Digital poetry

Digital poetry is a form of artistic use of language that is realized in media such as computers and the Internet and has been perceived as an independent art form since the 1990s.

The term digital poetry combines several branches of computer-based language art that have arisen independently of one another. This includes both artificial text production and works of interactive media art, hypertext literature, online literature and works that primarily deal with the symbolic levels of the computer. The concept of digital poetry consists in dealing with language within a digital medium. As a rule, the computer is seen as a tool by means of which, through programming and various design options, works of art of speech can be created. However, the concept of digital poetry is constantly evolving and cannot be sharply defined. The term "poetry" is derived from the Latin "poesis" (originally Greek: "poiesis"), which generally stands for the creative process of producing. This does not have to mean poetry in the strictly conventional sense. The component “digital” stems from the way the computer works, whose system of symbols is based on the two digits zero and one, and refers in particular to the symbolic nature of computer art. Terms with a similar meaning are for example electronic poetry , new media poetry or cyberpoetry .

Digital poetry sees itself as the art of language that has pushed the boundaries of conventional literature. The decisive difference to traditional literature is that with digital poetry - as in all experimental writing styles - the focus is no longer on the content, but on the language as material. Digital poetry is not primarily aimed at expressing feelings or opinions, but rather aims to create aesthetic linguistic works of art on the basis of conscious theories and experiments. In this sense, one is actually more concerned with a visual, material art than with literature. Digital poetry in developed form mostly shows media self-reference, is procedural, interactive, hypermedial and based on networking. That is why it is part of media digital art . (See in more detail under Structural determinations of digital language art ).

History and Development

The genesis of the different and yet often converging currents of digital poetry is so confusing and complex that only a superficial overview can be given without claiming to be exhaustive.

The first linguistic work with the computer came about in the 50s and 60s in the circle around Max Bense , who had already developed an aesthetic of the poetic automaton since 1950. Theo Lutz created the first artificial and stochastic texts on a Zuse mainframe computer in 1959. At the same time, Emmett Williams had been experimenting with his procedural poems since 1956 without the need for a computer - he replaced the letters of the title of the poem to be written with randomly selected words so that an artificial text was generated from it as if by a computer program. In the following time, several automatic text machines appeared, such as Jean Baudot's La Machine a écrire (1964). The main focus of these experiments was on the aesthetic function of automatically or artificially generated texts. The group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, Working Group for Potential Literature), founded in France in 1960, also gave impulses , for example with Raymond Queneau's work Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961), which consisted of ten sonnets with lines that could be combined as desired. More recent works such as Florian Cramer's Permutations (1996) or Eduardo Kac's biopoetic experiment Genesis (1999) can also be seen in this tradition of artificial text production.

Another starting point for digital poetry is the installations of interactive media art, such as Cybernetic Landscapes (1960s) and Legible City (1988-92), in which the viewer can move through virtual landscapes made of letters, or Frank Fietzek's installation Bodybuilding (1997) which resembles an exercise bike and spits out text in time with the movements. The focus of these works was the communication between the user and the electronic medium.

The international spread of digital poetry went hand in hand with the development of new electronic technologies in the 1980s. In 1987, Apple's HyperCard opened the era of the hypertext process. They made files freely linkable. The first literary hypertexts, so-called hyperfictions, were soon written using programs such as Storyspace - stories the direction of which the reader can determine through his decisions.

For example, the artist group Jodi (since 1994), whose works look like a system error at first glance, and the Ascii-Art-Ensemble (since 1998) with its transfer of films in ASCII dealt with the symbol level of the computer encoded by linguistic characters -Code, or Jaromil, whose 13-character Forkbomb (2002) (see also Forkbomb ) crashes Unix systems. In their own way, all works refer to the way the computer works, invisible to the average user.

It is only since the 1990s that the currents described have been increasingly viewed as components of the same genre. During this period, several projects have been created that have a unifying function - for example the p0es1s project, the website of the Electronic Poetry Center, Roberto Simanowski's online journal dichtung digital and printed matter such as Eduardo Kac's anthology New Media Poetry or one of the French journals ALIRE and DOC (K) S jointly published booklet on the topic.

One of the first German-language projects was the Imaginary Library by Heiko Idensen and Matthias Krohn, the basic features of which were created for Ars Electronica in Linz in 1990. A networked scene began to develop in the German-speaking area between 1994 and 1996. Net literature pioneers such as Olaf Koch, Sven Stillich, Reinhard Döhl , Johannes Auer , Martina Kieninger , Dirk Schröder, Claudia Klinger and Norman Ohler used the internet as a poetic space. The web platform netzliteratur.net , initiated by Johannes Auer, is an encyclopedia of the German-speaking discourse.

The German Literature Archive in Marbach created 2,013 to 2,015 as part of the DFG funded project a representative corpus of German network literature. The total of 75 works depict the development of online literature in the period from 1989 to 2011 and are described in detail in the associated MediaWiki. Archived publications are made accessible via the SWBcontent platform. The final volume Netzliteratur in the archive offers a historical review, technical results and perspectives for research on net literature . Experiences and perspectives .

"This is only the beginning" (Eduardo Kac)

Digital poetry - structural determinations of digital language art

In the following, some key terms of media poetry are to be named which are used in digital poetry - specifically modified or expanded. These concepts are closely linked, which is why they are often found combined or flowing into one another:

Medial self-reference

The concept of media self-reference includes the medium itself (in our case the computer and its technology); the digital medium refers to itself, so to speak. This is how structures and processes (of the medium) become part of art and make digital poetry what it is. For example, programming, source codes or interfaces are staged in a self-related manner and properties and special features of digital media, such as animation, interactivity, hypermediality, networking, and hardware and software are presented. The concept of media self-reference describes the "poetic interest in (...) 'material' itself". One example is the Jaromil Forkbomb . This “poetic virus”, which can be used to crash a computer by entering 13 characters in the command line of a Unix system, is a project that actively refers to the programming itself. Medial self-reference is a compelling criterion of digital poetry and the most important of the structural determinations of digital language art. As a central category, it runs through all other concepts.

Processuality

The term processuality refers to the dynamics, movement and animation of works of art. Processuality describes works of art that do not stagnate, but that are only completed through the actual process and are only realized through dealing with them. Digital poetry is characterized by this changeability and process. The focus is on the dynamics of linguistic or symbolic processes in the broadest sense and the changed aesthetic experience of time in the electronic language or symbol space. The completion of the work of art usually also lies in the activity of the recipient. In any case, the principle of incompleteness is an important factor and goes hand in hand with processuality. As an example here would be u. a. To mention works with processes of decay, for example Genesis by Eduardo Kac, in which “symbolic transformation processes” are visualized. The focus is on “the relationship between the perceptible” (movement as animation, as material movement of the text) “and the processes that evoke them” (the structural movement of the arithmetic and symbolization processes). Many artists concentrate on only one of the two aspects, i.e. either on the animation on the screen or the processing in the computer or in the network, many also thematize precisely their difference. Processuality can either be related to humans or machines. So on processes "in the head" or on machine processes. Interactivity is also a form of processuality.

Interactivity

“Interactivity” describes the involvement of the audience, who thereby becomes part of the art itself. The focus is on an active recipient who comprehends and completes the creative process. A bond or process arises between artist and recipient, whose “co-creating intervention in the art process” makes open and self-reflective perception and interpretation processes technically vivid, empirical and observable. The user's activity becomes part of the art. Often a very physical effort is required in interactive installations. An example of this is Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw. Here “the visitor moves on a stationary bicycle through the streets of a city that can be seen in front of him on a projection surface”. Interactivity is closely linked to the principle of processuality and lives from the dialogue between user and computer. The aim of the concept is motivation - the word interactivity should be used as a lure to interest potential users in the project. The interactivity cannot be reduced to absurdity, it can only be implemented within given limits. Florian Cramer, however, is a pseudo-interactive kitsch world for Jeffrey Shaw's Legible City .

Hypermediality

The concept of hypermediality refers to the ability to “simulate or integrate all previous technical media”. It represents an extension of the hypertext by emphasizing the multimedia aspect. Like hypertext, hypermedia insists on links. These include various media formats, so that in addition to pure text files, audio, image and video files are also included. It should be less about creating a multimedia spectacle than about using the various qualities of media forms creatively and linking them with one another. In this way, a total work of art is created whose media characteristics can and should be reflected. This means that not only the technical, but also the cultural quality of the media used can be observed and questioned.

Hypermediality is therefore more than “text behind the text”. It also refers to the programming level that is hidden behind the overall visual-acoustic data set, or that makes this possible in the first place.

For digital poetry, hypermediality means an expansion: It receives new dimensions of dynamism. While sheet and printed works are two-dimensional and text objects are three-dimensional, the texts on the screen are given variability. They change as you read and can be influenced by the user. This not only enables a new form of reception, but also new experiences with time and space. Animations, for example, are used to specifically shape the complementary relationship between time and space. The time factor is introduced into the structure of visual texts and their reception in a differentiable manner.

Networking

The concept of networking in the sense of “collaborative writing” already existed before the invention of the computer. Examples of this are the “poetic games” of the Nuremberg Pegnitz shepherds in the 17th century, the “letter novel” in the 18th century, the “salon literature” in the 19th century and the “ Mail Art poetry” such as Wolf Vostells and Peter Faeckes " Postal delivery novel " in the 20th century.

“Networking” in the sense of digital poetry refers to the following approaches: On the one hand, it describes the document linkage made possible by networking computers: the World Wide Web is an example of this. On the other hand, it describes the interaction of people via computer networks, independent of spatial and temporal presence.

Digital poetry not only uses the technology of networking - it also reflects and illustrates this. For example, in the case of networked, collaborative writing, it can show the extent to which networking is used as a social and communicative link. Document links in the computer or in networks such as the Internet can also be used deliberately to show the extent to which the concept of “networking” has a cultural impact.

Under the aesthetic principle of networking, traditional concepts such as "authorship" and "work" change or expand to include aspects such as collectivity, 'wreadership' (transitions between writing and reading), openness, incompleteness, etc.

Further description categories

Transversality and Transfugality:

Transversality refers to the crossing of different codes, going beyond the networking or oscillation, as described by Christiane Heibach. For example, the ASCII Art Ensemble amalgamates the analog film with the ASCII code.

Transfugality refers to the precarious status of the fugitive who seems to be inscribed in digital poetry. The transfugality is shown quite trivially in the fact that many digital works, due to technical developments, are already no longer readable or only with a high reconstructive effort.

Important examples of digital poetry

Bastian Böttcher: The Looppool (1997)

With its interactive poem in the form of Looppools the sweet life made slam poet Bastian Böttcher stir. In his "object-oriented poetry" he uses the interactivity of the user to make a statement about the static state of texts. In 1998 he won the special prize from “Zeit”, “IBM” and “ARD-Online” at the “Pegasus - Competition for New Forms of Expression on the Internet”.

The hypertext structure of the loop pool appears on the screen as an ornament with interwoven text, similar to the baroque “grid poems”. By clicking the start button, music starts and a text that flows through the ornament in branches is "rapped". If the user does not intervene, the text and music run normally ("linear") in 32 bars. But by pressing a button on the keyboard, the user can change the direction of the text and thus the verses themselves at any “intersection” (“cut-up technique”) and thus create a flowing, non-linear text. This means that new meanings can always arise in the same text fragment.

The first version of the loop pool allows only little interactivity: As a "DJ", the user can decide for himself which lines of text are rapped, but only within a closed framework, ie one can only move within its specifications - in the respective ornament. Together with the programmers will Grafhorst Hard Bastian Böttcher has now expanded the concept and a streaming-ready version of Looppools developed the Looppool zero - D . With this version, the user can add further “word loops” to the process flow, so that the loop pool grows continuously and forms “metastasis-like word nodes” that change its shape. This means that the user is no longer tied to a fixed structure. "Analogous to the 'functional principles' of virtual 3D worlds, the Looppool Null - D should convey a journey through 'PoesieWelten'".

Florian Cramer: plaintext.cc (2004)

The philologist, software art activist and programmer Florian Cramer often takes a very strictly theoretical position in dealing with digital poetry. With his “Ten Theses on Software Art” in 2003, he contributed to creating an important theoretical basis for the entire genre, which gives code a high priority. In his opinion, network writers have to understand the programming language in order to be able to deal artistically with the technical possibilities. This claim is reflected in his works, for example in plaintext.cc .

His work plaintext.cc is an “autopoetic bachelor machine ” that comes from three sources: from a text (George Batailles “Geschichte des Auges”, 1928), from the computer's system programs, and from an email dialog with the Australian Poet Mez. The machine consists of three columns to which a number is assigned. By clicking on one of the three numbers, the page reloads and a new text is generated from the three source texts according to certain parameters. This type of layout comes from the manuscript of Georges Perec's radio play “Die Maschine” (1972), in which a text generator makes a failed attempt to improve a poem by Goethe.

Accordingly, in this work Cramer plays with historical as well as current references to texts and discourses: The new technology, the machine, “contaminates digital code with poetic text.” The seemingly random composition of text and code frustrates some users, but reward those who who stay focused. These two different experiences of the recipient show a possibly fluid boundary between (alleged) nonsense and (alleged) art. This experience, especially in connection with the work of Batailles, is also an example of “Pornographic Coding”, in which pornographic content and code are no longer independent of one another, but are united: “Program code is like pornography. It has linear logic, but no meaning. "

ASCII Art Ensemble

The computer artists of the ASCII Art Ensemble joined forces with the aim of creating art through the "retransmission" of moving film images "into the ASCII character code. The group, whose members Walter van der Cruijsen, Luka Frelih and Vuk Cosic come from Amsterdam, Ljubljana and Berlin, was founded in 1998.

ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" and is a character encoding that may be used. a. includes the Latin alphabet and some punctuation and control characters. ASCII was first published in 1967 and last updated in 1986.

The ASCII Art Ensemble displays moving images, for example from the film “King Kong”, using ASCII characters. The films, which consist of 256 ASCII characters, i.e. only numbers and letters in green on black, call up the display method used by computers Memory back. "The process is reminiscent of the early, graphic-free and 24-needle stages of printer technology, when images could only be represented using ASCII characters in the computer and were accordingly indecipherable." The images lose some of their meaning, but gain a new one . It is the reverse transformation of the medium and the visualization of its origins: the signs. The ASCII Art Ensemble has published various art projects using the ASCII character code. In “ASCII to Speech - history of art for the blind”, for example, images from art history translated into ASCII characters are read aloud character by character with the help of software that converts text into speech. Another example and one of the most famous works by the ASCII Art Ensemble is ASCII History of Moving Images. This is a collection of seven film clips converted into ASCII characters, for example from the above-mentioned “King Kong”, or “Star Trek” and “Psycho”. This also includes Deep ASCII , the ASCII version of the porn film "Deep Throat". Here it becomes particularly clear how much the conversion of a film into the ASCII character code influences the content and the effect on the viewer. The pornographic images can no longer be deciphered, their ASCII version remains. What was previously wicked is played down, distorted, distorted and thus turned into art.

Eduardo Kac: Genesis (1999)

With his “transgenic works of art” Eduardo Kac opened a new area of ​​digital poetry, that of “bio-poetry”: Here, living organisms are seen as innovative language creations through digital transcoding and interactivity via the Internet. With his various works in the field of bio-poetry (including "GFP Bunny", "The Eighth Day" and "Move 36"), Kac tries to criticize the current direction in biotechnology and genetic engineering and to bring it into the public discourse.

The work of art Genesis examines "the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics and the Internet". The starting point for the work is a sentence from the biblical creation story (Book of Moses): "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." This sentence is first translated into Morse Code and then into DNA base pairs through a process specially developed by the artist. This creates an “artist gene”.

By cloning this synthetic gene, a bacterium (JM101) is created, which mutates during the period of the exhibition both through the natural reproduction process of bacteria and through UV radiation controlled by humans via the Internet. At the end of the exhibition, the mutated DNA structure of the bacterium will be translated back into Morse Code and then into English. Through this “final transfer”, the mutation of the bacterium, and thus of the original sentence, becomes clear. Here is the result of the first exhibition in Linz, Austria in 1999: "Let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that ioves ua eon the earth".

This minimal change in the original biblical sentence through technology is symbolic of the human ability to play "God" with the help of new technologies. The user does not accept the sentence in its original form and can create new meanings through the interactivity; the boundaries between natural life and digital / technology-based data are thus blurred.

See also

• Network history

literature

• Loss Pequeño Glazier: Digital Poetics. The Making of E-Poetries . University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2002.
• Caterina Davinio: Tecno-Poesia e realtà virtuali. Techno-Poetry and Virtual Realities . Foreword by Eugenio Miccini . Essay, bilingual Italian-English, Sometti, Mantova 2002 ISBN 88-88091-85-8 .
• Georg Ruppelt , Hg .: "The great humming god." Stories of thinking machines, computers and artificial intelligence. Exhibition of the Lower Saxony State Library. Series: Reading room, 7. CW Niemeyer, Hameln 2007 ISBN 3-8271-8807-5 (therein p. 62ff: Poesie-Automataten. Six examples and objects from Jonathan Swift to Adam Silk to Hans Magnus Enzensberger )
• Friedrich W. Block (Ed.). p0es1s. Aesthetics of digital poetry . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2004.
• Friedrich W. Block: p0es1s. Review of digital poetry . Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt, Graz 2015 ISBN 978-3-85415-527-0 .
• Manfred Engel : desktop theater. Cyberspace as a stage or the return of the happening in the MUD . In: Axel Dunker, Frank Zipfel (eds.): Literature @ Internet . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2006 ISBN 978-3-89528-534-9 , pp. 75-97.
• Jutta Bendt (ed.). Net literature in the archive. Experiences and perspectives. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-1999-8 .
• Saskia Reither: Computer poetry. Studies on the modification of poetic texts by the computer . transcript, Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-89942-160-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
• Christopher Funkhouser: Prehistoric Digital Poetry. An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 . The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2007, ISBN 0-8173-1562-4 (English).
• Klaus Peter Dencker : Optical Poetry. From the prehistoric characters to the digital experiments of the present . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-021503-8 ( limited preview in Google book search).

Web links

• dichtung-digital - Journal for digital literature and art
• Hybrid book publisher for digital authorship. Vienna Zurich
• Archive of the international e-poetry festival
• The most important German-language net literature, internet literature and hyperfiction projects
• German-language platform with theoretical texts on online literature
• P0es1s. Digital literature
• Dreher, Thomas: History of Computer Art. Cape. III.1 Computer literature
• Dreher, Thomas: History of Computer Art. Cape. VI.2.2 Hyperfiction for CD-ROM and Web

swell

1. ↑ cf. Block, Friedrich W. / Heibach, Christiane / Wenz, Karin: Aesthetics of digital poetry: an introduction. In: Block, Friedrich W. u. a. (Ed.): P0es1s. Aesthetics of digital poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2004
2. ↑ cf. Bense, Max / Döhl, Reinhard: On the situation (1964)
3. ↑ cf. - Glazier, Loss Pequeño: Introduction. Language as Transmission: Poetry's Electronic Presence. In: Glazier, Loss Pequeño: Digital Poetics. The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa, London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002; - Block / Heibach / Wenz, op. Cit.
4. ^ Beat Suter and Michael Böhler: hyperfiction. Hyperliterary Reader: Internet and Literature. Basel / Frankfurt a. M .: Stroemfeld / Nexus, 1999
5. ↑ Florian Hartling: Netz Kunst 2005, University of Halle-Wittenberg
6. ↑ https://wwik-prod.dla-marbach.de/line/index.php/Die_Quellen
7. ↑ http://literatur-im-netz.dla-marbach.de/
8. ↑ Jutta Bendt (ed.). Net literature in the archive. Experiences and perspectives. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-1999-8
9. ^ Kac, Eduardo: Introduction. In: Kac, Eduardo (Ed.): Visible Language, New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies. Special issue no.30.2; 1996
10. ↑ Cf. Block, Friedrich W. / Heibach, Christiane / Wenz, Karin: Aesthetics of digital poetry: an introduction. In: Block, Friedrich W. u. a. (Ed.): P0es1s. Aesthetics of digital poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2004
11. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
12. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
13. ↑ http://www.p0es1s.net/de/projects/jaromil.html
14. ↑ Cf. Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
15. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
16. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
17. ↑ Cf. Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
18. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
19. ↑ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/the-legible-city/
20. ↑ Florian Cramer: Exe.cut [up] able statements. Poetic calculations and phantasms of the self-executing text, dissertation, Berlin 2006
21. ^ Block, Friedrich: On the high seas in the Turing galaxy. Visual poetry and hypermedia. In: Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (Hrsg.): Text and criticism. Visual poetry. Special volume No. 9, 1997
22. ↑ Block / Heilbach / Wenz, op. Cit.
23. ↑ See Block, op. Cit.
24. ↑ Cf. Cramer, Florian: Why there is not enough interesting network poetry, URL: http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/karlsruher_thesen.html
25. ^ Christiane Heibach: Literature on the Internet. Theory and Practice of a Cooperative Aesthetic, Berlin: dissertation.de, 2000
26. ↑ Beat Suter: Hyperfiction and Interactive Narration, Zurich: update Verlag, 2000
27. ↑ Boettcher: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/features/schreiben-am-netz/looppool
28. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated August 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
29. ↑ Johannes Auer: "The reader as a DJ: or what connects internet literature with hip-hop" ( http://www.netzliteratur.net/dj.htm )
30. ↑ Boettcher: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/features/schreiben-am-netz/looppool
31. ↑ http://www.junggesellenpreis.de/jury.html
32. ↑ http://www.junggesellenpreis.de/jury.html
33. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated May 4, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
34. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated May 4, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
35. ↑ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/ascii-art/bilder/4/
36. ↑ http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/
37. ↑ http://www.ekac.org/
38. ↑ http://www.ekac.org/
39. ↑ http://www.ekac.org/