Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe

The Expanded Field

Eugene Thacker on Electronic Book Review.⁰

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss influentially diagnosed the logic of modernist sculpture as monument, established why that logic was failing, and then suggested an expanded field for sculptural practice. Poetry is in the same position today as sculpture was in Krauss` era. Iconic poems are bastion-like monuments, inscrutable sturdy pompous edifices etched with innumerable critiques by self-perpetuating cliques. The logic and inspiration that raised them to esteem falters, critics repair the myths, but their infrastructures are crumbling.

Poetry needs now, more than ever, in this epoch of inexorable technological change, an expanded field. This call for an expanded field occurs regularly within the poetics community. One can see it in Gomringer, Drucker, Glazier, Kac, Bense, Bootz, Bloch, Bernstein, Hayles, Seaman, Douglass, Pressman, Cayley, Raley, Strickland, Landow, Ricardo and many many other prescient prophetic minds lost in the mists of marginality.

Eugene Thacker (reviewing Kac on EBR in 2007), states: “…the very notion of poetics implies a congruence of some sort between language and life.”

Expand poetics to include the aesthetic wherever it overlaps with language. Like food into the stomach, all seen or heard words hurtle inward, ricochet off the lateral geniculate, trajectory toward amygdale and hippocampus. There the words nestle down, they burrow and are stored and breed together, like with like. Some words eat others. Cliffs and forest are covered in them, writhing like sticky bees. Words inside the mind do not obey the categorical imperatives of reasoned thought that dictate what words in what contexts can and/or will be considered poetry.

Just for a moment, invert the anthropocentric view, and imagine that words speak to each other through poems. They are not spoken by us, they are speaking to each other. They don’t care whether they have to use papyrus, digital networks, poets, cell phones, holograms, sculptures, video, cgi or billboards. Words want to speak. They use us to make them. They made computers be born so they could begin to develop faster networks for communication. Perched on our lips, they leap towards each other as sound.

5.1.5What May Be

To conclude: perhaps the state-space of digital poetry that utilizes dimensional typography has already been explored⁰. Pioneers (like Hayles, Kac, Cooper, Hartmann, Funkhouser, Sondheim, Andrews, Lewis, Miller and Valles) may have already charted most of the terrain. It may be that for the near future, digital technology will merely fill in the details, -- increase the rendering, raycasting and polygon count, enhance compositing detail and ease the use. Perhaps, there will be no paradigm shift in collective ontologies, no revolution in subtle apprehensions, no aesthetic animism.

It may also be that, like the video phone⁰, volumetric text loiters on the periphery of technological evolution for an era. It may be that the notion of living language is consigned temporarily to the trash, only to re-emerge when conditions are correct. It may be that volumetric-sonic-reactive text violates current cognitive multiplexing speed-limits and is thoroughly rejected as a literary device; if, however, cognitive speed-limits accelerate (as the rate of change of genetics suggests might occur) then multimedia literature might flourish. Even then, it may be that digital poetry never mainstreams, and instead fulfils a purposeful marginal niche role without inducing any subtle modulations in collective ontologies; until, one day in some unseeable future, poetry is discovered incipient underneath the most ordinary of notions.

Precipitous change in technology demands we reconsider and re-examine animist speculation as it concerns language. Bodies are structured matter; language is becoming increasingly structured and thus tacitly embodied. Letterforms will know who wrote them and who read them; and typography will be capable of disguising itself into our lived environments (either through motion graphics or augmented mobile apps). As these changes occur, attitudes toward the literary and poetic will shift, iconic traditions will be subsumed, and hybrid disciplines will emerge. Digital poetry might evolve into an aesthetic animism where letterforms exist as proprioceptive entities, reactive, intelligent, aware, and reflective of acoustic archetypes. Language might live.

A necessary precondition for living language is increased sensitivity to the temporal and ontological propositions imposed by design paradigms of typographic animation software. Writing must occur within software that is open to creativity: augmenting the fluid demands of whimsy, accident and tangents. Linear timelines are a potent paradigm for exploring logical temporality, but hybrid capacities and design modes that offer instrumental experiences (real-time change, constant feedback) are needed. When IDEs bifurcate into pragmatic ambiguity, then perhaps autonomous texts capable of transmitting nuanced living experience may arise.

Living language (embodied gestural and empathic in a way that it hasn`t been previously: pointing now to itself as thing) opens an opportunity for a deeper relation with how we communicate. Traditionally, signs are signifiers, tubes or tunnels toward what is meant. Digital volumetric text points to itself as thing, expressive in how and who and what it is. Future readers may develop relationships with words as entities, relationships that are as primary and complete as the relation with the signified.

In this transition, the rudiments of an ecological attitude gestate, an attitude which recognizes the cohesive nutritive substrate of expression, words themselves as other, as us. My vision of 3D text is, however, neither ubiquitous nor utopic; 2D text will continue to dominate communication, and humans will not suddenly start loving language, harbouring letters, letting paragraphs dwell in them (clouds of them softly perspiring). Instead as always in our ambivalent contingent world, this potential expanded relational field for sculptured cognisant text may simply be ignored. Poetry is, after all, both marginal and central, its influence both fundamental and ineffable.

One more thing: until the words themselves learn to speak and we as their carriers permit it, language will be like the bacterial species in our gut, silent symbiotic teeming presences that we implacably host.

Language is dead. Long live language.