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The following posts have been extracted from Brian Lennon's 2000 article Screening a Digital Visual Poetics.
  1. APA: Lennon, B. (2000). Screening a digital visual poetics. Configurations, 8(1), 63-85.
  2. Chicago: Brian Lennon. "Screening a digital visual poetics." Configurations 8, no. 1 (2000): 63-85.

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Recent trends in digital media theory signal the absorption of initial, utopian claims made for electronic hypertextuality and for the transformation of both quotidian and literary discourse via the radical enfranchisement of active readers. Born in 1993, the democratizing, decentralizing World Wide Web - at first, the “almost embarrassingly literal embodiment” (Landow 1992, 34) of post-structuralist literary theory, a global Storyspace, has been appropriated, consolidated, and “videated” as a forum for commerce and advertising. Thinkers such as Landow, Bolter and Grusin have seen from the start that electronic hypertextuality, or the computerized proliferation of symbolic writing, was only a step on the way to general electronic hypermediation dominated by iconic visual, rather than symbolic textual, forms.

As if in response to this, web-based or distributed electronic writing has evolved from its first alphabetic-(hyper)textual forms toward diverse incorporations of, and hybridizations with, the static or kinetic image. Poets and visual artists working from a tradition of typographic experimentation that reaches back to futurism and Dada, and includes twentieth-century visual and Concrete poetry, are using networked, heterogenetic writing spaces to create and distribute a new electronic visual poetry. This growth of visual writing may be seen as a response to the technological acceleration that permits more and more complex forms of information - from simple text, to static images, to animated and then to user-interactive text-image clusters or constellations, what might be called “lex/icons” - to coexist in one “medium” or information-delivery system. As Bolter suggests, “True electronic writing is not limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds, or even actions that the computer is directed to perform.” (Bolter 1991, 26)

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Out of habit, we identify the “modernist” poetic text as “materialized,” and the “postmodernist” poetic text as “dematerialized,” ephemeral, a “simulacrum.” The extent, however, to which “materiality” (taken as sensous, extraverbal reality, something more than the functional-instrumental, “transparent” use-value of a word) is integral to much postmodernist poetry, poetics, and art practice might be seen as reason to interrogate this habit of thought.

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Taking their cue from Bruno Latour’s 'We Have Never Been Modern,' Bolter and Richard A. Grusin have recently argued for the notion of a “genealogy of media” that situates new digital media in the long history of mediated and “remediated” representation in Western art and literature. (Bolter 1999, 57) While they do not deny that the “digital revolution” is a significant addition to this genealogy, they take pains to oppose the insistence “that there is something special about the mediatization of our current culture” placing unprecedented pressure on the reality of the subject. (ibid)

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Johanna Drucker’s post-Derridean “hybrid theoretical model” for the “materiality of the typographic signifier” in futurist and Dada writings return our attention to the implications of art practice for “ephemeralist” theories of the postmodern. “Materiality,” as Drucker envisions it, is constituted broadly by “interpretation”—the reader-viewer’s interaction with the work—even if that interpretation involves a kind of mixing of oneself into the medium. (Drucker 1994)

The putative demise of textuality is presently accompanied by a flourishing of poetry and text-based or alphabetic art that takes for granted not only its own dynamic, kinetic, virtual, and interactive visuality, but also a real, material, bodily human “interactor.” I propose to offer a tentative gesture, at a digital visual poetics: a poetics that draws by necessity on an entire century’s worth of language art and visual poetry, while at the same time formulating ways to read and to look at, to “screen,” the new and seemingly newly ephemeral artifact of the electronic visual poem. 

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Because virtual reality technologies offer the most radically manipulable operations on visual experience, they will be central to a digital visual poetics. With these operations come problematizations of subjectivity and agency that literally enact the “postmodern problem.”

VR is the material problem of the postmodern, the machine that came along to test not only our prophesied disappearance into the Great Simulacrum, or the endless play of différance, but also the conditions under which theorists may plausibly claim authority for such prophecy.  Landow, Bolter, and others have noted the nihilism in Baudrillard’s insistence that “we” can no longer perceive the differences between surface and depth, the simulated and the real. (Bolter 1999, 20-22) (Landow 1992, 20-22) What is most puzzling in the alarmism of VR opponents the conviction that an average “cybercitizen” will inevitably utilize a mimetic technology mimetically—that is, in further flight from “real,” not virtual, reality, in further flight into something that is, however convincing, still an illusion. For their part, “practitioners”—poets and artists—grow estranged from an abstraction that they may come to see as irrelevant to their material labor or craft-based interaction with machines, and correspondingly they neglect the possibility that we may not only be bodies, in just the sense hinted at so powerfully by virtual reality.

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The crucial fact is that, as William Dickey puts it, the computer is a tool “placed in our hands so that we can create with it something it was not intended for.” (Dickey 1991, 145)

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“The Materiality of the Typographic Signifier”

“The experimental typography which proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century,” writes Johanna Drucker, “was as much a theoretical practice as were the manifestos, treatises and critical texts it was often used to produce.” (Drucker 1994, 9) Drucker’s book 'The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923,' while restricted to a defined historical period, offers a model for the “materiality” of visual-linguistic signs that looks forward through what she calls the “nearly proto-electronic and cybernetic” sensibility of F. T. Marinetti (ibid, 109) - its kinetic adumbration of a “dematerialized,” “wireless,” or “electronic” medium. (ibid, 138) Drucker engages in a purposefully heterogeneous discourse for visible language that hints at contemporary implications for what Richard Lanham has called “the complete renegotiation of the alphabet/icon ratio” inherent in desktop publishing (Lanham 1993, 34) - and that extends itself to the same questions of subjectivity that are problematized by virtual reality. Insofar as it brings “visual presence” to meet “literary absence,” this notion of materiality is supported by a “hybrid theoretical model which contains certain internal and irresolvable contradictions.” (Drucker 1994, 43)

The typographically rendered page is an image, and it is also language; the reader is also a voyeur, viewer, or “screener.” Representation is at once in and of. These simultaneities operate within the production of both visual pattern and semantics; both are integral to signification, and both inform Drucker’s “materiality of interpretation.” It is a potent model for a digital visual poetics, whose object is never merely “text” even in the most generous poststructuralist sense—and especially when the “text” is a representation of three-dimensional typographical objects in the “quadri-dimensional” hermeneutic space of an electronic visual simulation.

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Another model of hermeneutic materiality appears in Donna J. Haraway’s socialist-feminist “cyborg” - a political-aesthetic persona comprised of constantly shifting, “partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves, a hybrid of mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, man and woman." (Haraway 1991, 157)

Haraway writes against a tradition of Marxian humanism that offers, in her view, only boundary maintaining divisions (base/superstructure, public/private, material/ideal) and secular Edens of natural innocence; her own call for a post deconstruction theater of “partial, real connection,” or material practice, reveals a commitment to continual inquiry via desire divorced from any final or totalizing resolution: “Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.” (ibid, 160-161)

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Repressive structures inbuilt in electronic technologies of military-industrial origin, and at the same time refuses “an anti-science meta-physics, a demonology of technology.” (ibid) The body, and “embodiment,” exist politically not as an original “state of nature” divorced from and threatened by technology, but in partial fusion with it: “Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.” (ibid, 180) In aesthetic-political terms, such an engagement will reject Marxian-humanist and avantgardist notions of “revolution” for something closer to Gertrude Stein’s sense of a “continuous present.” (Stein 1962) An “organic” or “holistic” politics exhibits excessive dependence on the “reproductive metaphors” of Edenic innocence or pre-Babel unity. Regeneration, not reproduction, Haraway suggests, is the cyborg moment—and it is enacted through the technology of writing:

"Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly. . . . That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine." (Haraway 1991, 176)

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“This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.” (ibid, 181)

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Katherine Hayles’s “embodied” body is, like Haraway’s cyborg, an aesthetic-political persona - not a body as such, or an identity, or an essentialized 'self,' but a position “enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.” (Hayles 1999, 196) Insofar as “bodily practices have a physical reality which can never be fully assimilated into discourse,” (ibid, 195)  information, or technology, the body entering the immersive or absorptive VR environment of dematerialized simulacra does not thereby automatically undergo identical dematerialization. What does occur, Hayles argues, is the constitution of a new subjectivity in and through this technologically provided experience: a subjectivity capable to hold the simulated and non-simulated together in a hybrid or cyborg simultaneity. It is not that the body disappears into the simulation, nor that the simulation invades the organic domain of the body. They simply coexist. Uneasily, perhaps—but the unease itself, and an aesthetic-political willingness to tolerate such unease, even to cultivate it, is a potent form of resistance to the global “technocratic context” of a deterministic information society. Embodiment—the resistant subject position, the body’s organic intervention in the machine—is “generated from the noise of difference.” (ibid, 196)

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In his own gestures toward a digital poetics, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum has advanced the notion of a “radical aestheticization of information” as a strategy of broadly humanistic response to new re-search in computer science. He suggests that the instrumentally designed operations of computer technologies may yield results of unintended aesthetic interest. Contemporary graphic design and electronic typography, Kirschenbaum suggests, are establishing the aesthetic paradigms to which poets and artists of the moment will respond - just as futurist and Dadaist poet-artists are seen, in Drucker’s account, responding to the technologically determined print aesthetics of the early twentieth century. Kirschenbaum’s “artificial subject position” or “artifice of intelligence” is, like the hybrid, cyborg and posthuman, an aesthetic-political formation useful to a digital visual poetics.

Twentieth-century poetic and visual innovators have shared the project of “materializing” language and the technological media that modify it. Now the task of an electronic poetics will be to operate on, to alter, the computer’s instrumental teleology - its design for informational transparency and functionality - as other poetics have resisted the transparencies of discourse and media in their times. Hybridization (of theory as of practice, of bodies as of machines), and other non-totalizing, non-technocratic forms of resistant engagement will inform a poetics of the new visual/textual media and the new opportunities for communication and critique through forms of writing, that they make possible. In the simultaneously material and ephemeral fields of such practice, the notion of “avant-garde” may seem finally provincial, absorbed into the sensibilities of an art that positions itself at once here and (whether virtually or no) elsewhere. (Kirschenbaum 1997)

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Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)

Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), 26.

William Dickey, “Poem Descending a Staircase: Hypertext and the Simultaneity of Experience,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 145.

Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994

George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 20-22, 34.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in idem, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181

N. Katherine Hayles,
  1. “The Seductions of Cyberspace,” in Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 173–190;
  2. “Text Out of Context: Situating Postmodernism within an Information Society,” Discourse 9 (Spring/Summer 1997): 25–36;
  3. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Truth, Beauty, and the User Interface: Notes on the Aesthetics of Information,” paper presented at the conference “Mixed Messages: Image, Text, Technology,” University of North Carolina, Charlotte, October 13, 1997.

Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 34.

Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 514–518