In fact, I would argue that to the extent “Carnival” is a “dirty” concrete poems par excellence, it now most effectively communicates to us in 2010 that the page, the letter, or the word is just as much a medium that we can read and write as computer software is. And, moreover, one of the ways in which McCaffery generates these tools is through hacking the page or the book in order to renew it, to turn it from a transparent carrier of meaning to an object that is meaningful in itself. That is, “Carnival”—a book experiment from the early 1970s—was made entirely by hand by, as Marjorie Perloff describes it, “placing masks on each of sixteen standard 81/2-by-11-inch pages, arranged in groups of four to make a square (or, strictly speaking, rectangle) measuring 44 by 36 inches. The sixteen pages were then perforated and arranged in sequential book form, accompanied by the Instructions, ‘In order to destroy this book please tear each page carefully along the perforation.’” But what is significant about McCaffery’s project is not just the physical size of the work, and it is not just the fact that one has to destroy the work in order to read it—it is that the typewritten text, the stamps, the various traces of writerly labor and the physical world (in the form of smudges or the slight bleed of ink) turn it into a work in which the surface is the depth and the making of the work is the meaning.

Similarly working explicitly against creating aesthetic objects that are seamlessly enmeshed in a slick, surface-level interface, digital poems that are “code-works” (after digital poets Alan Sondheim, John Cayley, and Mez Breeze) as well as works created by those in the hacker-dominated “demo scene” are also driven by a philosophy of making or, otherwise put, a belief in what designer and president of the Rhode Island School of Design John Maeda calls “dirty hands.” Writing for a blog for Harvard’s business school, Maeda declares “In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it’s six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, ‘2.0.’ Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands.” In this particular article Maeda was endorsing an approach to education and even a lifestyle driven by doing, by physically working with tangible materials (welding, sculpting, weaving etc.)–an approach nicely embodied by some of his early art works such as “Palm Paintings” from 2000 which were a series of boxes on which Maeda painted in a “mix of abstract styles” to then embed “a Palm computer in each of the computers and specifically program each one to visually ‘think’ about what the painting signified.”

But this sort of “dirty hands” approach can just as easily describe digital poems such as Mez Breeze’s “pro][tean][.lapsing.txts” which is an imitation of computer code (written in what she calls “mezangelle”) and thus the code is the poem, the visible, also primarily visual, surface text of the work (this in contrast to the way in which code is almost always the invisible, underlying layer which is responsible for make a different surface text visible). Once again, as with “Carnival,” the text is just as much about making visible the work of coding as it is about what the coding semantically communicates. And it can also nicely describe a whole range of recent open-source, community-driven artistic/cultural phenomenon such as the demo-scene, chiptune music scene, Maker Faire, or any of the burgeoning DIY electronics and robotics movements supported by companies such as Makerbot (a start-up company that creates open-source 3-d printers that you can by for $700-800 and put together yourself) or Arduino (an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments). While I think we can trace the impetus for many of these contemporary digital DIY movements to the arts and crafts movement as well as the growing prominence of artists books that took place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in reaction to rapid industrialization and mechanization—a movement arguably taken up once more by concrete poets from the 1950s and, via McCaffery himself, through the 1970s—the way in which the meaning is in the making as well as in an exploration of surface as depth now seems to be less about the grain of the wood, the binding of the book, the reworking of the physical page and more about how the meaning is in the code, the software, the programming, the circuitry.

For example, “VELOCIDADE” by Ronaldo Azeredo (1957) includes commentary by Haroldo de Campos who writes “The Futurists tried to paint motion. It was an iconic motion, imitative of reality…Azeredo’s poem has a different purpose: its dynamic structure moves—and by itself.” But what does it mean for a structure to move “by itself”? Is it that any repeating pattern is a kind of movement that does not necessarily need to involve actual kinesis?

It seems that Ernst Jandl would say “yes” as he introduces his 1964 untitled poem by declaring “This poem is a film” and not “this poem is like a film.”

Or there’s Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Semi-idiotic poem” which Williams informs us is a “contribution to the semiotic or code-poem genre invented by Decio Pignatari and Luiz Angelo Pinto.” Am I alone in my naïve belief that “code-poem” was a term that emerged out of the digital poetry practices of those such as Alan Sondheim, Mez Breeze et al? What does it mean that, in Florian Cramer’s words, “‘mezangelle’…uses elements of programming language syntax as material” whereas Finlay’s “Semi-idiotic poem,” presumably a code-work equal to any written in Mezangelle, seems to literalize this focus on matter and materiality by presenting us with a poem of non-semantic symbols? Is it possible that code-poems or code-works are the one genre not in the least affected by their medium of presentation?

]]> http://netpoetic.com/2009/08/the-digital-poem-as-a-concrete-poem/feed/ 3 http://netpoetic.com/2009/08/elo-seeking-two-directory-editors/ http://netpoetic.com/2009/08/elo-seeking-two-directory-editors/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:06:59 +0000 lori.emerson http://netpoetic.com/2009/08/elo-seeking-two-directory-editors/ I thought readers of Netpoetic might be interested in this call for job applications.

The Electronic Literature Organization is accepting nominations and applications for two Directory Editors. The positions are part of the NEH-funded “The Electronic Literature Directory: Collaborative Knowledge Management for the Literary Humanities.” The project uses open source content management and social networking software to develop a descriptive metadata vocabulary for the ELO’s comprehensive directory of electronic literature. We seek editors to join a dynamic and growing team distributed at institutions around the world. Editors are hired as consultants on the project at a rate of $3600 for 150
hours of work over an 18 month period. Directory Editors will receive training at an upcoming ELO meeting (to be announced soon). The Directory Editor position is especially suitable for early-career academics and Ph.D. students focused on electronic literature, digital textuality and archiving, and related topics. We welcome nominations of suitable applicants, as well as complete applications. Nominations should include contact information for the nominee and a brief evaluation of the nominee’s suitability for the project. Applications should include a letter indicating interest and suitability for the
project, along with a current CV. Final deadline for applications and nominations is September 30. Send applications and nominations, as well as questions about the position, to Sandy Baldwin clc@mail.wvu.edu.

I’m also curious to hear from you digital poets whether it’s pie-in-the-sky to think that I might also include the poems of yours that I discuss in the book on a CD to ensure stability, long-term access etc.? Or does this sound like a copyright nightmare?

scott and his cold, but happy offspring

But where Scott questions – rightly – the future popularity of e-literature – I can’t help thinking about the two classes I taught on digital poetry last year. These courses were brand-new and full from the first to the last day of class. I now have a waiting list for the digital poetry class I’m teaching in the fall. This is not testament to my teaching but rather to what these students tell me over and over again: thank god I’m finally learning something that’s relevant! Surprising considering how most conventional scholars view these same digital poems as esoteric and “weird.” The future of e-literature lies with these students who will force academic conservatives to make room for it. I hope.

Basically, rather than do what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years (presenting a close-reading of a particular digital poem), the paper will take more of a meta approach. I’m hoping to explore the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of a school of programmers and graphic designers, accreting around the work of John Maeda and the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and now the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), not only neatly echo that of book artists throughout the 20th and early 21st century but are in fact drawn from this long-standing history of the art of book-making. Working explicitly against creating aesthetic objects that are seamlessly enmeshed in a slick, surface-level interface, “code-works” (in digital poet John Cayley’s words) created by those in the hacker-driven “demo scene” as much as those working in digital poetry and/or net-art are driven by a belief in what Maeda calls “dirty hands.” Writing for a blog for Harvard’s business school, Maeda declares “In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it’s six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, ‘2.0.’ Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands.” Given RISD’s long-standing dedication to archiving and creating artists books, it is no coincidence that process-driven programming and the tradition of artists books should be conjoined in the figure of Maeda himself, now President of RISD. In fact, as I argue in this paper, it is the artist book (from those created by Russian Futurist Ilia Zdanevich to to those by Johanna Drucker or produced by The Center for Book Arts in New York City) that laid the groundwork for this turn toward self-conscious, self-reflexive coding as it showed us how to hack the book in order to renew the book, to turn it from a transparent carrier of meaning to an object that is meaningful in itself.

Perhaps far-fetched? Perhaps.