In tracing the history of computer-generated poetry, Klobucar identifies the agreed-upon earliest computer poetry as Theo Lutz's 1959 "Stochastiche Text"; the first machine-written book as William Chamberlain's 1984 "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed".
In the same issue of TCR, Jim Andrews in his essay "The Body of Net Art" writes "I do think that the edge of net art will continue to be strongly involved with trying to do funky shit with an internet connection. Why? That's a crucial distinguishing characteristic of net art versus other types of art..." (p.99)
Jim accurately describes this practice as the 'edge' of net-art. What of the other contours? It is my feeling that investigations of the medium dominate the early phase of art's relationship with a new technology. Since the web continues to change, these conceptual investigations of the media/technology itself continue to have relevance. But there is a significant portion of the technological infrastructure of the web (the basic network structure, URLs, html, Flash) which have matured and now offer what constitutes normative service. No one is amazed by their email anymore, or blogs, we read them for their content; and every other technological innovation will follow a similar path. A spike of interest in the device in-and-of-itself followed by a dissipation of that interest as interest in 'what it can do' and 'what it delivers' becomes ascendant. Eventually media become invisible, as the technology of language has for the most part become. Investigations of network media as media will still play a role in net-art. From Jodi to the Electronic literature Organization, engagement with networks as networks and code as material is a core aspect of the digital aspect of art practice. I feel however, it should not and is not exclusively the only path that interesting net-art will take. A substantial space exists for the exploration of lyric and mythological artistic practice in digital poetry. The metabolism of humanity, our neurological inheritance is tuned to feed on lyric and myth which transduce emotion and cosmological questioning into language. Incorporating these venerable traditions into contemporary net-art constitutes an enormous opportunity for a digital poetry.
Labels: digital poetics, emotions, net-art, orality
[+/-] Tertiary Orality and Digital Poetic Composition On the theme of "third orality" (which is how features of oral culture are reoccurring in digital culture), an insight into the creative process of composition of digital poetry arises when comparing oral composition to database composition.
In 1928, Milnam Parry radically restructured western critical understanding of how Homeric poetry is composed. Parry's proposed that oral poetry was a process of following metrical structures and drawing on a large repository of epithets or formulaic phrases to fill in the blanks. Instead of inspiration and memorization of words, oral poets follow metre, and then utilize an archive of phrases. (Drawn from Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.17-21)
In 2001, Lev Manovich, developed theories about database logic, repeatedly stressing how the ability to access lists of data and link to other data "contribute to the anti-narrative logic"(Language of New Media, p.221).
Comparing these two theories it is possible to see how oral composition is interpretable as database narrative: the archive of epithets and formulaic phrases are retrieved from the cultural database and used to fill slots according to metrical criteria. Perhaps this compositional method offers a viable model for anticipating how larger scale narratives will emerge from databases in spite of the bias against narrative that Manovich has chronicled.
As an empirical case-study, I offer the methodology I used for creating Interstitial: mp3 titles became phrases which sorted into chapters were stored in an archive (although formally a database structure, they conceptually are comprehensible as a database). Phrases from the correct archive were retrieved stochastically; proto-narrative emerged at the confluence of database and choice.
Labels: database, narrative, orality
[+/-] Ong: technologizing of the word (updated for internet) "Orality-literacy dynamics enter integrally into the modern evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorization and greater openness."
Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982). p.179.
Do networked computers constitute a new language dynamic?
If so, how are they influencing the evolution of consciousness?
Ong (p.130-2) lists the following as the effects of print:
1. removed rhetoric from center of academy
2. encouraged quantification of knowledge
3. eventually discouraged iconographic knowledge representations
4. produced exhaustive dictionaries and culture supportive of definitions
5. reinforced language as textual
6. major factor in development of notion of 'personal privacy'
7. created a new sense of private ownership
8. encouraged self-reflexive thought, awareness of thoughts as impersonal things
9. encouraged sense of finished text (final draft, completed work, no marginalia, no erasures)
10. text as subject of literary criticism,
11. text as derived from lived experience (as opposed to borrowed from ancient works in oral tradition)
12 gave rise to romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of textbook which proceeds from definition to definition
14. birth of fixed point of view and fixed tone (McLuhan,1962)
If digital media is accepted as being a dynamic shift in language use comparable to the transition from orality to print, then similar substantiative changes will occur in the evolution of consciousness as the mass of humanity adopts networked digital communication. Ong referred to TV and radio as 'secondary orality'. On that basis, the internet may be 'tertiary orality', but the term may not be apt. Networked computational communication superimposes and potentializes aspects of both orality and print/literacy cultures. Yet it also does more. As an emerging discipline with indeterminant conventions (margins? buttons? motion? links?), it is exhibiting experimental fluctuations. Online interface design is evolving, integrating off-line innovations and introducing new sets of possibilities that are outside the boundaries of oral or print cultures. Networked multimedia introduces unprecedented simultaneous and instantaneous vectors of communication which are altering our collective relations to knowledge: blog comments, social networks, discussion blogs, forums, helplines, chats, mmporg, second life, augmented reality, haptics, biometrics, brain machine interfaces, bots...
What changes will/are occurring?
What are the effects of the internet on conscious perceptions?
1. defocalizing primacy on written word: shift to multimedia
2. visualization of quantified knowledge and eventually emergence of tactile data will re-privilege qualitative and aesthetic aspects of knowledge research
3. rebirth of iconographic representations
4. birth of self-correcting, de-institutionalized, open-source knowledge repositories (wikipedia)
5. language as multi-modal (video,audio,text,interface)
6. major factor in resurgence of public space: social networks, shared bookmarks, shared citations, peer-to-peer networks
7. major factor in resurgence of public ownership : creative commons and open source
8. awareness of thoughts as shared, simultaneous abstract, lifeforms
9. encouraged sense of UNfinished text (blogs, incomplete posts, comments, correctable uploads, redesigns)
10. text as subject of communal criticism / praise : thumbs up or down inside stumbleupon networks
11. text borrowed and woven from other sources online
12 mashups on romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of educational-sites which proceed from link to link
14. birth of networked point of view and rebirth of turbulent collaged tone
Multimedia version to follow.
Labels: dynamic, evolution, literary, orality, printing
[+/-] Poetry, Propoganda, and Psychology
Walter Ong in "The Technologizing of the Word" 1982 wrote "By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possession were held in some sort of inert mental space. " (p.131-2)
Ong's insight can be extended to hypothetically theorize that the ubiquitous dynamic mobile-text network, humans experience now (on tv, films, banner ads, websites) will convert and/or encourage the growth of collective internal representations of our own minds that correspond to animated topological evolving data-spaces. In those spaces, our identity becomes an aggregate: an emergent property of the mass migration of synaptic neuro-modulators particles moving autonomously across synaptic clefts, like citizens who contribute to the macro phenomena of the ego-nation. The unconscious will become a living ocean, permeated by the diffused nutrients and toxins of networked society. The ontological implications of this change will perturb how communication is distributed and how political allegiances are formed. Subgroups of citizens already coalesce online internationally around issues irrespective of their physical location. For millennium, mythology (from Homer to the Mayans) has been used to assimilate individuals into the cohesive units known as nations. Rhythmic language operates as entrainment, grasping the brain in its strict repetitive logic. Emulating the heart's pounding, poetry bypasses the logical immune system of analysis in order to synchronize neural waveforms and instantiate positive associative defense nets around objects of shared cultural value.
Poetry, propaganda, and psychology have often gone hand-in-hand.
Yet the truth remains, people suffer from cognitive overload. Interfaces must give viewers choices as to the speed and density of informational flow. Only data in languages that the mind is capable of digesting, are integrated into belief structures. The human rate of visual information intake is estimated to be 2 bits. The majority of the humans will not adopt mobile text immediately or even swiftly: our metabolisms evolve very slowly, and cultural inertia is the corollary of evolution's temporal caution.
Even visual artists have deep seated resistance to accepting visual poetry superimposed over images. As an example, Chuck Close: "I always felt it was a little hokey having a poem right in the middle of the work of art." [ Close, C. (2006). A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. New York, N.Y: [Distributed in North America by] D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.(pg. i) ]
Labels: digital poetics, orality, poetry, propoganda, psychology
