http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog a chronology of digital poetry's ancestors and contemporaries Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:42:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This (rambling overview) post examines Maria Engberg’s (2007) doctoral thesis: “Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media”  for several reasons: first, I found her name referred to on the ELMCIP “Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” website (and since she is one of a handful of [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=383 The notion of the lived poem (that transfuses through the bones, hops the brain-blood barrier and instigates a transcendent or visceral contact with an alternative way of being) is an ancient one. It’s practitioners tend to be committed to the poem as autonomous, free to escape the rigid confines of discourse or the narrow cage [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=326 Contemporaneously with J. Abbot Miller’s Dimensional Typography, Peter Cho (an award-winning designer who later received a fine arts master from UCLA and a masters of science from MIT) was beginning to release typographic experiments that stretched conceptions of type as a carrier for meaning; the boundaries were stretched digitally with a zen-like precision using [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=301  “Dimensional Typography: Case Studies on The Shape of Letters” is a great title I would have loved to have thought of it; it’s also a great book written and conceived by J. Abbott Miller in 1996. I am endebted to the ever-resourceful Jason Lewis for loaning it to me from his library. “Dimensional Typography: Case Studies [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=269 The term graffiti referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Usage of the word has evolved to include any graphics applied to surfaces in a manner that constitutes vandalism. The only known source of the Safaitic language, a [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=248 Since the physical language workshop at MIT, Golan Levin has been at the forefront of programmatic explorations of typographic space. Interspersed with his purely visual explorations he sporadically returns to typographic explorations that usually involve text generated and manipulated in realtime. In Ursonography (2005: Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin) Levin built “a new audiovisual interpretation of Kurt [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=237 Source Note The material and flow of this post is derived directly from a lecture by Jason Lewis of OBXLabs in his University of Concordia CART355 Typography class. October 28/08. Jason begins the lecture by stating: “If you are moving something: why? The why is connected to meaning…There is an intrinsic space for beauty, but I [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=226 Kendall’s early DOS work ‘It all Comes Down ________’ is still (circa 2008) downloadable from his website, with the caveat that “the program will not run at speeds above 33Mhz; sorry, it was written a long time ago” In this contemporary era of dual core 2G laptops, Moore’s law has effectively sealed off Kendall’s creation [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=159 Source Note The material and flow of this post is derived directly from a lecture by Jason Lewis of OBXLabs in his University of Concordia Typography class. October 21/08. It charts a very broad course through typographic innovators who actively worked in both advertising and design prototyping from the earliest emergence of widescale digital typography. Neville Brody, —The [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=217 Eduardo Kac like Melo e Castro and Augusto de Campos, was there at the birth of videopoem. His first work Não! was released in the same year as the de Campos digitalized ‘Pluvial…Fluvial”. Online versions of Kac’s work are available. Ticker tape parades of neologisms, letter growing into space, rhythmic motion. The seeds of vector [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=195 Since 1970, Alan Sondheim has been playing with 3D. A visit to his website http://www.alansondheim.org/ –which is less website than a low-tech bulk online server-list of the contents of Sondheim’s eccentric yet consistent art-research output– reveals an astonishing array of diverse unsorted and unsearchable materials spanning decades. Sifting through the links is akin to searching [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=179 One of the pioneers of utilization of computers for creating a visual concrete poetry effect according to Funkhouser in Prehistoric Digital Poetry is Lillian F. Schwartz. Schwartz is typical of an early innovator, she is primarily an explorative artist who made contributions to vision theory, many documentary films as well as creating this poetic work. [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=120 Jackson Mac Low is a poet who worked like a computer before computers, and after computers arrived began to use them to implement algorithmic methods he had already been doing by hand. From 1962-1968, he composed 22 Light Poems [2] without a computer. The poems are all combinatorial and loosely composed upon algorithmic method, sometimes [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=147 Talks that began in 1965 culminated in an exhibit entitled “Computers and the Arts” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1968 with the intention of dealing broadly with the demonstration of how man can use the computer and new technology to extend his creativity and inventiveness (p.3) The catalogue opens with an essay by Norbert [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=127 1964: Jean Baudot, a pioneering engineer-linguist, creates the first French machine-generated published poetry. Published by the Editions du Jour in Montreal,”La machine à écrire mise en marche et programmée par Jean A. Baudot” (“A Writing Machine created and programmed by Jean A. Baudot”) is still circa 2008 available (mildewed and seemingly unread since 1976) in the [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=79 Marc Adrian was one of the artists featured in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit at ICA in 1974. Prior to this he had constructed films which were based on procedural workings (what he called “methodic inventionism”). His method eventually expanded into working with text processed by computers. He is considered one of the pioneers of film structuralism; [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=133 Funkhouser’s timeline includes: “Clair Philippy (USA), “blank verse at the rate of 150 words a minute” 5 poems published in Electronic Age.” Only a few feeble trickle references exist to this work online. No residue of the actual output exists. Time has coherently erased all but the shadow of it’s existence. Every cultural precursor is at similar [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=54 Reports vary on where it was first popularized (Funkhouser says Time magazine, a blog suggests Horizon magazine) but sometime in 1962, a subdivision of a computer company called the Laboratory for Automata Research of the Librascope Division of General Precision, Inc led by R.M. Worthy had their research popularized. “Librascope engineers, concerned with the problem of [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=29 According to Funkhouser (p. 12 & 41, PDP), in1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibited (experimental Italian poet) Nanni Balestrini’s 1961 Tape Mark poems . Virtually no reference to Balestrini currently exists online, except for a wikipedia entry (in italian) and this poster of the exhibit catalog: Baletsrini’s poems (cited in Funkhouser (p.41) from the exhibit catalog translated by [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=11 There is minor irony that the second historical figure in a lineage of digital poetry is a painter: Brion Gysin. [Sources: Prehistoric Digital Poetry (pg.39) and Kostelanetz's Text-Sound Texts] Cohort of William Burroughs and narcotic doyen of a furtive circle of eccentric lunatics, Gysin combined surrealist techniques and Dadaist recipes with digital algorithms (programmed by Ian [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=5 In 1959, on a Zuse Z22 computer Theo Lutz inserted sixteen chapter titles and subjects from Kafka’s The Castle into a database and programmed them to recombine into phrases joined by grammatical glue. As with most of the early references on this site, this reference appears courtesy of C. Funkhouser who cites Lutz (on [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=3 It might seem astonishing that as early as 1959, computers were ubiquitous and automated creative writing was being explored but as Jean Baudot mentions in 1964, humans have always been concerned with automation. In the historical context of occidental literature, consider the following excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Book III, Chapter 5) written in 1721 [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=85 Florian Cramer is the preeminent theorist of permutation literary arts. In numerous essays and programming works he has researched and investigated the roots of generative literary practice to an ancestry that predates modernism and the dadaist by millennium. As shown by Cramer, lured by the confluence of geometry, numbers and words, ancient alchemists and esoteric [...]]]> http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/?p=109