netpoetic.com

Later this month I’ll be presenting a paper on “Making as Meaning: from Dirty Concrete to Critical Code” – I will post the entire text of the paper once I’ve presented it. In the meantime I thought I would give readers a sneak peek. In short, something I’ve been exploring is the way in which Steve McCaffery’s so-called “dirty concrete poem” “Carnival” can be read alongside certain contemporary digital poems and digital DIY communities insofar as both comprise a movement not only to democratize the creative process. But they also reflect a movement to make this same democratization possible through techniques which draw attention to the art-object as a created object—techniques which essentially, I would argue, turn the inside of the literary-art object out. It is a philosophy of making that erodes the division between surface and depth, inside and outside.

In fact, I would argue that to the extent “Carnival” is a “dirty” concrete poems par excellence, it now most effectively communicates to us in 2010 that the page, the letter, or the word is just as much a medium that we can read and write as computer software is. And, moreover, one of the ways in which McCaffery generates these tools is through hacking the page or the book in order to renew it, to turn it from a transparent carrier of meaning to an object that is meaningful in itself. That is, “Carnival”—a book experiment from the early 1970s—was made entirely by hand by, as Marjorie Perloff describes it, “placing masks on each of sixteen standard 81/2-by-11-inch pages, arranged in groups of four to make a square (or, strictly speaking, rectangle) measuring 44 by 36 inches. The sixteen pages were then perforated and arranged in sequential book form, accompanied by the Instructions, ‘In order to destroy this book please tear each page carefully along the perforation.’” But what is significant about McCaffery’s project is not just the physical size of the work, and it is not just the fact that one has to destroy the work in order to read it—it is that the typewritten text, the stamps, the various traces of writerly labor and the physical world (in the form of smudges or the slight bleed of ink) turn it into a work in which the surface is the depth and the making of the work is the meaning.

Similarly working explicitly against creating aesthetic objects that are seamlessly enmeshed in a slick, surface-level interface, digital poems that are “code-works” (after digital poets Alan Sondheim, John Cayley, and Mez Breeze) as well as works created by those in the hacker-dominated “demo scene” are also driven by a philosophy of making or, otherwise put, a belief in what designer and president of the Rhode Island School of Design John 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.” In this particular article Maeda was endorsing an approach to education and even a lifestyle driven by doing, by physically working with tangible materials (welding, sculpting, weaving etc.)–an approach nicely embodied by some of his early art works such as “Palm Paintings” from 2000 which were a series of boxes on which Maeda painted in a “mix of abstract styles” to then embed “a Palm computer in each of the computers and specifically program each one to visually ‘think’ about what the painting signified.”

But this sort of “dirty hands” approach can just as easily describe digital poems such as Mez Breeze’s “pro][tean][.lapsing.txts” which is an imitation of computer code (written in what she calls “mezangelle”) and thus the code is the poem, the visible, also primarily visual, surface text of the work (this in contrast to the way in which code is almost always the invisible, underlying layer which is responsible for make a different surface text visible). Once again, as with “Carnival,” the text is just as much about making visible the work of coding as it is about what the coding semantically communicates. And it can also nicely describe a whole range of recent open-source, community-driven artistic/cultural phenomenon such as the demo-scene, chiptune music scene, Maker Faire, or any of the burgeoning DIY electronics and robotics movements supported by companies such as Makerbot (a start-up company that creates open-source 3-d printers that you can by for $700-800 and put together yourself) or Arduino (an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments). While I think we can trace the impetus for many of these contemporary digital DIY movements to the arts and crafts movement as well as the growing prominence of artists books that took place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in reaction to rapid industrialization and mechanization—a movement arguably taken up once more by concrete poets from the 1950s and, via McCaffery himself, through the 1970s—the way in which the meaning is in the making as well as in an exploration of surface as depth now seems to be less about the grain of the wood, the binding of the book, the reworking of the physical page and more about how the meaning is in the code, the software, the programming, the circuitry.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.