netpoetic.com

Seeing that picture of me up on the blog (eeks! still, thanks Jason) has motivated me to put up a first poet – a very informal, bloggy sort of post. Simply, I thought I’d post about a conference paper I’d like to give this fall at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts that will be at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. If you have any comments or suggestions for my hazy idea for a paper, I hope you’ll let me know.

Basically, rather than do what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years (presenting a close-reading of a particular digital poem), the paper will take more of a meta approach. I’m hoping to explore the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of a school of programmers and graphic designers, accreting around the work of John Maeda and the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and now the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), not only neatly echo that of book artists throughout the 20th and early 21st century but are in fact drawn from this long-standing history of the art of book-making. Working explicitly against creating aesthetic objects that are seamlessly enmeshed in a slick, surface-level interface, “code-works” (in digital poet John Cayley’s words) created by those in the hacker-driven “demo scene” as much as those working in digital poetry and/or net-art are driven by a belief in what Maeda calls “dirty hands.” Writing for a blog for Harvard’s business school, Maeda declares “In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it’s six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, ‘2.0.’ Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands.” Given RISD’s long-standing dedication to archiving and creating artists books, it is no coincidence that process-driven programming and the tradition of artists books should be conjoined in the figure of Maeda himself, now President of RISD. In fact, as I argue in this paper, it is the artist book (from those created by Russian Futurist Ilia Zdanevich to to those by Johanna Drucker or produced by The Center for Book Arts in New York City) that laid the groundwork for this turn toward self-conscious, self-reflexive coding as it showed us how to hack the book in order to renew the book, to turn it from a transparent carrier of meaning to an object that is meaningful in itself.

Perhaps far-fetched? Perhaps.

Tags: programming code Maeda artists books

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