1. " Innovative work avoids the …’I’…..a sentimentalized 'I,' often concerned with its own mortality, can be considered as having passed away." (Glazier 2002. 174).
Response: Humans devote inordinate energy to their affective condition. Text materiality should be considered by any digital author; in fact from the practitioner’s viewpoint, the materiality is simply knowing one’s tools, the IDE’s.. The ‘I’, far from being ‘passed away’, seems to permeate reality. Have nation states dissolved? Has death stopped? Has anyone ‘reading’ this never fallen in love? known loneliness? felt wounded? What account of this world that strives for holistic comprehensive clarity can disregard the ‘I’? Fiction offers us meta-I views, glimpses into other subjective cages. Poetry offers glimpses to the core of ‘I’ where forms of shared intent emerge.
2. “…the innovative digital literary text employs an architecture that places textual structures within the contours and values unique to its medium, a practice of textual ecology.” (Glazier 2002. 174-5).
Response: Agreed. To be ecologically viable, digital poetry must be adaptive to (and capable of surviving in) new media habitats. Yet nature is rarely unique, and evolution demonstrates an enormous amount of repetitive use of forms and strategies. New media is not exempt from absorbing evolutionary materiality. Old ways will lose relevance, adapt or go extinct. Many traditional poetic techniques (repetition, motifs, aesthetics, proportion, form, grace) transplant well into digital media.
3. “Enabling of new tools of intelligence. This quality suggests avoiding the reinscription of authority, totalitizing positions, and commodifying of the artworks.” (Glazier 2002. 175).
Response: Yes. This world is venomous; taming the human cognitive system for compassionate uses is important. However, restricting poetry to a non-authoritarian, non-absolute and non-commodified position consigns all poets to a relativistic totalitarian poverty. It also throws out a massive part of poetic inheritance: Ezra Pound? William Blake? Perhaps some humans are innately authoritarian commodities? Culture is how they communicate.
Glazier also points out what for him are ‘traps’ : narrative, the link, and ‘author versus programmer’ ( Glazier 2002. 175-6).
Response: All stable systems are ‘traps’.
Labels: affect, criteria, intelligence, literature
[+/-] digital literature
"This irruption in temporality from within writing introduces characteristics of oral literature to a resolutely non-oral object. To borrow a term from Robert Escarpit, it transforms the written text from being a document to a semi-document (like a film). What's more, it imposes the irruption of an act within the space of linguistic signs, imposing a poetic function for action on the poetic function of language. Borrowing from Jakobson's famous formula, one could say that animated literature plots the constructed axis of sequential reading onto the plane of equivalence in written representation...
...Alire has, for the first time in France, proclaimed loud and clear that computerized literature is literary and not a linguistic tool, as suggested by the programming and software camps who dominate Europe at this time. The first task for Alire was to affirm that literature was not "assisted by" the computer, contrary to the ideas of A.L.A.M.O. (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs, [Literature Workshop Assisted by Mathematics and Computers]), but that there exists a literature tied intimately to computer technology....
Alire fights vigorously against such finished text objects or closed, functional 'histories'. In so doing, the journal defines literature as a computer-based process and not as a creation or result."
Bootz, Philippe. “Alire: A Relentless Literary Investigation.” Digithum 4. 2002. http://www.uoc.edu/humfil/articles/eng/bootz0302/bootz0302.html.
Labels: literature
