Let me begin by citing Lev Manovich’s online essay “The Aesthetic of Post-Media”:
On the material level, the shift to digital representation and the common modification/editing tools which can be applied to most media (copy, paste, morph, interpolate, filter, composite, etc.) and which substitute traditional distinct artistic tools erased the differences between photography and painting (in the realm of still image) and between film and animation (in the realm of a moving image). On the level of aesthetics, the Web has established a multimedia document (i.e., something which combines and mixes different media of text, photography, video, graphics, sound) as a new communication standard. Digital technology has also made much easier to implement the already existing cultural practice of making different versions of the same project for different mediums, different distribution networks and different audiences. And if one can make radically different versions of the same art object (for instance, an interactive and non-interactive versions, or 35mm film version and Web version), the traditional strong link between the identity of an art object and its medium becomes broken. (my italics)
Lev Manovich’s crucial insight is that, in the digital environment, the link between the identity of an art object and its medium breaks down. The possibilities for photography/video/film/visual image are striking, but what about the verbal media, specifically poetry? Whatever else poetry is or is not, it is generally accepted that the poetic text is the text that demands to be re-read, that one can’t absorb it in linear fashion the first time one reads through. But to digitize a pre-existent poem is to undercut precisely this re-readability. Indeed, no matter how lovely the animation or how much fun it may be to see the letters of given words jostle one another and create new patterns, such movement can also be extremely distracting. For if poetry is language charged with meaning, it’s hard to “charge” in the midst of all the distracting elements onscreen.
But of course, those seemingly “distracting” elements might be precisely part of the poetic meaning, might make a given work even richer. Yes, this is possible but I would venture not likely because nothing can substitute the resonance of words, paragrams, anagrams, puns themselves. There is, however, another solution, which we might call a generative poetics. In Kenneth Goldsmith’s , for example, the long text was generated by recording every word the poet spoke within the time frame of a week and transcribing these words on the computer. Without advanced recording and computer technology, this would have been an impossible task for the recording mechanism had to be secret and the words of the interlocutors, all of them, had to be eliminated so as to create a seamless soliloquy. It is also a highly selective text for despite the seeming randomness, of course Goldsmith sets up the questions or verbal challenges or provocative statements that will yield the responses he wants. The result is a text that looks perfectly “normal”—no visuals or film clips or collage items—but presents us with “natural” speech that is in fact thoroughly technologized and digitized. Seen first as an installation and then turned into a sober book that is also wholly outrageous, Soliloquy is poetic in its framing and foregrounding of the language games we all play—but don’t quite know we play.
Or again, take Darren Wershler-Henry’s 9/11 project. After September 11, the poet took a few moments every day to capture the data that people enter into several different search engines, so as to see what form spying, collecting information, and analyzing data might take. The resulting supply text was then broken down into various sets—“natural language” questions, noun phrases, and so forth—and then formalized in various ways so as to produce continuity. The resulting catalogue poems recall both Dada and Oulipo. Indeed Oulipo naming—the exhaustive description of given objects using a variety of patterning, stands behind this new digital poetics—a poetics at once generative and, as I have argued elsewhere, differential, in that it takes a variety of different forms.
Does the medium disappear in this art? Yes and no. Language is generated off the page but by the time we see it, it may be back on it, the point being that, to be effective, digital poetics must be much more than transcribing an already written poem from one medium to another or turning concrete poetry into poetry in motion. Rather, the actual workings of digital information-making can be usefully probed and examined.