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.
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.
