As they mature, computational writing tools (both software and hardware) invariably will become the subject and sites of similar diffusive projections of opinions and mythological debates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the evolving theoretical debates over the materiality of the medium and code as poetry. [Example: Critical Code Studies, Mark C. Marino ] My feeling is that as valid as these theoretical dialogues are, any attempts to position a truth on the situation negates the actuality of the constantly changing reality: viewpoints aggregate together to inform our collective notion of every tool's identity. Putting fences into the ocean does not constrain water.
In looking at computation poetry as it is practiced by non-theorists, it is possible to find evidence of mutations and migrations away from the materiality debate. This motion is indicative of an evolutionary shift in the artists relationship to the tool. Work is emerging which revels in the potentiality of the computer as tool without investigating the implications of the tool as medium. As with advertising where (as I've stated elsewhere) theoretically disinterested participants advance the technological potential of the medium, a few digital poets practicing now are involved in aesthetic expressive explorations involving 3D and baroque sensibilities. The technology has now passed the point in its evolution where it is opaque and mysterious and the subject of discussion; its existence has been digested; computers are now a normative feature of the cultural landscape; a generation is emerging who have never been without them; as such they display a tendency to regard them as tools that simply assist the artist in communicating their vision. This I feel constitutes one of the evolutionary life points of a technology. This insight is corroborated by McLuhan who recognized that each technology has a life path.
Among the emerging generation will be digital poets whose dexterity with the tool renders the medium's materiality transparent and irrelevant. Emphasis will shift as it did in literary criticism onto the semantic and humanistic aspects of the work. Consider "Distant Air" by Myron Campbell. The website is a compendium of stylized highly accomplished visuals and brief poetic texts. It utilizes 3D figures in a way evocative of both crude dada collage, film noir and gaming. Yet the text, sparsely interspersed behind the visual facades, is personally evocative and poignant; the fonts, baroque and resonant of illuminated manuscripts. This highly idiosyncratic and effective weaving of aesthetic elements and merging of interface design with traditional subjective meditations on death constitutes one potential evolutionary path now available at this stage of its life for digital poetics.
The previous generation's theoretical foregrounding of materiality can be considered a corollary of the newness of the media; its alien-ness and foreignness evoked an almost obsessive scrutiny of its functionality. To draw a spurious although relevant analogy, it is as if digital technology in the 80s and 90s was a newborn baby; like incessant parents, theorists gathered to scrutinize its feces. Now the baby is a little beyond a toddler, less an object of fetishized adoration and more a potential nuisance. It begins to establish an identity. It becomes less an object which needs to be constantly fed and cared, but is developing into a subjective entity with a distinctive identity.
1. Darren S Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto, Ont: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).
Labels: aesthetics, digital poetics, nu baroque
[+/-] A Gap in the current Theory Currently, there is a gap at a theoretical level in dealing with aesthetics, intuition and emotions in digital poetry. This gap exists due to several convergent factors. First, academies privilege that which can be discussed. Intuition, emotions and aesthetics are intimate, qualitative and complex; they do not render easily in the language of formal research. Second, Lev Manovich (builing on Innis and McLuhan) stresses how new media is radically distinct from previous media. This insight which has swiftly consolidated into axiom, encourages an exclusive critical focus on work which investigates the materiality of media. Digital poetic work that simply utilizes new media as expressive tool risks being stigmatized as naive.
I argue for an inclusion of naive, intuitive, emotional and aesthetic approaches, and a sustained engagement with the issues that arise from emotional and aesthetic complexity. New media is, apart from its distinctive features, an aspect of computational technology; and if technology's evolution is analyzed comparative with biological life, technology is interpretable as the 7th Kingdom of biological life (Kevin Kelly, 2005). Technology is therefore connected to a continuum of tools which have been utilized for millennium by humans to build expressive forms. The motivation for the creation of these art-forms arises from a collective existential ignorance about death and love. Myth was the classical tool humans used to consolidate memory. Our existential ignorance remains the same: both love and death are mysterious apparatuses. New media art which deals with these fundamental thematics is neither retro or obsolete.
Labels: aesthetics, complexity, digital poetics, emotions, theory
[+/-] beauty, aesthetics, and a nu baroque seed Jonathan Lethem (mashup author) and Janna Levin (physicist novelist) in a 2007 online video arranged by Seed Magazine, discuss the differing relations art and science have to beauty. For artists, Lethem points out that "after modernism beauty is terrifically suspect", Lavan agrees that "its considered somewhat provincial to aim for beauty, we're not doing pretty pictures here, we're doing something...but in science we really hold up beauty and elegance as the goal because for reasons i think no one fully understands its a good criteria for distinguishing whats right from whats wrong." ...Lethem concludes the discussion by referring to the now commonplace knowledge that we find symmetrical faces beautiful, but prior to that knowledge: "no one would have said 'I like symmetrical people'. They sought the name beauty to describe an evoked response."
Clearly there is a tangle of social contexts, fashion, and metabolically-determined cognitive processes which all contribute to this elusive shifting quality called beauty. In most cases, beauty is a multi-functional tool, it generically refers to a vast subjective terrain.
Setting aside the utopian project of arriving at an agreed upon definition of beauty, it seems a feasible time for art to wrestle beauty in all its glistening manipulative power out of the exclusive domain of advertising and science, and reinstate it again as a honoured aspect of art, and specifically contemporary art, the serious stuff, respected and acknowledged. Just because supermodels exhibit the intelligence of twinkies, and classical art professors exhibit the dynamic charm of taxidermical objects, is no reason to discard aesthetics completely. Now is the time to correct the excesses of post-modernism. Beauty is a feature that can be shared among disciplines. The goals of art, science and advertising may diverge, but the cognitive response to beauty exhibit similar features: the body absorbs the impact of a perception whose correctness bypasses criticism.
Integrating beauty into art does not render it critically irrelevant, or suspiciously seductive, it merely offers artists an opportunity to engage with the totality of being.
Seed: Seed Video Feature: Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin (Highlights). (2007). Seed. Retrieved March 24, 2007, from http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/seed_video_feature_jonathan_le_1.php.
Posted March 2, 2007 11:50 AM
Labels: aesthetics, beauty, nu baroque, seed
