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!