Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008

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Eduardo Kac.  Media Poetry: An International Anthology.  Bristol, UK:  Intellect Press, 2007.

Reviewed by

Dene Grigar

N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens’ Close Reading New Media, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, Nick Montfort’s Twisy Little Passages, Mark Amerika’s META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, Marie-Laure Ryan’s Avatars of Story, the Electronic Literature Organization’s State of the Arts––the list of books that take the subject of electronic literature head on is not yet long, making the addition of one to the canon an occasion to celebrate for scholars and artists committed to the genre.  So it is with the second edition of Eduardo Kac’s book, Media Poetry: An International Anthology. Significantly larger in scope than his first edition, “New Media Poetry:  Poetic Innovation and New Technologies,” published in 1996 in the journal, Visual Language, this second edition is a most welcome addition to the field not only for its very presence but also because of what it provides:  a much needed global perspective of “technology-based poetic creation” (7).

That so little scholarship has been directed at an art form that emerged, according to Kac, over four decades ago makes for an interesting story in its own right.  One could argue that it took the introduction of the personal computer in the mid-80s and the browser in the mid-90s to impact the academy substantially enough to make scholars aware of those literary works showing up on the scene that were not able to be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device.  But such a claim does not hold when one considers that from the time of Kac’s first edition and the publication of the second, many important scholarly books focusing on new media/digital media/media art––or whatever term we wish to call it––neglect to mention the existence of electronic literary works along with the other digital art-based works gaining attention.  Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts (2002), for example, devotes only one and a half pages of his 900+ pages to hyperfiction (688-699) while Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation (1999) and Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) do not mention electronic literary works at all.  Organizations like the Electronic Literature Organization in the US, trAce Online Writing Centre in the UK, Hermeneia in Spain, and ELINOR in Scandinavia along with many important online journals like Leonardo Electronic Almanac, ebr, Iowa Review Web, and Poems That Go and Drunken Boat, to name a few, have done much work in both establishing the field and promoting the art.  But the dearth in book-length scholarship is interesting when one considers, as Kac suggests, that “digital and electronic media are no longer new in general or in poetry in particular” (7).  If digital media are so pervasive, then why is scholarship about electronic literature not more ubiquitous in the academy?  Why isn’t electronic literature part of popular culture as are video games, video, digital music?  Why, when students are exposed to Robert Kendall’s “Faith” or Stephanie Strickland’s “Slipping Glimpses,” are they surprised to discover, what Kac calls, “media poetry?” 

Kac does not attempt to answer these questions, at least not directly;  it is something the reader teases out of Media Poetry.  Instead, his collection of essays by 16 international artists, critics, and scholars focuses on the much needed area of critiquing, analyzing, and presenting “experimental works created with, through, and for media and environments as diverse as video, electronic displays, computers, holograms, biotechnology, early and contemporary digital networks, cellular phones and other mobile media, skywriting and its logical consequence:  outer space” (9).  One comes to expect such a vision from the artist who wrote so passionately about telepresence and the Mars Pathfinder in “Live from Mars” (1997) and made his mark, in part, from works like “Ornitorrinco, the Webot, Travels around the World in Eighty Nanoseconds, Going from Turkey to Peru and Back” (1996).  Going beyond the edge has been at the heart of Kac’s life’s work.

The book begins with Kac’s new introduction that contextualizes the second edition within the perspective of the first.  Explaining the shift from new media poetry to media poetry, he attempts to broaden the vision of the book to “encompass phonic and biological creative tools as well as non-digital technology,” harken back to works of the 1960s, and look ahead to the future of the art form (7).  Next, the reader finds his Introduction to the First Edition (1996), which serves to remind the reader of the visionary nature of the original contribution and approach to literary works.  From those two introductory pieces, the book moves into four main areas––Digital Poetry, Multimedia Poetics, Historical and Critical Perspectives, and Appendices.  The book is compelling, not for any wild vision Kac and others see for media since what may have seemed strange and new in 1996 has lost some of its weirdness.  Rather it is the fact that poetry driven by new forms of media has yet to become normalized and familiar.  So when the essays in the collection discuss holopoetry, multimedia generators, or videopoetry, to name but a few of the genres of media poetry, the reader may not be so surprised by the technology presented by the authors but by the fact that these technologies are used to create poetry––and it has been doing so for well over 40 years.  This situation may explain why, despite the 12 years between the two editions, Media Poetry offers all of the eight original essays from 1996 along with 11 newer ones, for included in the book are Jim Rosenberg’s “The Interactive Diagram Sentence,” Philippe Bootz’s “Poetic Machinations,” E. M. de Melo e Castro’s Videopoetry,” Andre Vallias’s “We Have Not Understood Descartes,” Ladislao Pablo Györi’s “Virtual Poetry,” John Cayley’s “Beyond Codexspace,” Kac’s own “Holopoetry,” and Eric Vos’s “New Media Poetry”––renamed in the new volume “Media Poetry,”  as well as others like Bootz’s "Unique-reading Poems,” an essay adapted from his 1999 work published in Recontre médias, and Bill Seaman’s “Recombinant Poetics,” begun with his 1999 dissertation project.  Still very vital, however, these essays serve as reminders just how far our sensibilities toward literature still need to go, not just for the general public to catch up with what is happening in the scene but how any of us needs to read and talk about it in any meaningful way.  This is the very point Hayles has been driving hard at for close to a decade now.  Kac’s book only helps her argument.

The first essay in Media Poetry, in fact, is Jim Rosenberg’s “The Interactive Diagram Sentence:  Hypertext as a Medium of Thought.”  Though it offers a view of hypertext and interactivity that has expanded broadly since the essay appeared in print in 1996, it sets the pace for the kind of in-depth, highly intellectual works that follow.  Stephanie Strickland’s “Quantum Poetics:  Six Thoughts” is particularly insightful.  Like many of the writers in the volume, Strickland is a working artist who also engages in critical and scholarly output of electronic poetry, or what Kac calls this section, “Digital Poetry.”  In this essay Strickland muses about “time dimensions,” “the stenographic paradigm,” “oscillation and resonance of [digital] images,” “superposition space,” “neuro-cognitive shifts,” and “translation.”  Her exploration into these six thoughts “helps,” she tells us, to “draw the connections and form the perceptions needed to flow, to participate in and comprehend an increasingly complex patterning that enfolds us, from nano-techniques to cosmic extent through genetic alteration and the new world disorders” (42).  Though she does not come out and say it directly, one understands from Strickland’s piece that despite the technologies used to produce digital poetry and the changes technology has wrought in our lives, poetry, in any medium, remains the path for making sense of our world.  It is this humanist perspective of technology that lies at the heart of a book about media produced literature––and one of its many strengths. 

Some of the articles read more like artist papers than scholarship and, so, broadens the audience from mainly scholars and critics to other artists and devotees of art, but it also keeps the focus of digital poetry narrowly articulated.  “Interactive Poems” by Israeli poet and writer Orit Kruglanski, for example, writes engagingly about her experience in producing interactive poetry for PDAs and reprises some of what she discusses on her current website.  While the work she details is fascinating, it would have helped the reader to situate Kruglanski’s work within the larger body of electronic literature if she could have talked a bit about how her interactive poetry relates to interactive fiction, an established genre of electronic literature documented in Nick Montfort’s book, Twisty Little Passages, or how her work with PDAs impacts other locative technologies.  It is actually Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman who expands upon media poetry produced for PDAs to other technologies.  In “Nomadic Poems”  Beiguelman talks about “projects [that] investigate the possible realm of a post-phonetic, hybrid culture, crossed by printed and digital layers, where the informational and esthetic codes are entangled through programming and produce a new semantics involving a rearrangement of signs and signification processes” (97) in digital signs, cell phones, and PDAs, coming to the conclusion that “the interface is the message” (103). 

Those hoping for the kind of visionary viewpoint Kac usually delivers in his work will not be disappointed by “Biopoetry.” In that work Kac offers 20 projects that utilize “biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal creation” (191).  Performances for bees, teaching parrots to “compose and perform literary pieces,” “nanopoetry,” and “haptic listening” (191-96) are just four “new directions” poetry can go when it goes “in vivo.”  More such futurist musings are needed for in order for scholarship to stay dynamic in this “world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic creatures” (191)––so much of what is produced in the academy remains fixed on reporting knowledge no longer new and fails to offer what is possible, so focused we are on recapitulating the obvious.

The third section of the book claims that it takes the reader through “historical and critical perspectives.”  The first two essays come from Kac’s first edition, and the third and fifth are republished essays from the European Media Culture-Online and Configurations, respectively.  The fourth, “Reflections on the Perception of Generative and Interactive Hypermedia Works” by Jean-Pierre Balpe, however, seems to be the most recently written.  The overarching question driving the essay is, “What does it mean . . . to be interactive and why should it be better to be interactive than not to be?” (246).  Balpe’s response centers on the work he created in 2000 with composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, entitled “Labylogue.”  A 3D installation laid out as a “labyrinth of walls” containing text, “Labylogue” fosters an exploration of “perception, appearances, and deep structures – and trie[s] to lead the spectator to simultaneously perceive all these levels, thus creating another level of meaning” (249).  Since the work he describes is similar to those recently produced for CAVE environments––for example, Noah Waldrip-Fruin et al’s “Screen”––the reader walks away from this essay wondering how this project may have influenced later VR installations, like “Screen,” and if, indeed, it has impacted human perception.  Some sort of introductory comments at the beginning of this section, and frankly, at the beginning of all sections of the book, that contextualize the essays would go far to helping the reader see how the essays work together as a whole and within the field. 

The final section, Appendices, is very helpful to scholars working in the area of electronic literature.  In it Kac provides a chronology, webliography, sources, and author bios.  Oddly, the chronology runs from 1921 to 1996 and is not updated to reflect the media poetry produced today even though the artists penning the essays are involved in the current scene and write about their work in the book.  Despite this omission, the historical background is important, particularly for scholars interested in the genesis of electronic literature. 

Kac begins the history of media poetry with the citation of an essay written by Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov entitled “The Radio of the Future,” in which Khlebnikov predicts the “the impact of telecommunications on literature  . . . and culture” (273).  Thus, Kac connects media poetry to the modernist avant-garde of the early 20^th century and in doing so, follows the lead of fellow art historians, Lev Manovich and Oliver Grau, who connect media art to Russian Avant-Garde artists and the Italian Futurists, respectively. He goes on to point out that Modernists in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and the US experimented with analog technology and poetry making.  American poet E.E. Cummings, for example, used his typewriter to play with “visual syntax.”  It was in 1959, according to Kac, that we see the first true computer generated poetry: Théo Lutz’s Stochastische Texte.”

The important literary group, OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or “Workshop for the Potential of Literature) founded in 1960 by French writers Raymond Queneau and Francois Le  Lionnais, is seen as one of the biggest influences upon the development of experimental poetry.   Thus, the late 1950s and 1960s regained the spirit of experimentation after having been disrupted by WWII.  Important to note are Brion Gysin’s “Pistol Poem” (1960); Gerd Stern’s programmed kinetic poem “Over” (1962);  Clair Philippy’s generative work (Poems no. 027, 929, 078, 105, 140) (1963); and John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem System” (1969).

Experiments with generative poetry, especially, continued through the 1970s and 80s, but we also see the use of other technologies with Richard Kostelanetz’s “Three Prose Pieces” (1975), which used video and his work “On Holography” (1978), which used holography;  Syvestre Pestana’s poems (1981), which used animation;  Eduardo Kac’s own ASCII and holography works (1982) that he talks about in Media Poetry; and Rod Willmot’s “Everglade” (1989), which used a hypertext authoring system for DOS platform.

In essence, what Kac suggests is that the history of media poetry––and so electronic literature––begins with experimental poetry produced in Europe, North America, and South America.  It is a trajectory that begins in the early 20^th century, has continued on to the present, and encompasses a variety of forms.  The driving force behind it, however, is technological experimentation and innovation, not necessary limited to the computer but certainly at its center today.

The history ends, as mentioned previously, in 1996.  What has happened since the publication of Kac’s first edition with electronic literature, particularly with the introduction of the web browser, multimedia software, and broad-band technology has given way to literally thousands of electronic literary works.  So, stopping here dates the information considerably.  One can understand why Kac resists taking updating his chronology, but certainly a brief rationale for not doing so and a comment about where it all headed for those new to media poetry would have been helpful.  Nevertheless, this information provides important information to electronic literature scholars in that it offers a broad,  international perspective to its history.  Those familiar with Hayles’ 2007 essay, “Electronic Literature:  What Is It?,” know that she begins the history of electronic literature with what she calls “First Generation, or Classical” Period, which begins in the late 1990s with the introduction of the authoring software, Storyspace, and ends with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, neither of which find themselves in Kac’s chronology. Hayles’ Second Generation, or Contemporary/Postmodern Period takes the genre to the present time focusing on various genres that have emerged.  While Hayles is interested in looking at all electronic literary works and Kac, the specific genre of media poetry, the two works, when read side by side, complement each other and offer an ambitious scholar in the future to synthesize the information and, perhaps, offer an expanded critical history of the electronic literature, in general, and media poetry, in particular. That Eduardo Kac’s, Media Poetry: An International Anthology exposes scholars and artists to electronic literature that has emerged out of Europe, South America, and North America and focuses intently on one genre of electronic literature speaks to the book’s significance as a scholarly work. It makes an excellent text for graduate programs in digital media and has the potential of shaping the current vision of media poetry as well as other genres of literature produced for and by computing devices and influencing the larger field of media art by raising awareness of electronic literature.