Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of several computer games, secretary of the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, and is the author of nine novels, the latest of which is Xibalba Gate, A Novel of the Classic Maya. An interactive novel, Portal, was published in 1986 on computer disk and two years later in ‘hard copy’. Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of […]
the hypertext murder case “Hypertext is dead – ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts and Culture ’99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.” No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be written, but – if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works of writing – Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one […]
I. The Planet Killers Elizabeth Kolbert throws up her hands at the end of her three-part New Yorker investigative series on the whys and wherefores of global warming: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technological society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing” (63). I’ve been thinking for some time about this notion of choice: that we could choose self-destruction is a datum in great need of explanation by anyone who styles himself an ecocritic. The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly […]
A recording of searing, unrelenting pain sounds has just started screaming on this page. Perhaps you have not noticed. Perhaps, like me, all sounds are painful to you and you routinely turn off the volume to live in silence (Colucci 2021). Or you are hard of hearing. Or your computer is malfunctioning. Perhaps, then, as you are now reading this in silence, you are wondering what signifiers you are missing—what clues are going unheard. Are the sounds vital to convey the full meaning of the piece? Is this piece like r(a/u)pture music where you see the multi-modal words converge—the rap […]
Having been here once here now once again. -Magdalena, Twilight, A Symphony To repeat evidently implies resemblance, yet can we speak of resemblance unless there is difference? -Peter Brooks I was sitting on my screened porch in the afternoon sunshine, cocktail in hand, the LCD screen of my laptop casting a pleasant glare in my face. I had, for whatever reason, decided that my reading of Michael Joyce’s latest hypertext fiction had come to a resting point, and it was time to mull over some recent criticism. Scanning through some online articles, my keyboard fearing for its life as my […]
It only takes a glance at the cover to get a feel for where Loss Pequeño Glazier’s new book is headed. The cover art for Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries first looks like a typographic jumble (an image of the cover is available at the book’s online appendix). Grey lines of text – mostly HTML code and Unix commands – run down the right side of the cover, immediately signifying “computerness.” The main title of the book is printed in a red X-shaped pattern that is overlaid on top of the light gray text. The top portion of the […]
From the outset, electronic textuality has been promoted through a kind of academic version of a hacker ethos. Just as hackers proclaim that “information wants to be free” and computers will democratize the world, proponents have celebrated electronic textuality for bursting out of the strictures imposed by print, and theorized its role in undermining hierarchies in the university and culture at large. This ethos has been grounded in an epistemology which has remained relatively implicit and therefore unquestioned. One finds an underlying sense in hypertext theory that electronic textuality is somehow more “natural,” more inherently suited to the human mind. […]
Artist Eduardo Kac writes on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression. Experimental poetry followed many directions in several countries in the twentieth century. Each new direction attempted to address the historical, cultural, and often political needs of its own time. Between 1978 and 1982 I worked with countless experimental poetic styles, trying to develop my own direction. I explored traditional versification, recitation, body-based performance, visual poetry, graffiti, collage, typography, color, object-poems, sound, and a number of other possibilities. As a result of this relentless experimentation, I felt on the one hand […]
On the present and future of hypertext poetics (circa 1997). When a lifeline of words is dangled for an instant before meaning about to go under, or when some desperate insight pulls a knife on language, what happens next is poetry – that extraordinary product of extreme circumstances in which every verbal action has to count. A line of poetry is a walk along a high ledge, and one false word can mean a plunge to the prosaic parking lot below. Nothing less than “the best words in the best order,” to quote Coleridge’s no-nonsense definition of the art form, […]
From Zukofsky’s “A” to Powers’ Goldbug Variations, in search of a social ecology of the self-discursive text. Prelude In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call “content” across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations over and against Louis Zukofsky’s “A” is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical […]