"Cyber Poetics and the New Avant Garde"
By Emma Milstead
Avant-garde poets of the past were famed for their rebellion against tradition. They wrote poetry that broke down the boundaries of the historical picture of language and created a genre that praises the most unpoetic of voices. So, what is tradition today? Hasn’t technology become the norm? Would true avant-gardes of today rebel against the use of technology and go back to old methods? Well, no. As digital- and technology- based poets prove, avant-gardes of today embrace technology while wrestling with the implications resulting from human connection with and dependence on innovation. The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, movement began in the 1960s with a group of French poets who chose to incorporate rules or constraints into the writing of their poetry (poets.org). Even though “poetry and mathematics often seem to be incompatible areas of study,” the Oulipos used mathematical-like restraints in their work to exercise their power over the concrete rules of their predecessors (poets.org). They explored their language, and ended up creating new forms, by bending to its authority and closely following every guideline. Contemporary poets, like Mary-Anne Breeze (Mez), Talan Memmott, and Christian Bök, use technology’s rules in the same way the Oulipo’s use the rules of language. They attempt to remove the self and provide the reader her own interpretations of the poetry rather than imposing meaning the way classic poetic technique imposes limits on poetry. Bök, a Canadian sound poet, says, in an interview about constraint driven poetry, “to fathom such rules supposedly emancipates us from them, since we gain mastery over their unseen potential, whereas to ignore such rules quarantines us in them, since we fall servile to their covert intention.” In other words, by purposely using the rules to such extremes, we validate the fact that we know them and choose to exert our power over them rather than succumbing to their imprisonment. Contemporary digital and avant-garde poets rebel against the “tradition” of technology by using its properties, like code, mechanized images, and scientific processes, as a means to not only allow the expression of their voice but also to integrate the audience into the meaning-making of the poem.
Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian critic, asserts, in “Discourse on the Novel,” that poetry cannot contain heteroglossia or be dialogic in nature because the poet can never step out of his own voice and adopt multiple expressions without placing his own authorial intent on the words. The language of poetry with its imagery and symbols is “equally oriented toward the single-languaged and single-styled genres” (Bakhtin 266) whereas novelistic discourse represents “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). Poetry, in the classic sense, does not have the ability to accept “the possibility of another vocabulary, another semantics, other syntactic forms and…the possibility of other linguistic points of view” (Bakhtin 285). Bakhtin contends, “The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to its unmediated power to assign meaning…that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own intention” (285). In Bakhtin’s eyes, the poet can never fully assimilate another’s voice into his own work because the poet writes every word through his own viewpoint.
However, Bakhtin’s theories regarding poetry do not take into account the turn that poetics has taken towards digital media. The lyric has always served “to articulate a private interior self” and “presents an array of characteristics that includes the ideology of a single author, a rhetoric of self-examination, self-justification, and self-restoration” (Morris 19). On the other hand, digital poetries are “inherently inhospitable to the lyrical ‘I’” and “are often collaborations emerging from alliances between writers, artists, composers, and programmers” (Morris 20). Not only do e-poetries defy the “I” in the traditional sense, but also “digital poetics reconnect…the interactor with the embodied gestures of letter making and the statues of writing as a performed activity” in which they are implicitly connected (Morris 22). The users are able to co-author the work because their choices become the meaning making mechanism behind the poem itself. This alliance between the audience and author accounts for the “multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness” (Bakhtin 278). Authors of digital poetries inevitably create works that are “not just multimedia but multiauthored and multipurpose, open rather than owned, morphing rather than fixed” which leaves room for the interconnectedness between humans and machines that define e-poetics (Morris 32). N. Katherine Hayles, one of the leaders in the critique of digital textual media, suggests “that all texts performed in digital media are coded” which “implies that reader and writer functions are always multiple and include actions performed by human and nonhuman agents” (183). Because the poems are shaped with the possibilities for various voices, heteroglossia permeates digital poetics.
Because art has often been the front runner in innovative thought and applications, contemporary poets present a new genre of digital and technology inspired poetics as an expression of the new collaboration-based computer age. The internet provides a vast array of avenues for collaborative writing that “can be seen, not as an individual personalized achievement, but as a series of strands in a larger social-spatial textual fabric (the network)” (Pequeño Glazier 175). The code writer writes the code to allow the technology to function, and the reader uses procedures and rules to interact with the technology. By engaging with the internet, the user is able to interface with “the sum of the information resources made available through thousands of networks, allowing the interchange of information between millions of computer nodes” (Pequeño-Glazier 40). The new avant-garde attempts to understand and manipulate the function of the cyborg, or the merger between humans and machines, by creating digital media works that enlist the viewer as a participant in the piece and, in essence, turning the reader into a cyborg. However, instead of merely “turning users into automatons,…digitized images enter into a circuit with them, making their bodies into laboratories or workspaces where digital information is converted into corporeally apprehensible images” (Morris 17). Not only is the artist collaborating with the machine by injecting code that allows the work to function, the artist also makes the audience’s contribution implicit in the understanding (or viewing) of the poem. We work with technology in a world run by technology; therefore it is inevitable that we see the artistic expression of that collaboration in work that by definition is shared by all who choose such interaction.
Contemporary poets who work with computer-based media establish the primary author of the work. The digital author envisions writing that “is not merely a fashioning of a verbal abstraction but a concrete act of making, a production that involves manual manipulation, proprioceptive projection, kinesthetic involvement, and other physical senses” (Hayles 184). Such multi-faceted poiesis shows the versatility needed to work in today’s environment, a place that constantly inundates its inhabitants with endless amounts of sensory stimulation. If lyric poets of the past represented meaning through line variations, rhyme schemes, and punctuation, then digital poets “have more flexibility in how they can employ the temporal dimension as resources in their writing practice” (Hayles 184). Although the primary creator remains the poet, she has the opportunity to show a diversity of voices never before possible by using collaboration techniques. These innovative prospects also supply an opportunity for poets to merge technological devices with the verse of poetry, a practice that often leads to an amalgamated language crafted from written English and computer code. This creolized dialect “leads us to read not only as if simultaneously honoring both text and code conventions but also as if reading a picture plane in every possible direction” (Strickland and Lawson 167). The unification of voices between poets and audience, the fusion between code and verse, and the capabilities of new technology simultaneously allow artists to comment on and capture the distinction between a biological identity and technological one.
In order to come to terms with the digital world, these poets find ways to fuse their first language with that of the language of machines. Mary-Anne Breeze (Mez) is an Australian born experimental poet. She began creating her net.wurks in the mid 1990s, and she is one of the front runners in e-poetics and digital art. In an interview for Rhizome, an internet museum for web art, Josephine Bosma asks Mez to describe her development of a code language called mezangelle . Mez states that mezangelle is a ”style of writing/textual construction…[that] underpins all my net.artwork, even the more image intensive versions” (Interview Bosma). The artist began with “the information text tracts” that a friend posted online, and she began to “’mangle’ them through free/multi-word associative techniques” (Interview Bosma). In order to establish the differences between English and mezangelle, Mez describes her work again for Bosma. She says, “N 1 Word: mezangelled/N 1 Sentence: the con[ned]flagration B-tween m-mage N text[ual]/sound N/fr[ott]ag[e].mentation ov breath/lec.tron.ics N flesh” (Interview Bosma). Her responses differ dramatically, but the poetic style of creating meaning through language resounds as she paints the picture of a conflagration between image and text, sound, and fragmentation of breath, electronics and flesh. This is only part of the meaning of this line, however. Mez also insinuates the idea of a conned conflagration or a textual sound rather than text and sound by inserting code markers such as brackets and periods. The importance of audience participation in meaning construction is key in the net.wurks Mez creates, and mezangelle allows the reader to “actively knit the units/ connections together” in order to determine their meaning (Interview Bosma). Mez also says that the “slippery auteur/authorship idea is one that underpins [her] revolving] [author][identity-tags” and that “this n.courages others 2 adopt a projective quality that both obscures and n.hances multilogue-authorship & polyvocal ownership” (“Currents”). The connection between humans and technology comes to life through a hybrid language that unifies computer code and human utterance, becoming a consistent thread in the works of many digital artists.
The choices given to the interactors stands out as one of the primary functions of digital art pieces like .::…:the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium:.:..:, a work by Mez. The reader’s ability to navigate freely without a consigned path is what makes digital poetry vary so dramatically from traditional page-bound writing. E-poetries’ “poetic emergence requires the participation of a user or operator to initiate the computational processes encoded by its author” (Memmott 294). The work “needs a user to become an instrument of/for signification” because without the interactor, the work lies dormant (Memmott 294). Because artists specifically build in the ability for audience participation, they are allowing the possibility for not only their own artistic voice, but also the voice anyone choosing to interact with the work. The media of the computer and the internet allow the “intentionality, poiesis, and poetics” to become “negotiable” rather than fixed through the intention of the poet (Memmott 304). But in order to participate in the creation, readers must first choose how to engage with the poem by learning how it operates, a process that begins with movement. This choice allows the reader to see countless versions of the poem which provides not only multiple readings but also a critique of the poet’s method of creation.
Mez’s work, .::…:the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium:.:..:, creates a poetic satire about the likelihood that technological fervor may take the place of religious zeal, a transition that could create a population who tend to bond with machines instead of connecting with the divine. The first thing the reader notices is the repeating pictures of Moses bordering the first stanza of the work. These images, along with the actual text on the page, clearly set the tone and style of the entire work by mimicking the sound of a bible verse. Moses serves God as the savior by following God’s command to “bring [his] people the Israelites out of Egypt,” and represents the way to a better future for God’s chosen nation (Exodus 3:10). As we read the first lines, we can also feel the aura of reverence as the stanza patterns itself after the creation story of the Christian faith. The tale begins when “i sawe a C0mmandE @ the d0llah pr0mpte: holding in itz teXt the keys of M: I: L: E: N: & U. 1t seized sum 0v the lettaHs: & K0dEd them up in2 a Th0usand N-crypti0nz…The zer0Hs & w0nnes then flick.erred with joy, N the DataHK0de was borne” (Breeze). The reader who is familiar with Christian doctrine easily sees the allusion to God collecting materials to create the universe. In Genesis, “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” until “God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear…let the land produce vegetation,” and “let the land produce living creatures” (Genesis 1:1-20). By the seventh day, “the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array” (Genesis 2:1). Mez uses the religious imagery and the form of her stanzas to juxtapose the worship of God with the worship of technology. In the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium, the “zer0Hs & w0nnes” are the creatures just as humans and animals were the creatures of God. The last line of the stanza seems to invite the reader to continue on her journey into the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium where the “re:maining lettaHz” are “all linked N clicking straighte in2 the Inph0ennium…” (Breeze). The final ellipsis demands a response, and the reader must choose “Pray_herr,” “Ph0phetiCk-t0ck,” SigN,” or “Cy[ps]almz,” which foreshadow the religion of technology that is yet to come.
In the .::…:the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium:.:..:, picking the “Pray_herr” link brings the reader to the “Prais1ng” of “the Datah Inpho[mill]ennium.” The screen has more ones and zeroes along with a pulsing image of the angel Gabriel that continues the biblical theme. Gabriel signifies the omen that brings Mary the news that she will bear the son of God; whereas, the reader and artist represent the bearers of the “code” that will usher in the “Datah Inpho[mill]ennium.” A less inquisitive reader may see this pop up screen as the conclusion of “Pray_her;” however, the curious reader will scan the screen with her mouse until she finds another link on the flashing image at bottom right side of the dialog box. In the process of searching for more, the reader not only absorbs the text but also “assist[s] in its de.scription, or ex.positon” (Memmott 304). Clicking on the flashing image allows a new box to appear, filled with ones and zeroes and a tessellation of a clipping of the original image of the angel. The prayer is simple: “DataH, let uz pray 2 the l0gin & the password: the 1RC and the 1CQ: the 1Fs & Thennes: the zer0Hs n the w0nnes: Let us swhymn thru the netw0rks N web into the fabr1c of yr f0nts: Bin[ary]d tyP0h and tract in2 rhiz0mes 0v yr K0dE” (Breeze). Mez describes images that invoke an intricate maze of connections between the networks and the users by establishing an allusion to people’s inherent need to find a relationship with a divine creator as well as with technology.
Once the reader closes the “Pray.her” dialogue box, she will see that the poem has automatically taken her to the “Pr0phetiCk-t0ck” section of the work and that the previous screen has changed to a collage of one image, Jesus and Mary Magdaline, with an inscription at the bottom. Until now, the user chooses where to go next, but by making a choice, “the machine, as a second reader, is responding to these interactions by creating actions of its own” (Strickland and Lawson 171). Mez does not make the options easy to find, and one click can take you back to the beginning of the work. The built in loops and directionalities in the program “leave would–be users uncertain about their configurations, trouble would-be interpreters with doubt about their meanings, and distract, confuse, or puzzle those who venture past an initial click into sustained interaction” (Morris 17-18). Once the reader chooses to further proceed into the poem, a prophecy appears on the screen. Mez instructs us in the ushering in of the Datah Inpho[mill]enium, saying, “take up yr keys and type N click yr modemz :ON: N scroll the pages thru N delete @b0minations N n0.s N linkz that breakE the KoDE N thenne merge the strings N u shell B phree” (Breeze). Again, the lines bring to mind the prophetic speech of biblical verse, but the content and language remind the reader that the way to “B phree” is to “l00k 2 the screen…and the d0t shell speax” (Breeze). In the box underneath Mez’s prophecy, the reader can see the return of the opening screen, initiating the need for another decision by the audience.
Choosing the “SigN” screen in the Datah Inph[mill]ennium calls attention to the danger of God’s, and technology’s, wrath when the believer chooses to go against the will of the creator. Mez seeks to show her viewers that one must be careful when immersing in technology’s web of information. She warns that innovation has the power to “smite thee with mye vEYErus, N seeke 2 break the millennium corrupt K0dE that binds u in itz thymiC 0verfl0w” if we choose to disregard our connection to the K0de (Breeze). Technology, like religion, has the authority to create with us an awesome connection, but it also has the force to crumble that bond. To continue the theme of pious rules, the next click takes you to “The 0&1 C0mmandmentz.” Rule 1.0 states, “U shell 0hbey the linez & linkz 0v the K0dE,” which reminds the audience to follow the constraints and rules of the technology (Breeze). Commandment 1.1 entreats readers to “kn0tt go 4th N ed-1T with0ut th n0-ledge 0v the K0De” (Breeze). Here, Mez seems to be reminding the reader that one cannot break the rules without first knowing what they are. Not only does the reader relate these rules to the Ten Commandments of the Bible, but Mez then uses an image of Jesus on the cross to fully bring the reader into the realization of the penalties of disobeying these mandates.
Whatever the consequences laid out by “SiGn,” the Cy[ps]almz” of the Datah Inpho[mill]ennnium allows the reader to feel the reverence the poem creates regarding technology. Mez brings us back to the Bible by naming this section after the Psalms chapter in the ancient text. Of course, she mezangelle’s the term by adding the “Cy” to remind the reader that she speaks of the worship of all things “cyber.” Just as Psalm 57:9-10 states, believers “will praise you, O Lord, among the nations…will sing of you among the peoples. For great is your love, reaching to the heavens.” Believers of the Datah Inpho[mill]ennium “wash the text with pixels 0v yr space N weep c0de in2 yr boardes and chr0me-hic dreamz” (Breeze). The cy[ps]alm ends with a line of worship that could have been taken right from a Christian prayer. It reads, “so greate iz yr text: my KodE: yr p0wer to down10ad” (Breeze). In this reading, Mez leaves the interactor to revel in awe at the web of possibilities in not only technology’s power to connect but also in the number of meanings to be found hidden behind every choice, every movement.
So, .::…:the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium:.:..: does not end here because not only could it have started here (in the Cy[ps]alms), but if the reader scans the screen with her cursor, one more link brings the opening screen back into view. This allows the poem, and others like it, to continue in a never-ending loop in which “the text is circulating, joining, dividing” and filling “the reader with uncertainty as to which verse will appear in the next interval” (Strehovic 2). The idea that dialogism infiltrates digital poetics also leads to the fact that e-poetry not only defies the lyrical “I,” but also it challenges the linearity of traditional notions of the poetic genre. So not only can cyber-poetics create a loop of data that provides a type of understanding, but also this apparent random connection between text, image, and movement brings to mind the concept of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome. The “Pray.her” in the “DataH Inpho[mill]ennium” invokes the “principles of connection and heterogeneity” (Deleuze and Guttari 7) by urging the reader to “swhymn thru the netw0rks…in2 rhiz0mes 0v yr K0de” (hotkey.net). Digital poetry’s principle characteristic is to initiate a relationship between the author, the reader, and the work, so the spider web of pathways between them have “no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing” where each voice is allowed to speak (Deleuze and Guttari 25). The possibilities of direction, the choices for meaning and union between entities, are what allow digital poetics to “participate in the ‘unitary language’…and at the same time partake of social and historical heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 272). Because the reader participates in the meaning-making of the work, most writers, like Mez, “perceive absorbers as co-creators” although they expect some readers to feel more comfortable to “slot themselves in as a recipient/passive role if they wish” (Interview Milstead). However the interactor chooses to view/use the piece, she will always be a participant, adding her own intentions and using her body’s instinctive choices to “point and click” her way through the loop, or rhizome, of the work.
Authors of digital writing do not intend to assign meaning to their works; instead, the words, regardless of poetic value and beauty of form, mean less than the audience’s physical act of manipulating the poem. The art that Mez, and others, creates varies drastically from any art created during previous generations because it allows the reader to engage in the piece interactively rather than passively absorbing the words. Carrie Noland, in her essay “Digital Gestures,” claims “that digital poetry, far from attenuating our relations to the human body, actually evokes this body and its kinetic energies in a variety of highly inventive ways” (217). The audience feels surprised by the changes occurring in the work. They not only logically understand the meaning of the signified by reading the sign, but also the reader’s body viscerally reacts to the moving and obscuring text and imagery that coincides with the meaning of the words. Not only has digital poetry “turned out to be a genre of computer-based writing concerned with recalling to the user’s consciousness a memory of the motions required to produce letters manually” (Noland 217), but also “reading and writing hypertext…are activities that undermine our boundedness as discrete physical bodies and even ‘refigure our perception of ourselves’” (qtd. in Noland 220). Because writing has changed into a mixture of non-tangible texts, so has reading changed into an interaction that goes beyond reader and page to a conversation or relationship between readers and the visual images and temporal space designed by the author.
Unlike .::…:the DataH Inpho[mill]ennium:.:..: where the audience is limited to “clicking” through each screen, Sky Scratchez is an extreme example of how a digital poem can invite the reader to join in the creation process by allowing the smallest movement of the cursor to alter the images that populate the display. In this collaborative work, Mez and Talan Memmott, an artist and critic of e-poetries originally from San Francisco, California, design a work that contrasts the natural world with the world of technology by invoking images of the human eye and figures of the cyborg which place the audience or reader as an integral step in the poetic process. Memmott’s eye imagery “can be read [as]…reflections of our own eyes looking at the screen, thus positioning the reader as Narcissus gazing at an image that he fails to recognize as himself” (Hayles 52-53). Each of Sky Scratchez’s three primary screens bears not only the image of the human eye (usually depicted through negative exposure), but textual references to optics as well. Throughout the work, the eyes make the reader feel like she is seeing the poetry along with a mirror image of herself in the technology. The reader/user now feels entwined with the technology, “teleported into its centre, so she encounters text units beside, under and above herself” and finds herself “within the textscape” (Strehovec 1). To reinforce this transportation of reader into the work, Mez and Memmott depict cyborg-like figures that could be interpreted as another representation of the audience. As humans become more attached to innovation, interactors can’t help but see the “metal gaps in [their] eyes” and “metal fillings filling up the holes in [their] bod[ies],…[their] back[s] now ha[ve] a steel plate embedded within, limbic system cables routed there” (Breeze and Memmott). Mez and Memmott mold the reader into a poetry maker by “establishing the body as a sensory apparatus exploring a machine with its fingertips” and initiating the union that propels the poem (Noland 221). In the world of digital poetics, “the lyric has deterritorialized” in that the reader, the author, and the technology no longer reside on different planes (Strehovic 1). They are all one entity and, in unison, a part of the meaning-making process by each bringing forth their own social and cultural viewpoints that initiate understanding.
The poets play on the ideas of poetic techniques, such as alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme, to further remove the “I” from the piece and to provide space for the interactor’s interchanges with the text to aid in comprehension. Poetry should be “accurate, acute” while the poets “drown in alliteration” and “rhythm and rhythm and rhyme” “brow beats into tattoos” (Breeze and Memmott). The left stanzas mimic the shape and style of typical free verse with varying line length and lack of a rhyme scheme. However, the left stanzas, written in mezangelle, help to question that traditional form of the poetic verse. Not only do the words look like a foreign language, but also Mez’s lines seem to deconstruct Memmot’s half of the poem by inserting new ideas and at times providing answers to Memmot’s lines. The reinterpretation of Memmott’s voice thru mezangelle, gives us “a larger sense of text in which individual writings are merely parts” of the whole (Pequeño-Glazier 51). Each word contains hidden words and alternate meanings, so ”Br.ooze[down mi front] inge, ac[k!]curate [thizz as an x-bihitionist piece], a.cute [azz a butt.ON]” repeats lines from the right stanza, while adding new significance (Breeze and Memmott). “Bruising, accurate, acute” becomes bruising down my front, accurate (this is an exhibitionist piece), acute (cute as a button). Mez says that her work, and others like hers, “can turn canonized notions of acceptability &][boring][quality n.side-out without sacrificing expressive greatness” (“Currents”). Instead of adhering to classic forms of poetic style, digital artists express the new “subjectivity of contemporary culture of mixing, sampling, composing and recombining, in which individuals search for new, as bold a meaning relations as possible, abandoning old ones” (Strehovec 1).
Once the reader chooses to interact with the poem, she is bombarded by streaming words and moving images appearing on each screen. The poem is programmed to automatically display new images and backgrounds surrounding and obscuring the original text; however, it is up to the interactor to navigate a path through the options. Often, once the user has called up a change in the work, the choice cannot be undone. Text flashes and moves across the screen according to the signification of the text like the way the words “poke” and “pinch” suddenly spring to life when activated by the cursor, and undergo a change into the actions of “poking” and “pinching.” This text alternates, bouncing in a pinching and poking manner which gives the reader a physical reaction, feeling the poking and pinching. The changes go even further when holes appear on the screen after the pointer traces the word “holes.” Unlike the moving text which cannot return to a static position on the screen, the holes only appear when the mouse traces the word. The audience must form their own understanding through not only bodily movements where “the swish of the tiny arrow of the mouse across a flat space of light” becomes the “perfect mimesis” of putting pen to paper, but also through a thoughtful interpretation of the free associative techniques used to build the poem (Noland 221). The unexpected alterations of the original images through minute physical movements, “provide many opportunities for creating a bond between the writer’s,” and reader’s, “visceral experience of tracing letters” to form meaning (Noland 221). The human physicality of poiesis, on the author’s as well as the audience’s part, has merged with the technology so much so that, instead of solely concentrating “on the information of the text, poetic practice has explored the conditions that determine…meaning-making as constituting the “meaning’” (Pequeño Glazier 32). The reader’s physical acts of operation represent the most important process in understanding cyber-poetics.The bodily reaction that poets build into their work shows the inherent link between biology and technology that scientists have been interested in for years. Because of the immense scientific implications about the progress and future of humanity’s relationship with technology, artists have begun to reach beyond the computer and internet in order to understand the merger between man and machine. No longer must a poet solely rely on text, imagery, and allusion to personify the cyborg or employ a creolized language that highlights the way technology has changed our way of perceiving. Christian Bök’s “Xenotext Experiement” challenges not only the traditional rules of poetry but also the rules of digital and technologically enhanced poetry as well. Bök has begun a journey that will finally realize what so many contemporary avant-garde poets have been striving to reach: the true integration of biological and mechanical entities. The “Xenotext Experiment” attempts to create a cipher that will convert a poetic text into a strand of DNA. The final poetic verse will be inserted into a tiny microorganism in an effort to encourage the cell to create another poem through biological means of reproduction. According to Bok, The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by simulating unliterary art forms. (Bök Interview) Bök challenges the connection between humans and innovation at the most elementary of levels by using technology to create a living poetic machine. The “alien language” living inside the organism becomes Bök’s way of “address[ing] some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a ‘xenotext’” that may be able to “store data by encoding sequences of textual information into sequences of genetic nucleotides” (Bök Interview). Bök has transcended the idea of computer code’s possibilities by using the human code of DNA, which determines a human’s characteristics, to encode “unimagined modes of artistic innovation and cultural expression” into the basic function of the organism (Bök Interview). He is stretching the limits of language and poetry in the same way as digital poets; however, Bok’s poetic organism “also becomes a machine for writing a poem” that , once injected, has the ability to create without the aid of humans.
This amalgamation of poetry, biology, and technology is the most dialogic of all contemporary avant-garde poetics because the organism morphs Bök’s original voice into an entirely new work. Just as the “web can be seen as a multiple text, being composed of endlessly varying pages or ‘I’s,” so can “The Xenotext Experiment” be recognized as a never ending chain of naturally producing words, poetics, that fluctuate with each replication (Pequeño Glazier 51). Because Bök’s organisms “are not technically the same…from moment to moment” and “are literally in a constant state of change,” so the verse continuously morphs, creating a new poem with each variation (Pequeño Glazier 50). Not only has Bök inserted his own voice into the text, but now the organism itself is “writing” new material from the old. The poet writes this type of text through the constraint of genetic code, so, just as code rules computer technology, code also “governs both the development of an organism and the maintenance of its function” (Bök Interview). As digital poets reach beyond the boundaries of the page, “The Xenotext Experiment” endeavors “to extend poetry itself beyond the formal limits of the book” to establish a concrete connection between the makers of poetry and the makers of science and technology. These multiple voices can then shine in their individuality as they merge to form dialogic utterances.
Contemporary poetry resides in a world consumed by technology and “the next best thing.” The work that these poets output through computer-based web mediums has created a new genre that speaks not only through the voice of the author but also speaks in a way that leaves open the ownership/authorship of the poem. Classic beliefs about poetic discourse “have all postulated a simple and unmediated relation of speaker to his unitary and singular ’own’ language, and have postulated as well a simple realization of this language in the monologic utterance of the individual” (Bakhtin 269). However, through interactive programs that invite the user to participate in poiesis, cyber-poetics breaks the rules that say poetry must always possess the lyrical “I.” These poets use the “officially recognized literary language” of poetry and alter it almost beyond recognition (Bakhtin 271). Whether it is a biological experiment to invent bacteria that produces poetry or a commentary on humanity’s worship of technology, the beauty of cyber-poetics is for the reader, in Mez’s words, “2 perhaps experience a type of dislocation + potential [non-linear] confusion that clears when the [lightbulb?] comprehension moment hits.” Artists “*never* advocate a complete understanding of [their] output [if there is such a thing;)]. the works r designed 2 audience-connect via a person's own subjective meaning framework. there is no "wrong" way 2 interpret” these works. It is not the extraction of individual elements that create meaning, but the process of making itself that defines e-poetics and the element that provides the audience with the experience of acting as the most important agent in understanding the work.
Works Cited
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