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)
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)
