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The following posts have been extracted fromLori Emerson's 2006 article Numbered Space and Topographic Writing.

1. APA: Emerson, L. (2006). Numbered Space and Topographic Writing. LEA, 14(05-06). http://tinyurl.com/omxykls Accessed on 14 12 2013
2. Chicago: Lori Emerson. "Numbered Space and Topographic Writing." LEA 14, no. 05-06 (2006). http://tinyurl.com/omxykls Accessed on 14 12 2013

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The cultural trend toward the mathematicization of space has brought about the mathematicization of writing to then argue that many poems — digital as well as paper-based — that are kinetic and/or generated model themselves on mathematical modes of thinking. I see these poems reflecting thinking that is based on either Euclidean or non-Euclidean principles of mathematics—principles which can then be used to ultimately account for a variety of paper-based and digital poems that are kinetic and/or generated.

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Digital poets continue to attempt to exploit the medium of the word to more accurately represent our desire to have a full experience of and through language as a form of life — only now, through movement, generation, interactivity, they are able to express visually the life-like qualities of words.

What is fundamental in that conceptual/perceptual shift brought on by the digital is that the digital realm offers us the opportunity to represent (not necessarily conceive of) space in different or expanded terms than that of paper-based writing; and, further, this sense of space therefore requires that we come up with a different set of literary terms for the interpretation of certain digital texts. Despite the inseparability of space and time in these digital pieces — an inseparability often marked by text that moves and unfolds in space — solely for the sake of brevity this paper will primarily center on space.

The subject-matter of poetry is not that ‘collection of solid, static objects extended in space’ but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are. The general sense of the word proliferates its special senses. It is a jungle in itself (Stevens, 658).

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Concrete poets are particularly obvious pre-cursors to digital poetry; through an attempt to draw attention to the materiality of both word and the medium of the page as well as an emphasis on the physicality of language, the constructedness and flexibility of meaning.

But what if a poem is based upon a conception of space as “multiple, variable, and vibrant” — where the literal ground is always shifting and heterogeneous — then how are we to understand the text? Or, to put it in another way, what if the ground upon which the poem is built (and only a digital poem could accomplish this) is not Platonic—is not, as Brian Rotman puts it, an ideal realm “‘out there’ somewhere, existing prior to human beings and their culture, untouched by change, independent of energy and matter, beyond the confines and necessities of space and time . . .” (p. 127)? We could still try to use rhythm, rhyme, line-breaks and so on to understand the poem but only if it were assumed that the resulting reading would be utterly contingent and, since the text could completely change in only a brief moment, such a reading would also ultimately tell us very little about the poem — or it would only tell us that it is comprised of uncountable difference.

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Simon Biggs in his 2003 “web art” work Book of Books, clearly sees language and machines as intertwined. As he writes in Computing the Sublime, “. . . it can be established that the computer is firstly a language machine. It is a machine that is formed with language (symbolically) and which operates as a semiosis, perhaps sometimes as a form of poesis, on language.” However, despite his mention of semiosis, in Book of Books this vision of the intertwining of language and machine is not in the sense of how they are both socially situated and culturally constructed, but in the sense that language, like mathematics, is a tool to be used, a tool entirely separate from its users. In his artist’s statement Biggs writes:

Rather than monkeys typing we have a computer program tirelessly generating random words and inserting them into the resulting ever expanding text . . . we can imagine that this system might, given an infinite period of time and processing power, generate such a book ... Eventually, after a reasonable period of time . . . the text is reduced to a one pixel font size at which point it resembles our new universal language, binary code. All languages are thus seen to be one and the same in a demonstration of what the term convergence media might really imply, as the erasure of difference leads to the text becoming unreadable.

What is so curious about this statement is that on the one hand the pieces of Book of Books show language, like numbers in Euclidean arithmetic, as an infinite plane of possibility that, again, exists apart from the vagaries of space, time, and users. But on the other hand, while Book of Books might appear to triumphantly represent the mathematicization of space that the computer offers us, the ultimate unreadability of Biggs’ texts seems in fact to point to a desire not just for language itself but for language to remain untouched by the zeroes and ones of an encroaching digitalization.

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John Cayley is another exception to paper-bound thinking: His work has evolved from an engagement with interactivity through movement, co-creation and continuous generation. Cayley writes: “There is a stable text underlying its continuously changing display and this text may occasionally rise to the surface of normal legibility in its entirety. However, overboard is installed as a dynamic linguistic ‘wall-hanging,’ an ever-moving ‘language painting.’”

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Biggs, Simon. (2003), Book of Books http://www.littlepig.org.uk/bookofbooks/statement.htm Accessed on 14 12 2013.

Cayley, John. (2004), Overboard: An Example of Ambient Time-Based Poetics in digital art, Dichtung Digital, http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2/Cayley/index.htm Accessed on 14 12 2013.

Rotman, Brian. Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Stevens, Wallace. (1965), The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, Vintage Books, NY.