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.
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.
