Friday 13 December 2013

The materialities of digital poetics - an old essay from the MA days...

I haven't written an academic essay for a few years now, and writing a lot of Young Adult fiction kind of rewires your brain in completely another way. In 2008 this is what I was thinking about. Quite frankly, I am both impressed at my own academic loquaciousness and utterly confused about what it all means.

Using a detailed range of examples, discuss the relationship between the materialities of digital poetics and that of the book and / or recent and current writing practice. Try to refer to how your own practice and practical interests relate to these issues.


Like any medium, the realm of digital poetics houses and implicates its own particular structures and requirements for writing. As Loss Glazier discusses in Digital Poetics, from this point of view, the internet and/or the digital forum is no different to the “new” development of the medium of film or that of the novel in its time; we are, therefore, tasked with finding ways to critique and understand the way writing, specifically poetry, works in this new form.

In this essay I will look at the following issues engendered by a study of digital poetics and how they relate to the materiality of poetry: the notion of materiality being the physical, and the relationship between the body and the text as a body; the philosophy of the link; dynamism; the role of the author and the philosophical issues of cyberspace and the infinite. I will also look at my own work in relation to these issues.

Using digital poetry as a medium consists of a wealth of considerations. Instead of putting pen to paper and making a permanent mark, one is manipulating identical and standardised magnetic marks on a screen. What consequences does this have? It makes the text potentially interactive and constantly changeable. It means there is no “original” version – every version of the work is in a sense the original, as the work is re-imaged and reactivated every time by a different user at a different time. If published online on the internet, it means millions of people have instant access to it and it can be written online – writing while your audience watches. It is dynamic in the sense it can be animated to move, change colour and link to sound and image.

Glazier considers poetry to be a particularly suitable form for modern, innovative poetry because of poetry’s avoidance of the traditional omnipotent “I” of narrative. Rather, its concern with the multiple in discourse connects with the “polysemous, constantly changing multiple-author text known as the web,” (Digital Poetics, p22). In discussing the character constructs of William Gibson’s Neuromancer where at least one character has a cyberspace existence rather than one of “form”, N Katherine Hayles also refers to the ability of digital text to foreground the medium and the fictionality of traditional forms:

“The displacement of presence by pattern thins the tissue of textuality, making it a semi-permeable membrane that allows awareness of the text as an informational pattern to infuse into the space of representation,” (How We Became Posthuman, p40)

Glazier also notes that Jerome McGann considers poetry to be particularly conversant with the digital form because:

“The object of poetry is to display the textual position. Poetry is language that calls attention to itself, that takes its own textual activities as its ground subject,” (Jerome McGann quoted in Digital Poetics, p21). Similarly, Glazier notes that “language is a procedure to reveal the working of writing,” (p32).

As Marshall McLuhan said in Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man, “the medium is the message”. This has a strong relevance to the understanding of digital poetry, as McLuhan considered the medium of a message more important than its perceived “meaning”. For instance, that what is shown on television is unimportant; it is television’s impact on our lives as a medium that is profound. He also thought that the particular medium that an individual experienced a particular content through would inevitably influence the understanding of that content. Modern poetic practice has a strong emphasis on form and the relevance of materiality on the content of the poem – so much so that, at best, the poem is its process and vice versa, and to ignore the aspects that engineer the poem is to wilfully suspend oneself in the erroneous sense of belief.

Modern poetry prefers to be explicit about its terms and conditions, and does not expect these to be subsumed seamlessly by the reader in an attempt to verify the godlike status of the author and the “essential truth” of the work. Additionally, as Glazier points out, multimedia does not simply provide an opportunity for convenient juxtaposition of sources, but for the interweaving of media to create a harmonious and (somewhat) holistic whole.

The weaving of multimedia sources in digital poetics is an important aspect of creating a multitudinous text with a nonlinear narrative. By linking to other sources from your original starting point, and sometimes by following a seemingly eternal sequence of “doors” in a labyrinthine journey, the ability of the internet to link from one place to another is an essential part of the idea that the medium affects the message. This can be seen in Diane Slattery’s Alphaweb, where the reader can link from one poem to the next from a series of multiple choices. Hence, the use of linking presents the reader with a non-predetermined outcome to their reading experience. As Glazier says, “electronic poems are not tied to the linearity of the page; this is not an end of linearity but an emergence of multiple linearities,” (Digital Poetics, p35).

Glazier also considers the ability to link to other sources as similar to Freudian parapraxis – when the mind shifts into an associative disposition and “links” apparently disparate images/sounds/words together (this could be described as the ultimate aim for a poet whose goal is to make eternally new associations between sources for the reader, and express the energy of the work via new expressions and imagery that have a strong, if unconscious, impact on the reader).

This idea, particularly closely associated with synaesthesia (a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway – definition on Wikipedia), is something that has inspired another of my own projects, the Flash Colour Spectrum project. Briefly, this is a series of 8 panels that follow the human-perceived colour spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, White) that individually contain 8 synaesthetic associations/links per page. My aim is to be able to animate these pages to be able to blend in and out of each other, both to imitate the spectrum, to question the notion of the spectrum as a continuum and where one colour starts and another finishes; also to pay a small homage to Charles Olson’s ideas about energy in a text. This work is literally about energy – colour is by definition energy vibrating at differing levels. Overall, again, the medium is the message – associative linking of “object” and “subject” – the colour and my synaesthetic response to it – and the eternal circle of the spectrum, which confers a nonlinear text (although not totally random either).

Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Sand is one text that philosophically suggests the infinite sense of the internet, and also explores the threatening notion of a book without end where each page is always different and where the reader can never reassure themselves by returning to the beginning or any familiar previous page. In the story, the protagonist becomes so afraid of the book that he hides it away from another discovery. The multiplicity it contains is disturbing to him, and the threat of an eternally nonlinear “narrative” haunts Borges. This, it can be said, describes somewhat the cognitive dissonance that the reader of contemporary experimental poetry experiences, if accustomed to a beginning, middle and end and a recognisable structure when reading.

Aside from the interesting reflection that The Book of Sand precipitated the internet, an infinite and boundless source of linked pages, the book itself is the medium of infinity, as it has an infinite number of pages that can never be returned to. The book is also the message, and the message is the uncertainty and discomfort of the reader in the face of a lack of conclusion.
The Book of Sand is also a fictional book, a book within a book, which itself is a fascinating paradox that foregrounds the essential falsity of the book as a “realistic” structure.

The materiality of (traditional) books and bodies is something that N Katherine Hayles discusses in How We Became Posthuman. Both are forms of information transmission and storage, incorporate encoding in a material substrate (the body is material and is “programmed” by DNA; the book is a physical object and its information is encoded in written form on pages and bound) and cannot easily be changed/amended/destroyed. Both body and book are a physical object, and both are a space of representation, or message. Therefore, Hayles makes the organic link between the body and the message – and present the realisation that to change one changes the other. Therefore, again, the medium is the message and vice-versa, because they are linked so inextricably.

I have tried to address this idea of body/text and message in a new piece of work on DNA. As DNA is the programming code of the body and computer code, be it HTML or ASCII, is the programming code of digital poetics, I am interested in how they correlate. My first action was to look at the existing programming code that lay “under” an entry about DNA on Wikipedia. I then copied this into a Word document and looked through it at text that might seem interesting and potentially for use in poetics.

After finding the following list of commands I thought they might be interesting to use to create a new “poem”, so I took a 4-line excerpt and used it as a repeating “verse” in a DNA-shaped image created in Photoshop. The “verse” is the horizontal text; the twisting vertical text was the following text also taken from the original programming code.

Vertical text (can be imaged as the verses of the piece):



var stylepath = "/skins-1.5";

var wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

var wgScriptPath = "/w";

var wgScript = "/w/index.php";

var wgServer = "http://en.wikipedia.org";

var wgCanonicalNamespace = "";

var wgCanonicalSpecialPageName = false;

var wgNamespaceNumber = 0;

var wgPageName = "DNA";

var wgTitle = "DNA";

var wgAction = "view";

var wgRestrictionEdit = ["autoconfirmed"];

var wgRestrictionMove = ["sysop"];

var wgArticleId = "7955";

var wgIsArticle = true;

var wgUserName = null;

var wgUserGroups = null;

var wgUserLanguage = "en";

var wgContentLanguage = "en";

var wgBreakFrames = false;

var wgCurRevisionId = "169270727";

var stylepath = "/skins-1.5";

var wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

var wgScriptPath = "/w";

var wgScript = "/w/index.php";

var wgServer = "http://en.wikipedia.org";

var wgCanonicalNamespace = "";

var wgCanonicalSpecialPageName = false;

var wgNamespaceNumber = 0;

var wgPageName = "DNA";

var wgTitle = "DNA";

var wgAction = "view";

var wgRestrictionEdit = ["autoconfirmed"];

var wgRestrictionMove = ["sysop"];

var wgArticleId = "7955";

var wgIsArticle = true;

var wgUserName = null;

var wgUserGroups = null;

var wgUserLanguage = "en";

var wgContentLanguage = "en";

var wgBreakFrames = false;

var wgCurRevisionId = "169270727";




Horizontal text (can be imagined as the chorus of the piece):

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="#Major_and_minor_grooves"><span class="tocnumber">1.1</span> <span class="toctext">Major and minor grooves</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="#Base_pairing"><span class="tocnumber">1.2</span> <span class="toctext">Base pairing</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="#Sense_and_antisense"><span class="tocnumber">1.3</span> <span class="toctext">Sense and antisense</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2"><a href="#Supercoiling"><span class="tocnumber">1.4</span> <span

I liked the repetition of these intriguing terms, which although generated from code, present a massive arena of interpretation, onomatopoeic dynamism (“coiling” “pairing”) and even self-referential irony, (“sense and antisense”). They have poetic qualities because of their use of repetition of words, each time slightly customised for the purpose of the particular line. Additionally, using this kind of data-as-poetic-text opens up the potential to use the programming code’s use of special characters as a dynamic form of punctuation, guidance for reading and for breath (i.e., >< could be interpreted by a reader as a pause)– as in Charles Olson’s famous essay, Projective Verse. You can see the finished result on my attached image.

However, this is the first part of my considerations of DNA, and in particular I became interested with the potentially generative aspects of working with this embodied code. In genetics and when creating a new gene, a new DNA code made of two “ladders” of protein code is “zipped” up together to make a complete gene. This thought gave me my first idea of being able to animate a DNA poem in Flash, so that two “ladders” of randomly generated words from computer code, a little like the above vertical text example, could be zipped up on-screen and generate a poem.

From this desire to make generative work based on the idea of DNA and code (on which premise a very interesting work by Andreas Muller-Pohle is based, Blind Genes (2002), cited in Digital Art by Christiane Paul), I progressed onto an idea inspired by genetic engineering. In the process of making a new gene, half a new gene (one “ladder”, if you like) is dipped into a bowl containing a “soup” of proteins – always C, G, A and T (Cytozine, Guanine, Adenine and Thymine, respectively). The molecules bond to the existing structure and a new gene is made. Additionally, Adenine and Thymine always bond together, as do Cytozine and Guanine. So, from a poetic mindset, you can see that C and G together and A and T together make a subset of potential poetry code.

From a generative point of view and using the image of the bowl of protein (word) soup, I next imaged a stage of the project where, rather like William Burroughs’ cutup method (, I could place 20 random words beginning with C and 20 random words beginning with G in a bowl and pull them out, ordering them into a randomised “zip”, according to which words came out in what order, only making sure that each line had a linked C and G. This process also has the potential to be animated, both in the zipping up and in the random generation.

In this work and in the work of genetics, to change the message is to change the medium (to link back to Hayles), especially if the change in the “message” (encoding) refuses to make the usual links between C and G, A and T. The medium (gene) will become mutated if a different encoding process is followed. Hayles discusses the notion of mutation as something that distorts a pattern in information, after the theory of informatics: that information is identified with choices that reduce uncertainty. Where mutation occurs, there is also a jump-off point for text to go in a new direction. In the arena of modern poetics, this supports the aims of making-strange and unfamiliarity in avant-garde processes used to create and present poetry. Mutation makes something new:

“The catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic… a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained,” (Posthuman, p33)

Loss Glazier discusses the notion of “seams” he found in the world of the digital through its being of one language being combined with another – computer code mixed with “recognised” language. Marjorie Perloff decribed Charles Bernstein’s work as:

“..playfully exploits pun, anaphora, epiphora, metathesis, epigram, anagram and neologism to create a seamless web of reconstituted words” (Digital Poetics, p36)

It is not too much of a leap to consider a zip a seam – a thing that joins – and Glazier confirms that poetic language “is a seam through which seep multiple parts of language” (p38). Hence the materiality of this work directly reflects its message, and vice-versa: the concept of the code-forming structure of DNA is described through the action of its generation. The message is how the body (text) is formed; the medium shows it being formed. The final “content”, in terms of the actual line-up of the C and G words, in line with McLuhan, is almost irrelevant (it would be different every time if accessed via a (reasonably) random online word-generator). All that is important is that poetic language has been created via the seam that joins multiple parts of language.

*

Where the poem on the page written by hand could be said to contain an idiosyncratic “essence” of the writer, when the work produced is channelled through the ownership vector (reference: Wark, The Hacker Manifesto) of the publication process, the reader is dissociated from the author and the author is removed from the production process. Not so with the digital realm for the poet, as this is somewhere she can produce and publish instantly online for immediate consumption. Immediacy, a multitextual approach and use of multiple linearities are some of the methods that characterise the energy that animates digital poetry and helps return poetry to its original reason for being, like all art – to challenge and develop existing modes of expression. Recognition of the material structures that “meaning” rests on – or recognising that meaning is articulated by those structures – seems essential for the development of poetry as a form, and by wider implication, serves the study of social structures and an understanding of the (frustratingly) complex sense that there are no definitives and no full stops in our daily, fractured experience.



Anna McKerrow

2592 words
Bibliography


De Giovanni, Norman Thomas (trans) and Clarke, Maximus, The Book of Sand: A Hypertext Puzzle http://artificeeternity.com/bookofsand/

Glazier, Loss Pequeno, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, The University of Alabama Press, (Tuscaloosa and London, 2002)

“William Burroughs and the Composite Text”, Oliver Harris (2007) on www.realitystreet.org, http://realitystudio.org/scholarship/cutting-up-the-archive-william-burroughs-and-the-composite-text/

Hayles, N Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, (London 1999)

Olson, Charles, “Projective Verse” in Selected Writings of Charles Olson, eds Robert Creeley (1950, New York)

Paul, Christiane, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson World of Art. (London, 2003)

Slattery, Diana Reed, Alphaweb, http://iat.ubalt.edu/guests/alphaweb/

Wark, Mackenzie, The Hacker Manifesto http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html