Jim: Stir Frys and Cut Ups at: http://www.vispo.com/StirFryTexts/text.html
Andrews, Jim: The Battle of Poetry against itself and the forces of dullness at: http://www.vispo.com/writings/essays/jimarticle.htm.
Beiguelman, Giselle: Recycled at: http://www.desvirtual.com/recycled/index.htm
Brillenburg Wurth Kiene: Multimediality, intermediality and medially complex digital poetry, RiLUnE, n. 5, 2006., at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/3_brillenburg.pdf
d’Abrigeon, Julien Horde d’ordre et de horreur at: http://tapin.free.fr/ordre.htm
Flanagan, Mary: [theHouse] at: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/flanagan__thehouse.html
Furuhashi, Takaumi: Kotoba Asob. at: http://www.p0es1s.net/p0es1s/bio_e/furu.htm.
Funkhouser, Christopher: Digital Poetry: A look at generative, visual, and interconnected possibilities in its first four decades
Heibach, Karin Wenz: p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004
Karpinska, Aya in the arrival of the beeBox at: http://technekai.com/box/beeBoxPaper.pdf
Karpinska, Aya the arrival of the beeBox at: http://technekai.com/box/theory.html
Katharina Schaffner, Anna: From concrete to digital: the reconceptualisation of poetic space at http://www.netzliteratur.net/schaffner/concrete_to_digital.pdf
Schaffner, Anna Katharina and Andrew Roberts Rhetorics of Surface and Depth in Digital Poetry, at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/roberts_and_schaffner.pdf
Simanowski, Roberto Concrete Poetry in Digital Media. Its Predecessors, its Presence and its Future at: www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/3-Simanowski.htm
Simanowski, Roberto: Fighting/Dancing Words, Jim Andrews’ Kinetic, Concrete Audiovisual Poetry at http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2002/01/10-Simanowski/cramer.htm
Strickland, Stephanie: Born digital at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182942
Uribe, Ana Maria: Anipoems at: http://www.vispo.com/uribe/anipoems.html.
Notes
[1] Cited by Karpinska, Aya in the arrival of the beeBox at: http://technekai.com/box/beeBoxPaper.pdf
[2] Funkhouser, Christopher: Digital poetry: A look at generative, visual, and interconnected possibilities in its first four decades
[3] Brillenburg Wurth Kiene: Multimediality, intermediality, and medially complex digital poetry, RiLUnE, n. 5, 2006., at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/3_brillenburg.pdf
[4] Katharina Schaffner, Anna From Concrete to Digital: The reconceptualisation of poetic space at http://www.netzliteratur.net/schaffner/concrete_to_digital.pdf
[5] Katharina Schaffner, Anna From Concrete to Digital: The reconceptualisation of poetic space at http://www.netzliteratur.net/schaffner/concrete_to_digital.pdf
[6] Strickland, Stephanie: Born digital, at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182942
[7] Strickland, Stephanie: Born digital, at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182942
[9] Simanowski, Roberto: Fighting/dancing words, Jim Andrews’ kinetic, concrete audiovisual poetry at http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2002/01/10-Simanowski/cramer.htm
[10] Brillenburg Wurth Kiene: Multimediality, intermediality, and medially complex digital poetry, RiLUnE, n. 5, 2006., at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/3_brillenburg.pdf
[12] Brillenburg Wurth Kiene: Multimediality, intermediality, and medially complex digital poetry, RiLUnE, n. 5, 2006., at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/3_brillenburg.pdf
[13] Brillenburg Wurth Kiene: Multimediality, intermediality, and medially complex digital poetry, RiLUnE, n. 5, 2006., at http://www.rilune.org/mono5/3_brillenburg.pdf