Digital poetry

Last updated

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms, on the World Wide Web or Internet, and as mobile phone apps.

Contents

According to Saum-Pascual (2019), digital poetry is the artistic heir to the avant-garde movements of the second half of the 20th century, including Lettrism, concrete poetry, and conceptual poetry. [1]

A significant portion of current publications of poetry are available either only online or via some combination of online and offline publication. There are many types of 'digital poetry' such as hypertext, kinetic poetry, computer generated animation, digital visual poetry, interactive poetry, code poetry, experimental video poetry, and poetries that take advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive, or use a generative or combinatorial approach to create text (or one of its states), or involve sound poetry, or take advantage of things like listservs, blogs, and other forms of network communication to create communities of collaborative writing and publication (as in poetical wikis).

Digital platforms allow the creation of art that spans different media: text, images, sounds, and interactivity via programming. Contemporary poetries have, therefore, taken advantage of this toward the creation of works that synthesize both arts and media. Whether a work is poetry visual art music or programming is sometimes not clear, but we expect an intense engagement with language in poetical works. [2]

History

Early digital poems include Christopher Strachey's love letter generator (1952), the stochastic texts which were indirectly produced by the German mathematician Theo Lutz in 1959 by programming a Z22 of Konrad Zuse; [3] Nanni Balestrini's "Tape Mark I" in Italian, published in 1961; [4] and Brion Gysin's English permutation poems from around 1959, done automatically with the collaboration of Ian Somerville. These and other early digital poems are discussed in C. T. Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry. [5]

Hypertext poetry

Hypertext poetry refers to creative works that are interconnected through the mechanics of digitization. [6] This form of cyberpoetry has a specific focus on visual arts that are connected across different mediums. [6] In other words, hypertext poetry is a classification of digital poetry that links the reader to different places in a document or different documents on the Internet. [7] In general, hypertext poetry combines the elements of culture and intertextuality to marry poetry to various digital mediums such as images, videos, texts, and songs. [8]

Hypertext usually falls into two categories: exploratory and constructive. Exploratory hypertext poetry allows users to navigate through a text by interest, engagement, and reflection. [6] This means readers can explore and think creatively about a poem that is digitized on a computer. [6] Constructive hypertext poetry takes a different approach. This poetry is built by an audience over time to create a fully fleshed-out final draft. [6] Along with this, audiences can look at previous versions of the text. [6] In all, the focus of constructive hypertext poetry is how computer software and machinery can enhance the creation of poetry. [6] As such, users can see first-hand the amalgamation of an author's inspiration, writing process, and cultural influences. [8]

The advent of hypertext poetry can be dated back to the mid-1980s. [6] Ted Nelson is often credited for coining the term in the 1960s. [9] Ted Nelson coined the term as he believed printed text would soon be outdated and that literature would move to a more digital sphere. [10] However, there is some disagreement on when exactly the term came to be. "Hypertext" has origins in the 18th century. [11] Moreover, it is believed that Vannevar Bush's description of "the memex" in 1945 also referred to hypertext. [9]

While there are a variety of factors that have caused hypertext to be as well known as it is today, it's popularization can be cited back to two particular events. [9] One event is Apple's invention and heavy promotion of the "Hypercard" in 1987. [9] This made hypertext less niche, where thousands of people could now recognize and understand the concept. [9] In addition, there was a large national conference on hypertext held in 1987, drawing participants from multiple studies and disciplines. [9]

Interactive poetry

Interactive poetry is a form of digital poetry by which the reader may or must contribute to the content, form, or performance of the work, thereby influencing the meaning and experience of the poem. Interaction allows the reader to participate and influence the work and their experience of it.

Interactive poetry is limited to a digital medium as it cannot perform the same function in other media such as print, which limits accessibility. Interactive poetry can also provide a different experience with each reading or from reader to reader so analysis of this type of poetry can be challenging as the experience is not static.

An example of audience participatory poetry is haikU by Nanette Wylde. Elit scholar, Scott Rettberg writes of this project "Nanette Wylde’s haikU (2001) is a project based on principles of user participation and on the use of a randomizing function to produce haiku that startle in the sense of producing unintended juxtapositions—no single author has determined which lines will appear together. The reading interface is a simple, spare web page. Every time a reader reloads the page, a new haiku is produced. Following a link to “Write haiku” individuals can submit their own haiku in three lines, each of which has its own button to post the line to bins of first, middle, and last lines. The poems delivered on each reload of the site are not the individual haiku as submitted by readers, but recombinations of these first, middle, and last lines of haiku pulled together in a variable way. Reloading the page twenty times or so, it is remarkable how many of the poems read as if they have been individually intended by a human intelligence. Most of the haiku, perhaps 80%, cohere quite well as poetry." [12]

Notable people

33.3 QR code poem by Genco Gulan 33.3 QR Code Poem.jpg
33.3 QR code poem by Genco Gulan

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaka Železnikar</span> Slovenian artist (born 1971)

Jaka Železnikar is a Slovenian artist known for his computational poetry and internet art. The base of his work is a nonlinear language-based expression combined with visual art. Since 1997 he has been part of the net art community, and since 2004 he has created several expressive add-ons for the Firefox browser.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cybertext</span>

Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing nontrivial work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caterina Davinio</span> Italian poet, novelist and new media artist

Caterina Davinio is an Italian poet, novelist and new media artist. She is the author of works of digital art, net.art, video art and was the creator of Italian Net-poetry in 1998.

Net-poetry is a development of net.art, involving poetry. This kind of experimental art was born in several different cities and countries around 1995.

Video poetry is poetry in video form. It is also known as videopoetry, video-visual poetry, poetronica, poetry video, media poetry, or Cin(E)-Poetry depending on the length and content of the video work and the techniques employed in its creation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philadelpho Menezes</span>

Philadelpho Menezes. Brazilian poet, visual poet, pioneer of new media poetry, professor in the Communication and Semiotics post-graduation program at the Pontifical University of São Paulo. He performed research for his post-graduate degree at the University of Bologna, in Italy (1990). With Brazilian artist Wilton Azevedo Philadepho Menezes created a pioneer intermedia-poetry CD-ROM: "InterPoesia. Poesia Hipermidia Interativa" (1998). In Italy he collaborated with the first net-poetry project: Karenina.it, by Italian artist Caterina Davinio.

<i>Prehistoric Digital Poetry</i> 2007 book about early digital poetry by C. T. Funkhouser

Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995 is a nonfiction book by C. T. Funkhouser. It provides documentation and literary criticism of early forms of electronic literature and digital poetry, many of which are no longer accessible. It was published in 2007 by the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States.

Eugenio Miccini was an Italian artist and writer, considered to be one of the fathers of Italian visual poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet art</span> Form of art distributed on the Internet

Internet art is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deena Larsen</span> American writer of electronic literature (born 1964)

Deena Larsen is an American new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Robert Kendall is a digital poet. Canadian-born, he now lives in the United States. He has a master's degree in Musicology and has taught electronic poetry for the New School University's online course.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanie Strickland</span> American poet

Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Code poetry is literature that intermixes notions of classical poetry and computer code. Unlike digital poetry, which prominently uses physical computers, code poems may or may not run through executable binaries. A code poem may be interactive or static, digital or analog. Code poems can be performed by computers or humans through spoken word and written text.

Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

John Howland Cayley is a Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media as well as a theorist of the practice, a poet, and a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Ladislao Pablo Győri is an Argentine engineer, digital and visual artist, essayist and poet, most known as the creator of Virtual Poetry in 1995, which has been described as "of utmost significance in advancing literature as sculptural object in electronic space". He has been described as one of the rare "poet-practitioners dedicated to 3-D art".

haikU is a browser-based, audience participatory, haiku poem project. The project displays randomly generated haiku poems, and allows the Internet audience to contribute to the project's database of haiku lines. The project is known as a work of electronic literature and for its use of an evolving database, and for the relative coherence of its output. It was created by Nanette Wylde in 2001 and is considered a form of interactive digital poetry.

References

  1. Selfa Sastre, Moisés; Falguera Garcia, Enric (2022). "From Text on Paper to Digital Poetry: Creativity and Digital Literary Reading Practices in Initial Teacher Education". Frontiers in Psychology. 13. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.882898 . ISSN   1664-1078. PMC   9249014 .
  2. "Computer-Generated Poetry Liberates Readers, Attracts Coders". Slice of MIT. Archived from the original on 2014-07-03. Retrieved 2014-05-16.
  3. The Present [Future] of Electronic Literature in Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen, Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Volume 7, R. Adams, S. Gibson and S. Müller Arisona, Springer.
  4. Mazzei, Alessandro; Valle, Andrea (2016). "Combinatorics vs Grammar: archeology of computational poetry in Tape Mark I". Proceedings of the INLG 2016 Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation: 61–70. doi: 10.18653/v1/W16-5509 . hdl: 2318/1603816 . S2CID   10752052.
  5. Chris., Funkhouser (2007). Prehistoric digital poetry : an archaeology of forms, 1959-1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN   9780817380878. OCLC   183291342.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (2007), "Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing", in Siemens, Ray; Schreibman, Susan (eds.), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 161–182, doi:10.1002/9781405177504.ch8, ISBN   9781405148641 , retrieved 2023-10-31
  7. Selfa Sastre, Moisés; Falguera Garcia, Enric (2022-06-17). "From Text on Paper to Digital Poetry: Creativity and Digital Literary Reading Practices in Initial Teacher Education". Frontiers in Psychology. 13. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.882898 . ISSN   1664-1078. PMC   9249014 . PMID   35783757.
  8. 1 2 Abrosimova, Ekaterina (2021-05-27). "Hyperlink Phenomenon In The Modern Internet Poetry". Man, Society, Communication. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences: 549–555. doi: 10.15405/epsbs.2021.05.02.66 . S2CID   236370245.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Smith, John B.; Weiss, Stephen F., eds. (July 1988). "Hypertext". Communications of the ACM. 31 (7): 816–819. doi: 10.1145/48511.48512 . ISSN   0001-0782. S2CID   220735610.
  10. "Historians and Hypertext", Gateways to Knowledge, The MIT Press, 1997, doi:10.7551/mitpress/3202.003.0025, ISBN   9780262271929 , retrieved 2023-11-02
  11. Ridi, Ricardo (2018). "Hypertext". Knowledge Organization. 45 (5): 393–424. doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2018-5-393. ISSN   0943-7444.
  12. Rettberg, Scott (2013). "Human Computation in Electronic Literature". In Michelucci, Pietro (ed.). Handbook of Human Computation. New York: Springer. pp. 187–203. ISBN   978-1493948154.

Bibliography