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The following posts have been extracted from Katherine Hayles's 2006 book chapter The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event.
  1. APA: Hayles, N. K. (2006). The time of digital poetry: from object to event, in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, Morris, A and Swiss, T., (eds), MIT Press,143-164.
  2. Chicago: Katherine N. Hayles, "The time of digital poetry: from object to event." in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories Morris, A and Swiss, T., (eds), MIT Press (2006): 143-164.

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I propose thinking about the digital poem as a machine to organize time. Inevitably, space is also involved in this production, but by keeping the focus on time, I hope to bring out characteristics of digital poetry that, while acknowledging continuities with print poetry, also suggest new directions theory can take in accounting for the operation of these poem-machines.

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What does it mean to say that the poem is a machine that organizes time? The time of a poem can be considered to consist of the time of writing, the time of coding, the time of production/performance, and the time of reading. While both print and electronic poetry evolve within this general temporal flow, they organize it differently.

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Loss Pequeño Glazier sees print and electronic text on a continuum, arguing that “innovative literature” in both media “has explored the conditions that determine ... the procedures, processes, and crossed paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the ‘meaning’”. As Glazier points out, print writers have also explored the materiality of the medium, from the typewriter poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay to the mimeo movement and concrete poetry. The specificity of digital media, he implies, lies in its distinctive materiality: “materiality is key to understanding innovative practice.”

The materiality of digital text increases the writer’s sense that writing is not merely the fashioning of a verbal abstraction but a concrete act of making, a production that involves manual manipulation, proprioceptive projection, kinesthetic involvement, and other physical senses.

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A digital text does not exist anywhere in the computer or in the networked system in the precise form it acquires when displayed on screen. As processes, digital texts exhibit sensitive dependence on temporal and spatial contexts, to say nothing of their absolute dependence on specific hardware and software configurations. Changes of some kind may happen every time the text is performed, from small differences in timing to major glitches when a suddenly obsolete program tries to run on a platform that has not maintained backward compatibility.

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What are the consequences of admitting an idea of textuality that is dispersed rather than unitary, processual rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably inscribed, always differing from itself rather than repro-ducing itself as a stable entity?

An obvious result is the highlighting of the temporal dimension, inviting experiments that play with the flickering indeterminacies of digital texts. Moreover, with texts that allow some degree of interactivity, reading also becomes a performance in a more kinesthetically complex and vivid sense than is the case with reading print texts. The machine produces the text as an event; the reader interacts with that event in ways that significantly modify and even determine its progress; these readerly interventions feed back into the machine to change its behavior, which further inflects the course of the performance. Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages, as these evolve together through time.

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Traditionally, the translatability of texts has been seen to depend on a logos that transcended the medium in which it was instantiated. When in the Biblical account Adam names the animals, this act of naming is presented not as a willful act of creating arbitrary signs but as a linguistic enactment of the names given by God, guarantor that the link between word and referent is appropriate and correct. Standing apposite to these assumptions is the Tower of Babel, where the nontranslatability of different languages into one another is the divine punishment for the hubris of mortals who, thinking they can come close to heaven, may also harbor designs to infringe upon the divine copyright to know and assign true names.

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With digital media, by contrast, translatability across media is guaranteed by the binary code to which all these texts are ultimately reduced, a process Lev Manovich analyzes in his discussion of transcoding (2001, 45–48). Rather than depending on the transcendental signifier, electronic texts tremble at the edge of what Cayley calls the “abyss” of binary code, a form of symbolic language difficult for humans to understand in its raw form; rather than pointing up toward the purity of the Word, digital devices plunge down into a froth of code that becomes progressively less intelligible to humans as it moves closer to the point where it is instantiated in the materiality of the machine as on-off voltages. To mark this difference between the transcendental assumptions undergirding translation and the machine processes of code, Cayley suggests that “transliteration” would be a better choice to describe the re-encoding of print or manuscript documents into electronic texts.

I have suggested that fully exploring the implications of media specificity will require new conceptualizations of materiality (Hayles 2002, 19–34). Rather than think about the materiality of texts as a fixed set of physical properties characteristic of an object, we might consider it as emerging from the ways a text mobilizes the physical characteristics of the technology in which it is instantiated to create meaning. Materiality in this view is a different concept than physicality. Materiality implies a characterization and selection of physical properties that could be listed as comprising an object. How the poem-event goes in search of meaning determines which aspects of the technology are foregrounded, so materiality emerges as a dance between the medium’s physical characteristics and the work’s signifying strategies. Contingent, provisional, and debatable, materiality itself thus comes to be seen as more an event than a preexisting object, a nexus at which culture, language, technology, and meaning interpenetrate.

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Descartes notwithstanding, the cogito res, taken here to mean the machine that thinks as well as the human that thinks, can never be stabilized so as to be self evidently present to itself as itself. These poem-events, similar to the readers they construct and require, are rivers that flow, processes that evolve, materialities that emerge contingently, flickering in the constantly changing plays of meanings.

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Glazier, Loss Pequeño. 2002. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p: 19 - 34.

Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p: 45 - 48.