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The following posts are quotes that have been harvested from Anna Katharina Schaffner's 2010 book chapter From Concrete to Digital: The Reconceptualization of Poetic Space.

1. APA: Schaffner, A. K. (2010). From Concrete to Digital: The Reconceptualization of Poetic Space, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Schaefer, J., Gendolla, P. (eds), Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, p: 179 - 199.
2. Chicago: Anna Katharina Schaffner, From Concrete to Digital: The Reconceptualization of Poetic Space, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Schaefer, J., Gendolla, P. (eds), Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, (2010): 179 - 199.

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Digital poetry is frequently, and I believe correctly, assigned to the wider trajectory of experimental/avant-garde poetry in many other studies as well. It is often considered as a third stage, contemporary continuation and further development of earlier experiments.

How did concrete poetry redefine poetic space and how are space and its parameters reconfigured once more in digital poetry in a second step? And what happens to the notion of ‘concrete’ in the web?

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Digital works are similar to concrete poetry on the following levels: they are works that operate conceptually with space, they explore the “verbivocovisual” qualities of the letter material, mostly work with few concentrated words or letters, focusing on reduced, minimalist and structural relationships between the linguistic elements, suppressing or reducing syntactic links in favor of an exploration of multiple dynamic structures.

A concern with space and the parameters of surface is arguably one of the major poetic features of concrete poetry. Values such as positions of the signifier material, relationships between the linguistic elements and their spatial interaction, and distance, density and exact arrangement of the letter material gain structural and semantic significance.

The German concrete poet Franz Mon advocates the creative exploitation of the spatial values of the page by saying that in concrete poetry, the functions of surface replace the functions of grammar and open up new possibilities, both for poetry and thought. The relationships between spatially arranged words are not fixed and unambiguously predetermined like the relations of words firmly arranged in syntactical hierarchies, but are open and flexible and subject to continual redefinition during the process of reception. The position of the textual elements on the page, the distance between them and the density of the textual field all acquire potential semantic significance, and serve as extensions of the conventional means of structuring a poem. They become an integral part of the semiotic set up, and introduce additional particles and tools of expression. The conceptual deployment of surface values thus constitutes a novel way of charging language with meaning, and allows for the expression of what cannot be expressed within the boundaries of existing grammatical frameworks.

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The signs on screen have an additional technical dimension attached to them. One of the major concerns of avant-garde and concrete poetry alike is the exploration of the medium of usage, the language material, its physically perceptible qualities, its visual and acoustic dimension.
In extreme cases, signs are deprived entirely of their representative function and pragmatic use value, referring to themselves and their concrete materiality alone.

In digital poetry too, attention is frequently directed to the material and the medium and its conventions – one of the reasons why many consider it a continuation of the avant-garde tradition in the first place. However, on the screen, the material is no longer just language, but language with a whole new cosmos of technical meaning attached to it. As Florian Cramer has pointed out, language in its specific manifestation in the computer is marked by a paradoxical double function as both message and code: language is not only transmitted as message on the screen, but also controls and generates this transmission behind the screen in the form of codes and programming languages. Self-reflexive digital texts frequently include or reference the processes by which they were generated, they reflect upon the technologies that have produced them.

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Language is frequently presented visually on the monitor, as image. Katherine Hayles has coined the influential notion of the “flickering signifier” in her study "How we became Posthuman." Text is treated graphically on screen, she argues, and morphs into a flickering image, an instable visual display, and it is no longer a material object.

Beiguelman too emphasises the imagetic condition of the screen text, and at the same time the essentially textual condition of the web: on the screen, images perform texts, and behind the screen, texts generate these images. This thesis is explored both visually and textually in her work “the book after the book” (1997), where the idea of the flickering signifiers, of the dissolution of the boundaries between text and image and the graphic treatment of text on the screen are explored. The internet, Beiguelman writes, “is no more than a big text. On the front, at the screen, text reveals itself as image.”

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The screen is redefined by the addition of two further dimensions which the page lacks: a temporal one, and the third dimension, the simulation of depth. New spatio-temporal parameters thus become possible.

On the screen, space is no longer flat, but multiple layers of textual organization become possible. The dimension of depth is added, foreground and background relations can be constructed, letters can be superimposed upon others, distance and proximity can be simulated. Writing becomes volumetric: letters can suddenly be viewed from all sides, from behind, below, above, they can be rotated and turned around their own axis like real objects in space.

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Digital poetry actually emerged from the orbit of concrete poetry in the late 1950s in Stuttgart. In fact, the deployment of computers for the artificial generation of poetry was nothing but the logical consequence of the theoretical reflections of an important figure of the concrete poetry movement. One could even say that it was the product of certain aspects of concrete poetry driven to their utmost extremes – which closes the circle rather nicely.

The German scholar, philosopher and poet Max Bense was one of the leading figures of the concrete poets of the Stuttgarter Gruppe, and an important international mediator between various different national groups and factions. He was preoccupied with the study of philosophy, mathematics, technology and theory of science as well as with information theory, semiotics and cybernetics. Bense is certainly the most radical pursuer of objectivity and scientific exactitude, but Eugen Gomringer too emphasised the importance of method, system and structure, and experiments with stochastic, permutational and combinatorial structures can also be observed in many other concrete oeuvres, such as Franz Mon’s and those of the Wiener Gruppe.

In his Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie from 1969, Bense describes “aesthetic states” of texts as defined by their degree of unexpected, surprising and non-trivial occurrence of words. This notion is a direct transfer of Claude E. Shannon’s definition of information as “unexpected, unpredictable news” into the realms of the aesthetic.

To my knowledge, Bense and his students were the very first ever to deploy computers for purely aesthetic purposes in order to produce stochastic, machine-generated poetry. They deployed the random function of computers for the generation of “unlikely, highly selective and non-trivial” sequences – which is Bense’s defintion of what makes a text aesthetic rather than functional. In 1959, in the computer lab of the ‘Technische Hochschule’, Theo Lutz fed vocabulary taken from Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss into a Zuse Z 22, and wrote a program determining several rules of combination, and thus generated the first artificial, chance determined literary text.

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Perhaps the most important aspect of combinatorial and chance-determined works is the surprise moment: the results of chance productions are unpredictable, they display features which astound even the artists themselves. Chance is effectively deployed as a tool to transgress the subjective powers of imagination, to go beyond the producer’s limits of comprehension in an attempt to arrive at results which transcend both cultural, psychological and intellectual boundaries.

This hybrid between poem and game forces the recipient into activity, and evokes the oft-cited game state that Eugen Gomringer has defined as another important feature of concrete poetry. The constellation, Gomringer writes, is an offer of a fixed set of parameters, within which the reader is asked to take up the ball that the poet threw and to playfully create meaning by combining and relating the given elements in a creative fashion.

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Other concrete poets too have explored the possibilities of computers for their purposes, amongst them Reinhard Doehl, Emmett Williams and Augusto de Campos. Augusto de Campos uses the web primarily as a transmission medium for his poems, and exhibits static representations of concrete poems, some of them equipped with a soundtrack, usually recordings of a reading, such as “tensao” (1956) and “cidade/city/cité” (1975). In these pieces, the visual and the acoustic dimension do not enter into an innovative dialogue, as in more complex digital works, but remain separate entities.

And it is Augusto de Campos too who called for “new spatio-temporal modes of apprehension of the text by the reader”, arguing that concrete poetry has drastically redefined poetic space and poetic temporality and our perception of it.

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Rita Raley, the editor of the September 2006 issue of the Iowa Review, has dedicated a whole edition to what she calls the “spatial turn” of digital writing.

In her introductory essay “Writing 3D”, Raley calls for a new type of reading, “deep reading”, a new type of analysis similar to the Jamesonian “archisemiotics” which acknowledges the semantic significance of spatial design and takes into account the new dimension of writing, the extension of poetic space into the third dimension. Raley argues that those multi-dimensional works that integrate the z-axis into their repertoire require a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective and new critical frameworks for their analysis. A fourth type of reading becomes necessary, volumetric reading along the z-axis, “reading surface to depth and back again.” “The unit of poetic analysis has shrunk from line to word to letter and now we have need of another unit”, she writes: “the three-dimensional projecting plane.”

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Even though digital works seem more “concrete” than many concrete works in certain respects, they are immaterial, merely an array of pixels on the screen, a representation of binary data constituted of a string of zeros and ones with no physical, material body whatsoever. Paradoxically, the simulation of concreteness is the result of very advanced abstract processes.

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Jim Andrews even talks of “langwidgets” – language as a thing, as an object in the full sense of the word. Behavior can be inscribed into letters, and letters are put on the scene like actors.

Operative, effective program codes, as John Cayley points out, “instantiate a genuinely ‘performative’ textuality, a textuality which ‘does’ something, which alters the behaviour of a system.” This brings up the issue of time: speed and duration of reception can now be programmed, temporal structures can be inscribed into the work and the reception process can thus be carefully staged-managed in advance.

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Many digital poems also illustrate the concept of the autonomous linguistic “Eigenwelt” that Gomringer emphasises in his writings. More than ever before, text is represented for its graphic qualities, or, less frequently, for its acoustic ones, and its representative function is just one amongst three possible textual roles. Concrete poems, Gomringer writes, are not poems “about something but concrete realities in themselves.”

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It is not the concrete poets who were the first to have aimed conceptually for the effects which could be fully realized in digital poetry, but the Italian Futurists. In 1916 already, F.T. Marinetti and his comrades foretold the downfall of the book in their manifesto “The Futurist Cinema” from 1916.64 Moreover, they also envisaged the following:

“Filmed Words-In-Freedom in Movement (synoptic tables of lyric values – dramas of humanized or animated letters – orthographic dramas – typographical dramas – geometric dramas – numeric sensibility, etc.).”

This prophetic vision of the Futurists seems to corroborate very clearly one of Walter Benjamin’s theses. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin declared that artists tend to aim for effects which can be realised and effectuated only with the help of new technologies:

“One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.”

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Andrews, Jim

1. “The Battle of Poetry against itself and the forces of dullness” (2002 – updated 2005).  http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/indexenglish.htm
2. “Stir Frys and Cut Ups” (1999). At: http://www.vispo.com/StirFryTexts/text.html
3. “DIGITAL LANGU(IM)AGE. language and image as objects in a field” (1998). At: http://www.vispo.com/writings/essays/jimarticle.htm.

Beiguelman, Giselle “The Book after the Book” (1997). http://www.desvirtual.com/thebook/english/project.htm Accessed 15 12 2013

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In: Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana Press, 1992, p. 230.

Bense, Max Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung
in der Texttheorie. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969.

Cayley, John “The Code is Not the Text (unless it is the Text)”. In: Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach, Karin Wenz (eds.), p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004.

Cramer, Florian “Netzkunst und konkrete Poesie (2001). http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/netzkunst konkrete poesie.htm Accessed 15 12 2013

Gomringer, E., & Rothenberg, J. (1968). The book of hours, and Constellations: Being poems of Eugen Gomringer (Vol. 1). Something Else Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine, How we became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimielli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti, “The Futurist Cinema” (1916). In: Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

Raley, Rita “Editor’s Introduction: Writing 3D”. Iowa Review, September 2006, Volume 8, no 3.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/september06/raley/editorsintro.html Accessed 15 12 2013