The upright script: Words in space and on the page

Journal of Electronic Publishing

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2011, Pages

  Borsuk, Amaranth ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84155179121     PISSN: None     EISSN: 10802711     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3998/3336451.0014.212     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. This quotation appears in One Way Street, a meditation in aphorisms on life in the metropolis. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1996), 456. Hereafter OWS.
2. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939--1962, Eded. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 54.
3. Stéphane Mallarmé, "The Crisis in Poetry,"Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 126.
4. Media theorist Lev Manovich makes a strong case for this reading in "New Media from Borges to HTML,"The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 22. Hereafter NMR.
5. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,"Selected Writings: Volume 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 254.
6. Marjorie Perloff traces twentieth- and twenty-first century poets' attempts to turn away from subjectivity through an emphasis on the materiality of language (including Brazilian Concrete poetry, French OuLiPo writing, language poetry, and conceptualism) in her new book Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)
7. Perloff asserts that contemporary conceptual and appropriative writing can in fact produce works of genius that surprise and delight. She traces this work from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project through Kenneth Goldsmith's Traffic.
8. Johanna Drucker, "Language in the Landscape,"Figuring the Word (New York: Granary Books, 1998), 94. Hereafter FW.
9. Janet Murray, "Inventing the Medium,"NMR, 6
10. Fringe Television, "Fringe 201: The Observer in 'A New Day in the Old Town',"YouTube, September 16, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61aN94OhAXA.
11. The framing suggests the viewer of the show is herself this voyeuristic watcher. However, the presence of a recurring character known as "the observer,"an alopecia-stricken man in a mid-century styled gray suit and fedora with an inhuman appetite for spicy food, indicates another potential witness to the space- and time-bending events that often disrupt the lives of the characters. The indifferent way in which this observer labels what he sees, noting events from spontaneous human combustion to mass biological warfare impassively in his journal, suggests that whoever is watching does not necessarily have our best interests at heart.
12. Motion Theory, "Liberty Mutual, 'Sideswipe,'"Mth, http://motiontheory.com/content/401/liberty-mutual_sideswipe.
13. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 2
14. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Dover, 1997), 3
15. New media artist Christophe Bruno began experimenting with the idea of information overload as early as 2004 with his "Human Browser,"one of the first Google Hack artworks. In this site-specific piece, a person performs the results of programmatically conducted Google searches based on keywords related to the performance context and location. Wearing headphones, the performer hears a text-to-speech translation of the results and in turn renders this text to any visitor who might pass by, changing her tone and affect as she shifts from one result to the next.
16. Kenneth Goldsmith, "A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation,"The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008), 144.
17. Hereafter CI. Documentation of the project, which was performed as recently as 2010, can be found at www.iterature.com/human-browser/.
18. In Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith provide illuminating introductions to these texts as well as works by over 100 other contemporary conceptual writers and important precursors
19. The poet Anne Boyer critiques Shirinyan's project as "a satire of connectedness entirely constructed of connectedness and all it omits"in her response on the publisher's blog, January 19, 2011, http://futurepoem.wordpress.com/.
20. A particularly Steinian claim; "using everything"is one of the three main precepts of her 1926 "Composition as Explanation,"The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1962), 513.
21. Certainly, to recombine, rewrite, and remediate existing texts is indeed to add another text to the world, whether or not that text's content, or data, is new, and Goldsmith's assertion is partly in jest
22. These texts, Day, Sports, The Weather, Traffic, Fidget, and Soliloquy, are also available online through Ubuweb's Archive, which means they will be available for remediation by users of laptops, iPhones, and iPads and still other unforeseen generations of digital devices
23. "The Digital Flood: You'd Better Start Swimmin' or You'll Sink Like A Stone,"Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation (blog), April 24, 2011, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-digital-flood-youd-better-start-swimmin-or-youll-sink-like-a-stone/.
24. "I Was Not Far Enough Out and Simply Waving Not Drowning,"Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation (blog), April 25, 2011, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/i-was-not-far-enough-out-and-simply-waving-not-drowning/.
25. Katherine Elaine Sanders, "So What Exactly Is Conceptual Writing?: An Interview With Kenneth Goldsmith,"Bomblog (blog), Oct 2, 2009, http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=4653.
26. Christian Bök suggests that Factory Work, the book in the series ghostwritten by Kenneth Goldsmith, is in fact a direct appropriation of Warhol's diaries. "Flarf, Arf, Arf, Arf! (Part 2),"Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation (blog), April 13, 2010, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/flarf-arf-arf-arf-part-2/.
27. Vanessa Place, The Polished You (Rio: oodpress, 2010).
28. Library of Congress, Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third Series, Books and Pamphlets, Jan.-Jun. 1972, 1484.
29. "History,"Taylor Business Institute Website, accessed May 26, 2011, http://www.tbiil.edu/?page_id=2814.
30. "Vanessa Place-writing La Medusa, new projects with Les Figues Press, and the literary scene in LA,"Examiner, Experimental Arts, National, June 20, 2010, http://www.examiner.com/experimental-arts-in-national/vanessa-place-writing-la-medusa-new-projects-with-les-figues-press-and-the-literary-scene-la.
31. Ander Monson, "Index for X and the Origin of Fires,"Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007), 57.
32. Born Magazine, http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/indexx/.
33. Built in Flash, the text and animation load on a single page, thus no page references are possible. The text of the complete poem, information on how to contribute images, and biographies of the creators are available from the menu at the top of the page.
34. Marjorie Perloff, "Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,"NMP, 146
35. Flickr, www.flickr.com, is a photo sharing website that allows users to share images with friends and family, a wider network of contacts, or the public at large. The site is a resource not only for snapshots, but for professional photographers seeking to make their work available to others through a creative commons license (for which each user may define the terms). Photos carry a large quantity of metadata with them, enabled by digital photography, which embeds information about file size, camera type, and sometimes gps location in the images. Users may also geotag their photos manually, apply descriptions, titles, and tags to their photos, and link the people in the photos to their profiles on Flickr.
36. Jer Thorpe, "Index for X: An Experiment in Mass Collaboration,"BLPRNT (blog), January 18, 2006, http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/index-for-x-an-experiment-in-mass-collaboration.
37. Ezra Pound, "Mauberley,"Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990), 201
38. Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), 227
39. One of the preeminent sources for this material is infosthetics.com, the blog of Andrew Vande Moere of the department of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. The term "information aesthetics"arises from Lev Manovich's 2001 "Info-Aesthetics Manifesto,"which defines "info-aesthetics"as the use of "new media to represent human experience in INFORMATION society in new ways"(last modified October 27, 2001, http://www.manovich.net/IA).
40. Jer Thorpe, "NYTimes: 365/360 - 2009 (in color),"Flickr photostream, Feburary 18, 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/3291287830/in/set-72157614008027965/.
41. Boris Müller, "Poetry 03,"Esono (blog), accessed May 25, 2011, http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry03/.
42. An ancient code structure used in a range of mystical practices including Hebrew Kabalistic study and Ancient Greek dream interpretation. It is evident as early as the eighth century BC.
43. http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry06/. Figure 12 shows a detail from the visualization of the poem "Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland"by Theodor Fontane as visual explanation.
44. Derek Beaulieu's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (UK: Information as Material, 2007), a work of concrete poetry, provides an analog example of this type of information aesthetics. In it, Beaulieu maps the movement of the letters of the alphabet across every page of Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella, rendering their trajectories as jagged lines. The book's publisher, Information as Material (established by artist Simon Morris in 2002), specializes in conceptual works that use other texts as their sources.
45. Brian Kim Stefans, "potentially suitable for running in a loop,"Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003), 38
46. William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads,"The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, volume 2, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 151.
47. Emily Dickinson, "This was a poet,"The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961), 215.
48. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life,"The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 10.
49. Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,"Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (London: Blackwell, 2005), 19.
50. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"Critical Theory Since Plato, revised ed., ed. Hazard Adams (Florida: HBJ, 1992), 763.
51. Ezra Pound, "Mauberley,"Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990), 201
52. Of course, many more definitions could be inserted here
53. See the prefatory quote to this essay