Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Morris on page 1)

Notes and Quotes
Adalaide Morris (beginning on page 1)

There is a lag between two kinds of knowledge: what we know because it is what we see and do, and what we know because it is what we think (1).

From a posthuman point of view, we are not the fully self-conscious beings imagined by Enlightenment thinkers but cybernetic organisms joined in continuous feedback loops with media and information technologies (4).

A common element in the use of the term “posthuman” is a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines (4).

The most generative approaches to discussions of the computer as an expressive engine tend to be those that work from bottom up rather than top down (6).

The approach of this book has been to open the hermeneutic circle with texts new media poets and critics of poetry include in the category of new media poetics in order to think about the contexts and theories within which these writings operate (8).

Three inseparable components of a digital poem: data fields, code, and display. Because only the display is visible, critics of print poetry often underestimate the otherness of new media writing (9).

Bush’s “Memex” (11).

Some suggest interactivity is an ideological term… clickable options are preprogrammed, therefore the reader’s claim to compositional agency is a “sham” (13).

Frist-generation critics of electronic literature drew much of their terms from analyses of narrative classics, while second-generation critics of electronic literature invoke strategies developed to read the texts of experimentalist poets (13-14).

The machinic is not to be confused with the robotic (17).

New media texts engage and extend the body’s energies (17).

Part of the reason new media is hard to define is because of the rapid evolution of software and hardware and the variety of uses they can be put to (18).

The author wants to position new media poems in an expanded field that is neither poetry nor not-poetry but an active exchange between two forms of discourse: the late romantic print lyrics, one the one hand, and the networked and programmable poem, on the other (19).

Literal art: they feature not the stanza, line, phrase, or resonant word but tumbling, morphing, graphic, and semiotic letters (20).

Poem games: Interactive (22).

Programmable procedural computer-poems: emerges from avant-garde practices associated with groups such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and the Language poets. They are generated by a database and algorithm (24).

Real-time reiterative programmable poems: the demon coughs up for consideration endless algorithmic iterations of its source texts. It demonstrates on the fly the art of survival by surfing and browsing rather than perfecting and preserving (26-27).

Participatory networked and programmable poems: an inquiry into a global flow of trademarks, gadgets, and images that exists at the intersection of electronic commerce, networked personal computers, and ambient attention spans (27-29).

Codework: Frequently hidden and always instrumental. Its purpose is to facilitate the execution of commands. It scares a lot of people (29-31).

New media artists belong to Stein’s tradition of outlaws who prepare the way for a future that is already here (31).

The coding applied to textuality in new media allows us to perceive the unambiguous effects and consequences of that coding (33).

In the last chapter Watten discusses its dialectical and historical efforts to dismantle customary standards of judgment, on the one hand, and its generation of new cultural meanings and possibilities on the other (34).

                          Watch for this!

No comments:

Post a Comment