This article first appeared in Configurations 8.1 (2000) 63-85.Copyright © 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Societyfor Literature and Science. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribedinstitution. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outsideof the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express writtenpermission from the JHU Press.

Screening a Digital VisualPoetics

Brian Lennon

Book wasthere, it was there.

"O sole mio." The contemporary elegy, PeterM. Sacks has observed, mourns not only the deceased but also the ceremonyor medium of grief itself. ¹Recent trends in digital media theory signal the absorption of initial,utopian claims made for electronic hypertextuality and for the transformationof both quotidian and literary discourse via the radical enfranchisementof active readers. Born in 1993, the democratizing, decentralizing WorldWide Web--at first, the "almost embarrassingly literal embodiment"(George P. Landow) of poststructuralist literary theory, a global Storyspace--hasin a mere six years been appropriated, consolidated, and "videated"as a forum for commerce and advertising. ²Meanwhile, with the public recantation [End Page 63] of hypertext'svirtues becoming a kind of expiation ritual, ³the initially minimized warnings of new-media theorists such asLandow, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, and others arebeing echoed with increasing frequency. These thinkers have seen from thestart that electronic hypertextuality, or the computerized proliferationof symbolic writing, was only a step on the way to general electronic hypermediationdominated by iconic visual, rather than symbolic textual, forms. Bolter'srecent thinking in particular emphasizes the continuing marginalizationof (hyper)text as the "videating" media of television and filmadapt and encroach on previously textual environments of the Web. ⁴

As if in response to this (as though, in the acceleratingvistas of electronic writing, there were time enough for anything like"response"), Web-based or distributed electronic writing hasevolved from its first alphabetic-(hyper)textual forms toward diverse incorporationsof, and hybridizations with, the static or kinetic image. At the same time,poets and visual artists working from a tradition of typographic experimentationthat reaches back to futurism and Dada, and includes twentieth-centuryvisual and Concrete poetry, are using networked, heterogenetic writingspaces to create and distribute a new electronic visual poetry. This growthof visual writing may be seen as a response to the technological accelerationthat permits more and more complex forms of information--from simple text,to static images, to animated and then to user-interactive text-image clustersor constellations, what might be called "lex/icons"--to coexistin one "medium" or information-delivery system. It might alsobe seen as evidence that commoditizing the videation of the Web invitessubversive uses of that videation--just as, say, the video art of BillViola is dependent on (and talks back to) the same technology that extendsthe commodity value of a blockbuster (and then Blockbuster) film. ⁵As Bolter suggests, "True electronic writing is not [End Page 64]limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds,or even actions that the computer is directed to perform." ⁶

Out of habit, we identify the "modernist"poetic text as "materialized," and the "postmodernist"poetic text as "dematerialized," ephemeral, a "simulacrum."The extent, however, to which "materiality" (taken as sensous,extraverbal reality, something more than the functional-instrumental, "transparent"use-value of a word) is integral to much postmodernist poetry, poetics,and art practice might be seen as reason to interrogate this habit of thought.⁷ Theoriesof postmodernism--those, for example, of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Fran*oisLyotard, or Fredric Jameson--that replay a "break" or "divide"tend, overtly or covertly, to become entangled in the problem of the "McLuhanesque":that is, they are built around the notion of a revolution in therise of media, an event that must dramatically and irrevocably have changedthe essential fabric of daily life in the developed West. That these theoriesdescribe at least the perception of some significant cultural andhistorical complex called "postmodernism" is unworthy of dispute.What a synthetic and structuralizing theoretic overview may neglect (especiallywhen it goes seeking diagnostic or prophetic authority) is the hybridityof practice by which even self-identified avant-gardes, such as the AmericanL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, tend to locate themselves historically. Postmodernistpoets' continued use of the self-consciously "material" printmedia of high modernism, in tactical response to life in a postmodern,technologically mass-mediated society (even while they embrace new electronicmedia as well), is a literally "literary" form of resistanceto both the dematerializing, utilitarian ends of technology--what artistSimon Penny terms the "engineering world view" ⁸--and the pure theoretic mode that, in its estrangement from orresistance to art practice, reverts to apocalyptic (or, less often, utopian)prophecy.⁹[End Page 65]

Taking their cue from Bruno Latour's We Have NeverBeen Modern, Bolter and Richard A. Grusin have recently argued forthe notion of a "genealogy of media" that situates new digitalmedia in the long history of mediated and "remediated" representationin Western art and literature. ¹⁰While they do not deny that the "digital revolution" is a significantaddition to this genealogy (Bolter, in particular, could hardly be accusedof minimizing the impacts of digital technology), they take pains to opposeJameson's lapsarian insistence "that there is something special aboutthe mediatization of our current culture" placing unprecedented pressureon the reality of the subject. ¹¹Another line of argument runs from the "cyborg" socialist-feminismof Donna J. Haraway through N. Katherine Hayles's recent writing on virtualreality and the "posthuman." ¹²Both thinkers envision a hybrid subjectivity in continual oscillation betweenhuman materiality, or bodily agency, and technologically assisted paramaterialityor para-agency. The cyborg or posthuman neither dystopically rejects theautomaton, nor transcendentally dissolves itself in it, but instead movescontinually between nature and culture, organic and synthetic, individualand collective, partaking of both (and enjoying the advantages of each).

Perhaps more concretely, recent work such as JohannaDrucker's The Visible Word and Adalaide Morris's Sound Statesanthology are efforts to bring this technologically enhanced ratherthan erased subjectivity back into the postdeconstruction fieldof literary and culture [End Page 66] studies. ¹³Drucker's post-Derridean "hybrid theoretical model" for the "materialityof the typographic signifier" in futurist and Dada writings, and theefforts of Morris, Hayles, Garrett Stewart, Marjorie Perloff, and otherSound States contributors to revisit the "secondary orality"of Walter Ong, ¹⁴return our attention to the implications of art practice for "ephemeralist"theories of the postmodern. It is significant, I think, that Drucker isa hybrid practitioner herself, producing challenging artworks as well asworks of scholarship and criticism in the field; and also that so muchof the work assessed in Perloff's invaluable criticism is that of the Europeanhistorical avant-garde, then the line of American modernist, "radicalmodernist," and postmodernist art/theory running from Gertrude Steinto the objectivists, Charles Olson, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, all of whom insistedon the essential reciprocity of theory and practice, articulation and demonstration,ephemerality and concrete agency. "Materiality," as Drucker envisionsit, is constituted broadly by "interpretation"--the reader-viewer'sinteraction with the work--even if that interpretation involves, in Haraway'sor Hayles's sense, a kind of mixing of oneself into the medium.

And even if the work and its medium, I will suggesthere, are wholly digital: bits of data stored on a disk, or the electronicevent of transfer by which those bits are reproduced and moved from onelocation to another--re-created, that is, by the interface with which thereader summons them. The putative demise of textuality, inevitable or no,on the electronic network known as the World Wide Web is presently accompaniedby a flourishing of poetry and text-based or alphabetic art that takesfor granted not only its own dynamic, kinetic, virtual, and interactivevisuality, but also--contrary to alarmists' fears--a real, material, bodilyhuman "interactor." In what follows I propose to offer an essay,a tentative gesture, at a digital visual poetics: a poetics that drawsby necessity on an entire century's worth of language art and visual poetry,while at the same time formulating ways to read and to look at, to "screen,"the new and seemingly newly ephemeral artifact of the electronic visualpoem. Having incorporated electronic hypertextuality, this new poem isnow appearing as visually "kinetic" (literally, in electronic[End Page 67] motion) and "virtual" ("moved through"by an electronic simulacrum of the reader).

1. Virtual Reality, Trip Masters, and "MachinicHeterogenesis"

Of Robert Carlton ("Bob") Brown's invented"reading machine," Jerome McGann notes, "Brown's jouissanceof the word anticipates the Derridean moment by forty years, and prophesiesas well the practical emergence of computerized word-processing and hypertextualfields." ¹⁵Now that we see with machine eyes, protocybernetic moments abound; andone of the prime difficulties in formulating a poetics of the moment isthe risk that what seems blindingly new may, at a turn in thought, revealitself to be no more than a version of what one already knows. This isthe paradox built into Steve McCaffery's and bpNichol's notion of the "bookmachine," another prototechnology whose hybrid formula is appealinglyblunt, and, more importantly, familiar. In speaking of a digital visualpoetics, I want also to avail myself of McCaffery's and Nichol's "unacknowledgedpresent," itself an adaptation of Gertrude Stein's "continuouspresent," and in many ways a more suitable trope for the new mediathan "avant-garde." ¹⁶As a theory of coterminous theory and practice, as a formalism of intermediategenres, and as a progressive politics of "partial, real connection"(Haraway), a digital visual poetics may operate on the fringes and in theinterstices of many other discourses. Rather than breaking new ground,it may write within the zona inexplorada of a never wholly discovered,validated, or otherwise bounded network field. Rather than staking a claimto replace (and then be replaced), it may form a temporary node or rhizome(Gilles Deleuze and F*lix Guattari) within a constellation of temporarilyrelated nodes.

Because virtual reality (VR) simulation technologiesoffer the most radically manipulable operations on visual experience, theywill be central to a digital visual poetics. With these operations comeproblematizations of subjectivity and agency that literally enact the "postmodernproblem," offering users a practical experience of Nietzschean "eternalrecurrence," of Heidegger's destruction of metaphysics, of the Foucauldianand Barthesian deaths of the subject, or of the arational consciousnessof the religious mystic or narcotic-hallucinogenic [End Page 68]drug user. ¹⁷VR is the material problem of the postmodern, the machine that camealong to test not only our prophesied disappearance into the Great Simulacrum,or the endless play of diff*rance, but also the conditions underwhich theorists may plausibly claim authority for such prophecy. What doesit mean to proclaim, with Baudrillard, that "we have all become ready-mades. . . dedicated . . . to mediatic stupefaction, just as the ready-madeis dedicated to aesthetic stupefaction"? ¹⁸Landow, Bolter, and others have noted the nihilism in Baudrillard's insistencethat "we" can no longer perceive the differences between "junk"and "art," surface and depth, the simulated and the real. ¹⁹Like the parents and educators of the 1980s "Dungeons and Dragons"scare, the prophets of technoapocalypse do not trust "us" toknow informatic constructions from our own bodies; such things are "knownto happen." ²⁰The extent to which this relies on a notion of "the public" asirrational--a notion often used to excoriate high modernism, but perhapsas useful to describe the neutrality of pop art and other self-consciously*lite infatuations with "low culture"--has yet to be acknowledgedat a time when we are still struggling with the paternalism of theoriesthat have tried in good conscience, but without complete success, to deconstructtheir own grounds. What is most puzzling in the alarmism of VR opponents(or VR advocates, for that matter) is the conviction that an average "cybercitizen"will inevitably utilize a mimetic technology mimetically--that is, in furtherflight from "real," not virtual, reality, in further flight intosomething that is, however convincing, still an illusion.

This disjunction between perceptions of design andperceptions of usage illuminates some of the ways in which cultural theoryand cultural practice misunderstand each other. "Theorists,"whose professional specialization is as much an economy as any other, imagineall sorts of figural ghosts and simulacra where there are still real humanbodies sitting in front of the televisions and computer [End Page 69]screens, or strapped into the VR apparatus. For their part, "practitioners"--poetsand artists--grow estranged from an abstraction that they may come to seeas irrelevant to their material labor or craft-based interaction with machines,and correspondingly they neglect the possibility that we may not onlybe bodies, in just the sense hinted at so powerfully by VR. It shouldgo without saying that as nineteenth-century realism furnished the flashpointfor modernist irrealism in the same principal media, a "Victorian"birth of mimetically biased virtual reality implicitly and automaticallysignals some form of self-revision. It seems less likely that "allthe hard-won vision of the twentieth century is to be surrendered to wire-framerealism in the twenty-first" than that it will be carried into furtherpermutations both cyclical and diachronic. ²¹The crucial fact is that, as William Dickey puts it, the computer is atool "placed in our hands so that we can create with it somethingit was not intended for." ²²This hybrid and noninstrumental engagement of the technology is a locusof poetical-aesthetic and political response, and I want briefly to traceits manifestation in three relevant topics of cultural discourse.

a. Hybrid Theoretical Models: "The Materialityof the Typographic Signifier"

"The experimental typography which proliferatedin the early decades of the twentieth century," writes Johanna Drucker,"was as much a theoretical practice as were the manifestos, treatisesand critical texts it was often used to produce." ²³Boundaries separating literary from art practice, practice from theoryand criticism, and one literary or visual genre/medium from another werenotably porous at the flourishing of the historical avant-garde (Russianand Italian futurism, Dadaism, cubism, etc.). Drucker's book The VisibleWord: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923, while restrictedto a defined historical period, offers a model for the "materiality"of visual-linguistic signs that looks forward through what she calls the"nearly proto-electronic and cybernetic" sensibility of F. T.Marinetti ²⁴--its kinetic adumbration of a "dematerialized," "wireless,"or "electronic" medium.²⁵[End Page 70]

Drucker's model emerges from a critique of two opposedideologies: that of phonic presence in structuralist linguistics, and thatof the self-absenting play of inscribed diff*rance in deconstructivecritique. Derridean critique, and poststructuralist theory more generally,have encouraged an unproblematized definition of "information,"and "information art," as les immat*riaux. ²⁶For Drucker, Derrida's critique of Saussure, and of a metaphysics of presencemore generally, "cancels the possibility of ever apprehending substance"in the ambiguous, simultaneous, or oscillating visual materiality of type,which combines "the arbitrary (or at least, conventional) characterof the linguistic sign with the more complex features of the visual sign."²⁷ Inresponse, she offers a counterformulation, a purposefully heterogeneousdiscourse for visible language that hints at contemporary implicationsfor what Richard Lanham has called "the complete renegotiation ofthe alphabet/icon ratio" inherent in desktop publishing ²⁸--and that extends itself to the same questions of subjectivity that areproblematized by VR:

The concept of materiality, then, cannot simply begrounded in a Derridian deconstruction. Nor can it, after Derrida's critique,return to a placid and unquestioning acceptance of the concept of substanceas self-evident presence or being. The question of whether it is possibleto posit the existence of material as substance without a metaphysics ofpresence lurking inevitably behind it remains to be resolved. ²⁹

Insofar as it brings "visual presence"to meet "literary absence," this notion of materiality is supportedby a "hybrid theoretical model which contains certain internal andirresolvable contradictions." ³⁰Derridean "relational, insubstantial and nontranscendent difference"and "phenomenological, apprehendable, immanent substance" areheld together at risk to the authority of both; they are bound (or not)in a postdeconstructive hermeneutics that, like Deleuze and Guattari'sfigure of the rhizome, writes fluid lines of alterity [End Page 71]and travel rather than "arborescent" points of contention andstasis: ³¹

The basic conflict here--of granting to an objectboth immanence and nontranscendence--disappears if the concept of materialityis understood as a process of interpretation rather than a positing ofthe characteristics of an object. The object, as such, exists only in relationto the activity of interpretation and is therefore granted its characteristicforms only as part of that activity, not assumed a priori or asserted asa truth. ³²

The typographically rendered page is an image, andit is also language; the reader is also a voyeur, viewer, or "screener."Representation is at once in and of. These simultaneitiesoperate within the production of both visual pattern and semantics; bothare integral to signification, and both inform Drucker's "materialityof interpretation." It is a potent model for a digital visual poetics,whose object is never merely "text" even in the most generouspoststructuralist sense--and especially when, as in Eduardo Kac's virtualreality poems, the "text" is a representation of three-dimensionaltypographical objects in the "quadri-dimensional" hermeneuticspace of an electronic visual simulation.

b. Hybrid Bodies: Politics, Poetics, and the Posthuman

Another model of hermeneutic materiality appearsin the writings of Donna J. Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Haraway'ssocialist-feminist "cyborg" is a political-aesthetic personacomprised of constantly shifting, "partial, contradictory, permanentlyunclosed constructions of personal and collective selves," a hybridof mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private,nature and culture, man and woman. ³³Haraway writes against a tradition of Marxian humanism that offers, inher view, only boundary-maintaining divisions (base/superstructure, public/private,material/ideal) and secular Edens of natural innocence; her own call fora postdeconstruction theater of "partial, real connection," ormaterial practice, reveals a commitment to continual inquiry via desiredivorced from any final or totalizing resolution: "Some differencesare playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination.'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference." ³⁴A contemporary socialist feminism, Haraway suggests, will [End Page72] utilize the resources of "high-tech facilitated social relations"³⁵ towardthe elimination of fixture in racial, sexual, and class identities, withoutlosing sight of the ways in which the same technologies embody patriarchal-capitalist"informatics of domination" ³⁶and repression.

As an aesthetic and political persona, the cyborgresists the repressive structures inbuilt in electronic technologies ofmilitary-industrial origin, and at the same time refuses "an anti-sciencemetaphysics, a demonology of technology." ³⁷The body, and "embodiment," exist politically not as an original"state of nature" divorced from and threatened by technology,but in partial fusion with it: "Intense pleasure in skill, machineskill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine isnot an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machineis us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment." ³⁸In aesthetic-political terms, such an engagement will reject Marxian-humanistand avant-gardist notions of "revolution" for something closerto Gertrude Stein's sense of a "continuous present." ³⁹An "organic" or "holistic" politics exhibits excessivedependence on the "reproductive metaphors" of Edenic innocenceor pre-Babel unity. Regeneration, not reproduction, Haraway suggests, isthe cyborg moment--and it is enacted through the technology of writing:

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs,etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the strugglefor language and the struggle against perfect communication, against theone code that translates all meaning perfectly. . . . That is why cyborgpolitics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimatefusions of animal and machine. ⁴⁰

Politics and poetics are united: "This is adream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia."⁴¹[End Page 73]

The postmodern ideology of dematerialization thatdrives Baudrillard's nihilism depends, for Haraway, on the origin storyof a presimulacrum, or intact, nonsimulated, real reality (presumably antedatingthe rise of media). ⁴²For Hayles, it is an ideology with its own highly determined material and"embodied" historical context in the so-called information revolution--thoughits most dangerous tendency, as ideology, is to obscure just that materialcontext. "How much of what we call postmodernism," Hayles asks,"is a response to the separation of text from context that informationtechnology makes possible?" ⁴³The fluidity of text (information), accelerated by global networktechnologies, makes the control of material context for information ("spin")the potential nexus for both technocratic repression and its resistance:

Whether in biotechnology, disinformation campaignsor hightech weapons, the ability to separate text from context and to determinehow the new context will be reconstituted is literally the power of lifeand death. In this context, what Niklas Luhmann calls "context control"is crucial to understanding how relations between power and knowledge areconstituted in postmodern society. ⁴⁴

"Informatics"--the "technological,economic, and social structures that make the information age possible"--comprisematerial conditions for the production of decontextualized and dematerializedinformation. ⁴⁵The scientific-humanistic discourse of informatics, engaging the humanisticdiscourses of postmodern theory, is necessarily hybridized: "Excavatingthese connections requires a way of talking about the body that is responsiveto its postmodern construction as discourse/information and yet is nottrapped within it." ⁴⁶

Hayles's "embodied" body is, like Haraway'scyborg, an aesthetic-political persona--not a body as such, or an identity,or an essentialized Self, but a position "enmeshed within the specificsof place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment."⁴⁷ [EndPage 74] Insofar as "bodily practices have a physical realitywhich can never be fully assimilated into discourse," ⁴⁸information, or technology, the body entering the immersive or absorptiveVR environment of dematerialized simulacra does not thereby automaticallyundergo identical dematerialization. What does occur, Hayles argues,is the constitution of a new subjectivity in and through this technologicallyprovided experience: a subjectivity capable to hold the simulated and nonsimulatedtogether in a hybrid or cyborg simultaneity. It is not that the body disappearsinto the simulation, nor that the simulation invades the organic domainof the body. They simply coexist. Uneasily, perhaps--but the unease itself,and an aesthetic-political willingness to tolerate such unease, even tocultivate it, is a potent form of resistance to the global "technocraticcontext" of a deterministic information society. Embodiment--the resistantsubject position, the body's organic intervention in the machine--is "generatedfrom the noise of difference." ⁴⁹

Self-organization from noise, a concept central toinformation theory, is at the heart of Haraway's "regeneration"and of F*lix Guattari's formulation of "machinic heterogenesis."⁵⁰ Inplace of hierarchical and patriarchal reproductive legitimation, the socialist-feministcyborg or hybrid--what Hayles terms the "posthuman" ⁵¹--substitutes regenerative illegitimacy as a strategy for resisting themilitarism and capitalism of technology, through technology:

The drive for control that was a founding impulsefor cybernetics . . . is evident in the simulations of virtual reality,where human senses are projected [End Page 75] into a computer domainwhose underlying binary/logical structure defines the parameters withinwhich action evolves. At the same time, by denaturalizing assumptions aboutphysicality and embodiment, cybernetic technologies also contribute toliberatory projects that seek to bring traditional dichotomies and hierarchiesinto question. ⁵²

A machine politics is also a machine poetics. "Hacking"is one of its prime forms: to write is also to write illegitimate code,to "write over" the instrumental (technocratic) functions ofa user interface, disrupting the controlled delivery of information. Aresistant subjectivity of temporal, spatial, physiological, and culturalspecificity is thereby reinserted into the context-erasing simulation,assuming the status of a "para-site." ⁵³

c. Hybrid Practices: The "Aesthetics of Information"

In his own gestures toward a digital poetics, MatthewG. Kirschenbaum has advanced the notion of a "radical aestheticizationof information" as a strategy of broadly humanistic response to newresearch in computer science. He suggests that the instrumentally designedoperations of computer technologies may yield results of unintended (andunattended) aesthetic interest--one of his examples is Antonio Gonzalez-Walker's"Language Visualization and Multilayer Text Analysis" project,at the Cornell Theory Center--and argues unapologetically for attentionto "beauty" in the "visual materiality of information."⁵⁴ Ashybrid practice, Kirschenbaum's advocacy combines attention to the "phenomenologicalmateriality of electronic media"--a materiality constituted, likeDrucker's, not ontologically but in the event of human interaction withthe machine--with the injunction, derived from the theories of Russianformalism, to "defamiliarize" the objects of attention--in thiscase, information. ⁵⁵New electronic artworks, he suggests,

are concerned with demonstrating the materialityof their environments. . . . this concern extends itself into the supposedlyimmaterial electronic writing spaces which some of these objects inhabit.. . . although created and authored [End Page 76] by human beings,[they] are at all points engaged in the construction of artificial subjectpositions--artificial intelligences if you will, though perhaps artificesof intelligence is more accurate and less (or more) glib. ⁵⁶

Contemporary graphic design and electronic typography,Kirschenbaum suggests, are establishing the aesthetic paradigms to whichpoets and artists of the moment will respond--just as futurist and Dadaistpoet-artists are seen, in Drucker's account, responding to the technologicallydetermined print aesthetics of the early twentieth century. Kirschenbaum's"artificial subject position" or "artifice of intelligence"is, like the hybrid, cyborg and posthuman, an aesthetic-political formationuseful to a digital visual poetics. From the European historical avant-gardeto Anglophone L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E writers of the 1970s and 1980s, twentieth-centurypoetic and visual innovators have shared the project of "materializing"language and the technological media that modify it. Now, as the new writingtechnology of the computer nears ubiquity in the developed West, the taskof an electronic poetics will be to operate on, to alter, the computer'sinstrumental teleology--its design for informational transparency and functionality--asother poetics have resisted the transparencies of discourse and media intheir times. Hybridization (of theory as of practice, of bodies as of machines),hacking, para-sitism, and other nontotalizing, nontechnocratic forms ofresistant engagement will inform a poetics of the new visual/textual mediaand the new opportunities for communication and critique (as distinguishedfrom command and control), through forms of writing, that they makepossible. In the simultaneously material and ephemeral fields of such practice,the notion of "avant-garde" may seem finally provincial, absorbedinto the sensibilities of an art that positions itself at once here and(whether virtually or no) elsewhere.

2. Eduardo Kac's "Secret"

"What happens as we go?" asks Michael Joyce.⁵⁷ Whathappens as we "screen"--bring up on screen, examine, evaluate--"Secret,"an interactive virtual reality poem created in 1996 by artist and poetEduardo Kac, which he claims is the "first of its kind"? ⁵⁸The poem references [End Page 77] a small body of electronic visualand "kinetic" poetry based on network standards developed since1993 (HTML, VRML, JavaScript, etc.), ⁵⁹some of which can be found at virtual gallery and exhibition Web sitessuch as Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com)and SUNY-Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center Gallery (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/gallery/).⁶⁰ Atthe same time, [End Page 78] "Secret" adapts the mimeticallybiased technology of VR to represent the material typographic sign, thesymbolic letter, the word, and other units of writing as three-dimensionalobjects in space, and in this it enters the company of work such as JeffreyShaw's "The Legible City," the Virtual Shakespeare Project atMIT's Media Lab, and Kirschenbaum's electronic dissertation. ⁶¹

So: what happens as we go? The file loads (Fig.1); the viewer rests at the center of an "alpha-architecturalspace" ⁶²--"whitespace" turned "blackhole" ⁶³--in which the word "wind" floats some distance ahead and slightlyto the right. The word's four letters are constructed from cylinder andsphere shapes of heterogeneous size, visual density, texture, and apparentlevel of light reflection. A representation of a control panel (not partof the poem, but a configuration of the Web browser used to view it) presentsus with a number of options. We may approach the word/object "wind"on a "gravity" (grounded) or a "floating" plane; wemay zoom in on the word/object from our represented position in space;we may "slide" vertically or horizontally through the space,or "tilt" from one represented position; we may "pan"from one position; we may "manually" rotate the word/object (Figs.2, 3).[End Page 79]

Exploration of the space reveals an ideogrammaticword constellation, "readable" from top to bottom and from rightto left:

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊwind
ÊÊÊÊÊÊthat
ÊÊÊÊÊÊblows

ÊÊÊÊ[string of quasi-alphabeticletters/symbols]
ÊÊÊÊwith
ÊÊÊÊt [or cross/crucifix shape]

[isolated cylinder and sphere shapes]

The constellation is visible in toto only at a distanceand an angle that render each word/object and subconstellation nearly illegible;as one reverses, slides up or down, and pans from the entry point, eachword/object and subconstellation appears, achieves legibility, and recedestoward illegibility as the next approaches.

This is only "entry" reading. It is up to the viewer to traveltoward and away from and around, under, and over each word/object and subconstellation,and toward and away from and around, under, and over the entire visual-textualconstellation. "Reading" here is a polymodal activity, whichmay include:

1. "Reading" the words in the conventionalsense.

2. Examining the words as representations of three-dimensionalobjects--an operation that may involve rotating them, traveling "above,""below," "behind," "past," or even "through"them (Figs. 4-7)--literally, "subversion."

3. Reflecting on the nature of this simulated interactionwith the simulated materiality of the words (reading one's reading).

4. Reflecting on the simulation interface itself--readingthe
virtual-reality software itself as a work of writing or code.

Kac's practice is prolific and diverse, having includedgraffiti poetry, book art, and body-poetry (using his body in performanceto shape letters); electronic signboard and videotext poetry; holographand hypertext poetry; digitally animated and interactive cinematic visualpoetry; installation art; telepresence, telematic, and biological art;digital painting; and, most recently, robotic art. In his theoretical writings,he has developed a wide-ranging and radically engaged [End Page 80]machine poetics, one part of which (chiefly from the essays on "holopoetry")I can present only briefly and superficially here. ⁶⁴

"I felt on the one hand," Kac writes in"Key Concepts of Holopoetry,"

that the printed page imprisoned the word withinits two-dimensional surface, thus creating specific limits to poetic expression.On the other hand, I realized that the construction of solid three-dimensionalobjects gave the word a permanence and a physical presence that contradictedthe dynamics of language. ⁶⁵

The goal of a holograph or (in a slightly differentway) a VR poem is simulated linguistic materiality--the real materialityof real objects being inherently too static or inert for Kac's purpose.Furthermore: it [End Page 81] is not the simulation of a linguisticmateriality that might be construed in real three-dimensional space (say,by carving letters out of blocks of wood), but rather that which is displacedonto the viewer, or interactor, in the confrontation with the radical immaterialityof word/image in the holographic or electronic medium. Holographic poemsare "quadri-dimensional because they integrate dynamically the threedimensions of space with the added dimension of time. This is not the subjectivetime of the reader found in traditional texts, but a perceived time expressedin the holopoem itself." ⁶⁶As the space of the poem dematerializes into an "oscillatory fieldof diffracting light," its temporality becomes a dynamic functionof "viewer-activated choreography" ⁶⁷--a viewer's interaction with, and alteration of, the poem. Central tothis effect is Kac's theory of the "fluid sign,"

essentially a verbal sign that changes its overallvisual configuration in time, therefore escaping the constancy of meaninga printed sign would have. . . . Fluid signs are time-reversible, whichmeans that the transformations can flow from pole to pole as the beholderwishes, and they can also become smaller compositional units in much largertexts, where each fluid sign will be connected to other fluid signs throughdiscontinuous syntaxes. Fluid signs create a new kind of verbal unit, inwhich a sign is not either one thing or another thing. A fluid sign isperceptually relative. For two or more viewers reading together from distinctperspectives it can be different things at one time; for a non-stationaryreader it can reverse itself and change uninterruptedly between as manypoles as featured in the text. . . . Fluid signs can also operate metamorphosesbetween a word and an abstract shape, or between a word and a scene orobject. When this happens, both poles reciprocally alter each others' meanings.⁶⁸

In "Secret," this occurs at the level ofthe subconstellation that "reads":

[string of quasi-alphabetic letters/symbols]
with
t [or cross/crucifix shape]

The ideogram/sentence "wind that blows . . ." has, upon the viewer'sarrival at a position near this subconstellation, disintegrated into [EndPage 82] strings of quasi-typographic objects that approach and withdrawfrom alphabetic signification, and that change their individual and collectiveconfigurations according to the viewer's position in space (Figs.8, 9). "After" that--temporality being, not the determined"subjective time" of print literature, but a broadly variablefunction of the viewer's intervention--it simply disintegrates into isolated,ambiguously lexical and iconic particles (the crucifix that is also a t,the cylinder and sphere that are also an l and an o).

Far from "disintegration," though, theoperation of this very small poem, as I read it, is to write the polymorphicconvergence of the lexical-visual in electronic writing, the paradox ofmaterial representation in an immaterial medium, and the invitation toa participatory poetics that travels well beyond the na�ve claims for readerempowerment that are advanced, and as quickly dismissed, by the techno-aestheticutopians and their opponents. Michael Joyce puts it well: "this istheater as much as virtuality. . . . as theater, virtuality and interactivityenact nothing less than reading embodied." ⁶⁹It is not mere user participation in an electronic work of art, some valorously"active" clicking at a mouse, that is being sought here; whatis sought, rather, is a reflection of the vital ambiguities of life livedthrough technologies that change us, and our ways of living and thinking,even as we change them in responding to perceived evolutions in our knowledge:a feedback loop linking contemporary cultural forces and instrumental technologiesinto reciprocal and recombinant relations. ⁷⁰

The title of Kac's poem indulges the transcendent-revelatorymetaphysics of passive reading even as it interrogates and challenges [EndPage 83] that reading. As Charles Bernstein has put it, apropos ofGertrude Stein: "Faced with the sound, the materiality, or the presence(present) of language as music of sense in our ears, we project a secret:a hidden language." ⁷¹Here, though, the secret is not simply illusion or simulacrum, tobe collapsed into the truth of the real, but a figure for the hybrid unattainability--orsimultaneity--of "pure" presence/absence, materiality/immateriality,reality/virtuality, and so on. The "secret" is to hold two contradictionsin suspension, witholding their resolution in an endless play of differencewithin the body. "Secret" is not, I venture, "avant-garde"--howeverfar it may appear to reach forth into a manifestly alien, self-organizedaesthetics. Its effect as a poem, as a piece of art, depends on "polluted"reading: reading against metaphysics as against positivism; against apocalypseas against utopia; against revolution as against tradition.

3. "Hacking a Private Site": Some ConcludingThoughts

"Our encounter with the future text," MichaelJoyce suggests, "carries with it what might be called the melancholyof history." ⁷²Already, the theory and practice of electronic poetics are almost unmanageablydiverse. Cyberpoetry, hyperpoetry, infopoetry, virtual poetry, digitalvideopoetry, computer Lettrisme, experimental electronic typography,and intersign poetry flourish in thriving movements and submovements (someconstituted solely by their inventors). OuLiPo has been succeeded by InfoLiPo.⁷³ WhatAlberto Moreiras calls "hacking a private site" ⁷⁴stands not for the effort to consolidate these proliferating poetries,or to find one's safe place among them, but for the politics they collectivelyenact in breaking codes that limit the uses of a technology to itsfunctions. In this spirit, I would like to close with a speculationon the role that digital media may play in the continual revising of traditionthat is a poetics.

In our time, "information" is displacingtraditional capital, including the unpatentable intellectual and aestheticcapital by which artists, writers, and humanities scholars earn their livelihood.⁷⁵ Asan alternative to "end of culture" scenarios, new formulationsof a postmillennialist "experimental humanism" ⁷⁶are being offered by scholars [End Page 84] and writers who arepressured to defend the legitimacy of their own cultural activity as wellas to resist the automation of literacy that is "deskilling"them as teachers (along with their students). Such an experimental humanism,Richard Lanham suggests, will "think systemically" ⁷⁷--both in the specifically technocratic sense of the term, and in a widersense that sees the "information revolution" and its technologiesas part of the cultural-historical context of the late twentieth century.In other words, it will be resolutely "interdisciplinary," andtechnologically hybridized without being technologically cannibalized.

The discourse of information theory may be the mostpotent new appropriation for a digital poetics. Now that an academic criticalliterature has established the importance of poetic strategies once (oftenstill) derided as productive of "unpoetical" nonsense, randomness,and opacity, the informational concepts of noise, pattern, and recombinationmay (through no intention of their originators) provide new ways to readand to write about the poetries of the past, as well as informing thoseof the continuous or unacknowledged present. Perhaps some of our most challengingpoetries have courted randomness, courted nonsense, in protocyberneticanticipation, or perhaps they remain challenging merely because new languagesseem glad to engage them. The task in any case is, as Moreiras suggests,to "define a task of thinking that would refuse to believe itselfabove and beyond technique." ⁷⁸As "the humanities" are increasingly charged with the task ofresponding to the informatic Engineering World View, the leisure of a theorydivorced from experimental practice may prove to be more unsustainablethan ever.

BrianLennon is a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literatureat Columbia University. He is working on a series of essays about contemporarypoetry and information technologies.

Notes

1.Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenserto Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 299:"Sociologists and psychologists, as well as literary and culturalhistorians, consistently demonstrate the ways in which death has tendedto become obscene, meaningless, impersonal--an event either stupefyinglycolossal in cases of large-scale war or genocide, or clinically concealedsomewhere behind the technology of the hospital and the techniques of thefuneral home." It is the technology, of course, that is key: and thisapplies not just to the technologically obscured death of humanbodies, but to the technologically assisted figural "death,"first of the author (Barthes, Foucault), then of the printed book (Birkertset al.), and now of the techno-socialistic "network" (with militaryantecedents) that the Internet once was.

2.See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary CriticalTheory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992),p. 34. "Storyspace" is the hypertext authoring tool developedby Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce in 1985-86; for an account of theircollaboration, see Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy andPoetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). The term "videation"is Marjorie Perloff's; see Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Ageof Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 74.

3.See, for example, Laura Miller, "www.claptrap.com," New YorkTimes Book Review, March 15, 1998, p. 43--a likably pugnacious, iftypically defensive, riposte to enthusiasts.

4.See Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: UnderstandingNew Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

5.See Marjorie Perloff, "The Morphology of the Amorphous: Bill Viola'sVideoscapes," in Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for EmergentOccasions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 309-321.

6.Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the Historyof Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), p. 26.

7.For accounts of the importance of a materialized writing practice to the"Language" writers, see, e.g., Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice(above, n. 2); Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=EBook (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); CharlesBernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1992).

8.Simon Penny, "The Virtualisation of Art Practice: Body Knowledge andthe Engineering World View," Art Journal 56 (Fall 1997): 30-38;available on the Web at http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/www-penny/texts/Virtualisation.html.

9.Critical-theoretic estrangement from practice is a by-product of the professionalizedeconomy of the university. One remedy is for writers to work also as critics,editors, and publishers. By all indications, the "small press revolution"of the 1960s and 1970s continues unabated today--not only in a profusionof printed chapbooks and magazines, but also in the networked environmentsof electronic publishing. It is interesting to note, however, that manyyoung writer-editor-publishers--who make extensive use of telecommunicationsfor the personal networking that is integral to what is virtually a "gifteconomy"--still prefer the more costly print medium for publication.This is not, I think, mere anachronism, and it raises more interestingquestions about community, activism, and the "future of the book"than the diffuse cultural debate conducted in the popular media.

10.Bolter and Grusin, Remediation (above, n. 4).

11.Ibid., p. 57.

12.See Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminismin the Late Twentieth Century," in idem, Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181;N. Katherine Hayles, "The Seductions of Cyberspace," in RethinkingTechnologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 173-190; idem, "Text Out of Context:Situating Postmodernism within an Information Society," Discourse9 (Spring/Summer 1997): 25-36; idem, How We Became Posthuman: VirtualBodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1999).

13.Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and ModernArt, 1909-1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); AdalaideMorris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

14.Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word(London/New York: Methuen, 1982).

15.Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 88.

16.Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine;The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982(Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992).

17.For an interesting discussion of simulation technologies and contemporary"drug culture," see Avital Ronell, "Our Narcotic Modernity,"in Conley, Rethinking Technologies (above, n. 12), pp. 59-73.

18.Jean Baudrillard, "Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality," inJean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London:SAGE, 1997), pp. 19-27, p. 22.

19.See Landow, Hypertext (above, n. 2), pp. 20-22; Bolter and Grusin,Remediation (above, n. 4), p. 194.

20.In the early 1980s, the popularity of information-based role-playing gamessuch as "Dungeons and Dragons" led to hysteria when a handfulof juvenile crimes (which would otherwise have been attributed to Satanismor heavy-metal music) were taken for proof of damaging immersion in thegames' fantasy.

21.Joyce, Of Two Minds (above, n. 2), p. 206.

22.William Dickey, "Poem Descending a Staircase: Hypertext and the Simultaneityof Experience," in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. PaulDelany and George P. Landow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 145.

23.Drucker, Visible Word (above, n. 13), p. 9.

24.Ibid., p. 109.

25.Ibid., p. 138.

26.In a brief history of computer poetry in Europe since 1959, Philippe Bootzhighlights the 1985 Les Immat*riaux exhibition at the Pompidou Centeras "a climax for A.L.A.M.O. [a computerized offspring of OuLiPo] and. . . a starting point for the dynamic poetry which was to develop in thefollowing years" in France and elsewhere (Philippe Bootz, "PoeticMachinations," Visible Language 30:2 [1996]: 118-137).

27.Drucker, Visible Word (above, n. 13), pp. 34-39, pp. 39 and 34.

28.Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and theArts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 34.

29.Drucker, Visible Word, p. 39.

30.Ibid., p. 43.

31.Gilles Deleuze and F*lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 6ff, p. 21.

32.Drucker, Visible Word, p. 43.

33.Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs (above, n. 12), p. 157.

34.Ibid., pp. 160-161.

35.Ibid., p. 165.

36.Ibid., p. 181.

37.Ibid.

38.Ibid., p. 180.

39.See Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation," in The SelectedWritings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 514-518:"No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular varietyof creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creatingtheir own time refuse to accept. . . . Continuous present is one thingand beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things.And then there is using everything."

40.Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs (above, n. 12), p. 176.

41.Ibid., p. 181.

42.For an analysis of postmodernism as "disappointed rationalism"(which has inspired the digital media theory of Bolter and Grusin, amongothers), see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. CatherinePorter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Cyborgs andother hybrids are, in Latour's account, "nonmodern" or "amodern"(but not antimodern) in their refusal to perpetuate the linear andbinary structures that define ideologies for both the modern andthe postmodern.

43.Hayles, "Text Out of Context" (above, n. 12), p. 27.

44.Ibid., p. 30.

45.Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (above, n. 12), p. 29.

46.Ibid., p. 193.

47.Ibid., p. 196. This conception of agency or subjectivity is remarkablycongruent with that developed in the poetics of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Ewriters, many of whom advanced cogent theoretical justifications for apoetic practice that radically altered, or entirely discarded, the Romanticlyric subject, while retaining other options for aesthetic-political agency.See, e.g., the essays and manifestos collected in Andrews and Bernstein,L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (above, n. 7; particularly Ron Silliman's "Disappearanceof the Word, Appearance of the World"); Bernstein, Poetics(above, n. 7); Ron Silliman et al., "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politicsof Poetry: A Manifesto," Social Text 19/20 (1988): 261-275.

48.Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (above, n. 12), p. 195.

49.Ibid., p. 196. For another picture of this resistance (via a reading ofJ. G. Ballard's Crash), see Scott Durham, "The Technology ofDeath and Its Limits: The Problem of the Simulation Model," in Conley,Rethinking Technologies (above, n. 12), pp. 156-170.

50.F*lix Guattari, "Machinic Heterogenesis," in Conley, RethinkingTechnologies, pp. 13-27. For an extended discussion of "self-organizationfrom noise" and its relation to literature and aesthetics, see WilliamR. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

51.See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (above, n. 12), pp. 2-3.

52.Hayles, "Seductions of Cyberspace" (above, n. 12), p. 174.

53.See Johannes Birringer, "Makrolab: A Heterotopia," PAJ: AJournal of Performance and Art 60 (September 1998): 66-75.

54.Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "Truth, Beauty, and the User Interface: Noteson the Aesthetics of Information," paper presented at the conference"Mixed Messages: Image, Text, Technology," University of NorthCarolina, Charlotte, October 13, 1997; available on the Web at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/papers/beauty/index.html.

55.Here, again, a congruence with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and related poetics maybe noted.

56.Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "Machine Visions: Towards a Poetics of ArtificialIntelligence," electronic book review 6 (November 1997): http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6kirschenbaum/6kirsch.htm, section I.

57.Joyce, Of Two Minds (above, n. 2), pp. 199-218.

58.See KacWeb, the artist's personal Web site/gallery (http://www.ekac.org),which, in addition to "Secret," archives other work and selectedtheoretical writings.

59.HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language; VRML: Virtual Reality Modeling Language.Javascript is one of a number of "script" languages (DynamicHTML is another) designed to facilitate graphic animation and interactivefunctions.

60.The work collected on these sites, by Tan Lin, Juliet Ann Martin, JanetZweig, Charles Bernstein, Brian Kim Stefans, Loss Peque­o Glazier,and others, brings to the network-architectures first explored by hypertextprose writers the polymorphous influence of typographic and hypergraphicexperimentation--from futurism, Dada, and surrealism through the internationalConcrete movement of the 1950s and countless other schools and subschoolsof "visual poetry," in both electronic and traditional media,up to the present day. For an excellent introduction to Concrete poetry,see Mary Ellen Solt, "A World Look at Concrete Poetry," in ConcretePoetry: A World View, ed. idem (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1970), pp. 7-66. Other sources worth consulting are Richard Kostelanetz,ed., Visual Literature Criticism: A New Collection (Carbondale/Edwardsville:Southern Illinois University Press, 1979); Theo D'haen, ed., Verbal/VisualCrossings 1880-1980 (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1990). For discussions ofdigital visual poetry, see David K. Jackson, Eric Vos, and Johanna Drucker,eds., Experimental--Visual--Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s(Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1996); Visible Language 30.2, issue entitled"New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies" (1996).

61.Michael Joyce discusses "The Legible City" at some length inOf Two Minds (above, n. 2), pp. 199-218. For a discussion of theVirtual Shakespeare Project, see D. Small, "Navigating Large Bodiesof Text," IBM Systems Journal 35:3-4 (1996): http://www.almaden.ibm.com/journal/sj/mit/sectiond/small.html;Kirschenbaum, "Truth, Beauty" (above, n. 54). Kirschenbaum providesinformation about his dissertation, as well as a smaller project composedin VRML, at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/.

62.Joyce, Of Two Minds, p. 203.

63.Katie Salen and Sharyn O'Mara, "Dis[appearances]: RepresentationalStrategies and Operational Needs in Codexspace and Screenspace," VisibleLanguage 31:3 (1997): 278.

64.See, e.g., Eduardo Kac, "Holopoetry," Visible Language30:2 (1996): 184-213; idem, "Key Concepts of Holopoetry," inJackson, Vos, and Drucker, Experimental--Visual--Concrete (above,n. 60), pp. 247-257; idem, "Beyond the Spatial Paradigm: Time andCinematic Form in Holographic Art," "Holopoetry, Hypertext, Hyperpoetry,"and "Recent Experiments in Holopoetry and Computer Holopoetry,"all available from http://www.ekac.org.

65.Kac, "Key Concepts," p. 247.

66.Kac, "Holopoetry," p. 187.

67.Ibid., pp. 193, 190. For an extended discussion of time in "informationart," see Perloff, "Morphology" (above, n. 5).

68.Kac, "Holopoetry" (above, n. 64), p. 194.

69.Joyce, Of Two Minds (above, n. 2), p. 204.

70.Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (above, n. 12), p. 14.

71.Bernstein, Poetics (above, n. 7), p. 146.

72.Joyce, Of Two Minds (above, n. 2), p. 234.

73.See the InfoLiPo Web site at http://www.unige.ch/infolipo/.

74.Alberto Moreiras, "The Leap and the Lapse: Hacking a Private Sitein Cyberspace," in Conley, Rethinking Technologies (above,n. 12), pp. 191-203.

75.Hayles, "Text Out of Context" (above, n. 12), p. 28.

76.Lanham, Electronic Word (above, n. 28), p. 11.

77.Ibid., p. 26.

78.Moreiras, "Leap" (above, n. 74), p. 194.

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