"One must free oneself from one's ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality -- which is an even greater illusion."
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso Radical Thinkers edition, London, 2007, p. 50
Labels: language, post modern, posthuman
In My Language
A M Baggs: "The first part is in my 'native language', and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not."
Autism Rights
Labels: autism, epistemology, language, thought
1980s-1995: MIT Visible Language Group
"...it is often/only at the expense of what is is information in language --it's complexity in material, syntactic, poetic, or even vernacular form-- that language functions in the electronic environment."
Johanna Drucker
LANGUAGE AS INFORMATION: INTIMATIONS OF IMMATERIALITY (1996)
Johanna Drucker
LANGUAGE AS INFORMATION: INTIMATIONS OF IMMATERIALITY (1996)
Labels: digital poetics, language, materiality, theory
POSTLANGUAGE POETRY:
"...literature is too multi-faceted, rambunctious, and iconoclastic to fit the limits of any definition... Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent and often wearied eye....Thus, while narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the everyday appear often as elements that language poets think should be rejected, postlanguage poets such as Juliana Spahr, Susan Smith Nash, Jefferson Hansen, Liz Willis, Peter Gizzi, Chris Stroffolino, Jennifer Moxley, Joe Ross, Lisa Jarnot, myself and many others have been consciously using one or several of these elements in their work, without returning to the sort of naive justifications of those elements that continue to be a feature of more mainstream American poetry."
Labels: language, literature, popo, theory
ap/xxxxx
Culture and the Individual
The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.]
Culture and the Individual
Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.[Aldous Huxley. Culture and the Individual. 1963, Playboy]
Crystalpunk: Meaning is to language what Soup is to a Fork
"Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game of Life, the origin of language and the origin of mind, the suspected but never-realised capabilities of mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost, the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs"
Labels: digital poetics, generative, language, punk, writing
Kaldron Home Page -- Begun in the early 70s, Kaldron is the longest running magazine of visual poetry, or concrete poetry, or book art, the avant-garde intermedium between poetry and painting in the U.S., with an international and multicultural scope
Labels: books, digital poetics, language, literature, vispo, visual
Piet Zwart Institute - Words Made Flesh
WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer
A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.
Labels: art, code, computation, language, poetry, software, technology
