Itch Away blog

The for godot issue 1 has produced all manner of reaction in the blogosphere and on the listserv for British poets. Openned have also commented on the hoo-ha.

My feelings in the use of my name are as tepid as my feelings for the guts of the work itself. I don’t mind that someone’s project has attributed some algorithmically produced poem to my pen. Not a bit – in fact, it raised my eyebrows and led to some questions as I looked over the ‘featured’ poets’ names. And for many, this is where the project begins and ends. What I tried to articulate on the listserv was a vague interest in the concept of gravitas assumed through an authorial name and the historical contexts which accompany those names. In theory.

The writing itself is, I’d guess, arbitrary and from what I’ve read incidental to the production of the work and whatever reasons lie behind it. This sets it apart from a conceptual work such as Kenneth Goldsmith, much of whose work one would not be expected (KG himself says this) to read through in any conventional sense, such are the weighty tomes produced through the procedure – and this is the basis of many criticisms of his work. However, love him or hate him, Goldsmith’s work relies on the context of carefully chosen source materials, the types of texts they are, where, when and how they were produced and mainly consumed, in order to parse the conceptual makeup, and this sets these works apart from pure arbitrary reordering. His are conceptual projects, mainly freely available as well as buyable, and ignorable if one is so inclined.

I feel there is no such luxury with this piece, whose presence automatically implicates the work of other poets from a huge variety of backgrounds. The presence of this as online product is significant – it has, in a relatively short space of time, been picked up by the Google bots, whose indiscriminate acceptance of linguistic stuff has cemented these poets’ ‘works’ firmly into your searchnodes. [this and the following paragraph edited based on comment about flarf]

With neither a source agenda nor a real sense of conceptual motivation behind this work I find little appealing in it’s content save for a passing thought in the vein of authorial contexts as above. I may not care about the use of my name, but then, my name is little affected by its inclusion. I think the work is mainly harmless, but I also understand there are certain complexities with certain authors (especially the dead ones) and those investigating poets online – which has in recent years become a far more viable and useful way to mine information and access materials. Aside from this less than useful potential obstruction (which is admittedly pretty minor – people should be checking their online sources, yaknow) this work is, well, irrelevant. Perhaps this is foregrounded in the fact that most discussion has been about rabid angry and not so angry reactions from authors regarding the uses of their names.  There is not really much else to discuss. The fairly lame reactions of the editor seem to attempt defense, yet the work was screaming for reaction from the get-go, and once you bring in real, actual names in the way this publication has done, you have no choice but to accept the input – the constructive or destructive criticism – of those authors, whether or not you agree with them.

That’s why I enjoyed Jow’s response more.

I find myself wanting to defend algorithmically produced works to the death, but sometimes they’re a lost cause. Works by John Cayley investigate language in relation to algorithms which explore visual qualities, perspectival calculations, layers, etc.¹ . J B Wock and the News Reader and Regime Change texts of Noah Wardrip-Fruin filter blog and news language respectively and rework it in ways which look forwards and backwards – backwards onto their sources texts, forwards into their construction of contextually and linguistically interesting montage texts. Etc etc. These are essential directions for algorithm texts, and show how the use of arbitrary systems ad mappings of algorithms onto language in certain, thoughtful situations can in fact charge them and foreground them in thoroughly unique ways. When the language is ignored both semantically and conceptually, you’re not left with much but about 3000 grumpy poets sending you emails and leaving angry comments.

Which is essentially what the 4000 poems represent. Not much, except a fairly reasonable thorn in the side for some poets.

1. See, for example, Overboard, and some of Cayley’s own explanatory essays from Dichtung Digital – on Overboard, and Writing on Complex Surfaces [↩]

As a kind of addendum to my post on Providence, here are some tasty links to check out. They can all – of course – be found on the links section of the site.

Firehouse 13 – If you live in Providence, this seemed to me like a cool venue to check out. Hosts Justin Katko’s The Program event. Make sure you attend on a regular basis.

Justin Katko

Justin edits the Plantarchy publication through Critical Documents. Check em all out.

Also check out Justin’s work at Midway Journal (Reading Palm plus transcript)

On current issue of The Little Magazine (006 – 007 ISSUE)

Justin’s youtube page

Aubade

Aubade is one incarnation of a fascinating look into manipulation of a corporation’s coded viral site at notcelebrity.co.uk. Justin has worked out ways of subverting the URL structure used to create a name in lights. His youtube page has more examples, and there’s a video at http://plantarchy.us/katko/projects/names-in-light/names-in-light.mp4

Cris Cheek

See Cris Cheek’s page at the British Electronic Poetry Centre

Things Not Worth Keeping – or TNWK (collaborative identity with Kirsten Lavers) – a large site of archived work here

THE CHURCH – THE SCHOOL – THE BEER (Plantarchy 3 – see right-hand side of page)

Radio Radio interview with Martin Spinelli at UBU

Angela Veomett

Anglea’s website is a well-maintained archive of work. All of the videos mentioned in my Providence poet can be viewed here. http://www.angelaveomett.com/

Aya Karpinska

Aya, who is currently completing an MFA and teaching the Electronic Writing II class at Brown, has a background in web design, putting her in an interesting position as a digital poet. Her website, containing both digital poetry and an extensive portfolio of web work, can be found at http://www.technekai.com/

See also Aya’s performance of “nobody knows but you” at the epoetry 2007 festival videos archive (scroll about half-way down)

John Cayley

There’s really too much to put here, so be aware that this is hardly a comprehensive list. But a few highlights on the web, and interesting points of departure might be as follows:

John’s home page (the top link will take you through to his practice) http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/

IMPOSITION in the Openned Anthology

Overboard: http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/overboard.html with an overview at Dichtung Digital

See also “Writing on Complex Surfaces” also at Dichtung Digital.

Hopefully this is an interesting group of links to check out. But there are many I’ve missed. Please leave some comments expanding on the above if you have any you’d like to contribute.

More content coming soon. I’m aware that my website proper has not adequately represented my work over the past year, and I’m working from scratch to try to have it better designed, easier to update, and easier to browse. Stay tuned.

I’m back from Providence where I enjoyed an action-packed day with some old and new friends (in fact, I’m already in Phoenix, this post being a combination of a couple of days’ sporadic writing in spare pockets of traveling time). I had two ‘commitments’: guest speaking for Aya Karpinska’s Electronic Writing II class at Brown University, and the performance with Cris Cheek and Angela Veomett at the Firehouse 13 venue in Providence.

The Electrronic Writing II course, currently taught by Aya (and apparently to be taught by Justin Katko – a genius of similar magnitude to Aya’s fantaschtick) was a wonderful experience for me, since I don’t get many chances to sample the functioning and discussions happening in other courses centred on experimental writing.

The students in Aya’s class, despite having been on the course for just a few weeks, clearly had the focus, enthusiasm, capacity and open-mindedness to produce fascinating work. As it happened, the assignment for today’s class was to increasingly fragment through anagram a paragraph of text written originally by that student. Clearly all of these students, in one way or another, are already ‘good writers’ in the respect that each original was a well-crafted piece of ‘narrative’. The reason I point this out is to reiterate the capacity of these students to then take interest in pulling these pieces of writing apart using procedure without somehow feeling precious about their work. The spirit of experimentation was rife in the class, and was backed up by incredibly thoughtful and intelligent approach to what was happening to their writing and why this was of relevance and interest to them.

It was really fun to give them a brief overview of my work. Fun but odd, since I’ve never really surveyed my work in a way where I connect pieces like Version 1 (2003) with new works-in-progress like Ideas on Oedipal Bitstreams. As usual, I over-prepared and overstressed myself about it. And, as usual, once I got going I barely used the notes next to me, which turned out to be little more than a reassuring mascot for me going my own improvised way. This is probably a much healthier way to deliver my work (and hopefully more useful and accessible to those listening) and the students seemed interested, again asking pertinent questions. These days, I actually look forward to QAs, which are fantastic opportunities to gain fresh perspectives on my own work which all too easily becomes dulled by my over-familiarity with it.

Cris Cheek was also guest speaking in the class, and showed the class a Flash movie produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers (under their collaborative idenitity Things Not Worth Keeping) which was textual / visual / sonic investigation into abstracted virtual locations (for example, Silicon Valley) using the bizarre-but-actually-real-I-shit-you-not-this-is-fact location of “Silicon Fen” as its focal point. The movie fits together incredibly well and stands the test of time well too, without looking too shabby for its years. One thing I’ve always found very difficult is trying to get a Flash video which incorporates photography, sounds, texts, to fit together as a cohesive whole. The video – deliberately non-navigable – perhaps represents the un-navigable psychogeography of Silicon Fen ideally. Conspicuous by its physical absence (or perhaps through its existence solely through abstract name-allocation), Silicon Fen’s repeated textual assertion reduces (elevates?) it to the level of hyper-representation, foregrounding the kind of absurd construction trajectory imposed on this physical space (or so I felt when I was watching).

After class, we met up with John Cayley and others, had some dinner and moved on the the Firehouse 13 to finish setting up. From what Justin told me, this was pretty much the most ‘multimedia’ of these events so far. The space itself was great – wonderfully restored (no fireman’s pole, however – which Cris tells me was removed due to fire hazard issues) and before long we’d created a sort of makeshift projection space which accommodated all three of us nicely and, incredibly, obstructed neither the bar nor the toilets.

Angela and Justin at setup

Angela and an exit

I was on first, which can be tricky in terms of getting the crowd on your side, but that wasn’t a problem given the present company, who were up for it. It seemed to go well. Or, I should say, the crowd at least seemed receptive (the farting and burping boy excepted. He was either voicing his displeasure with my reading or his body was voicing its displeasure at his greeding).

Sudden digreshun: I’m updating this section of my blog post from Philadelphia, where I’m waiting for my two-and-a-half-hour-late flight to Phoenix. On the enjoyment scale, and even by the already plunderous baseline of airports, this place is Sucky McSucklington. And I have to spend at least 2 hours here before the gate opens. At least there’s an “Irish” pub.

Next up was Angela, whose 5 videos fell into 2 distinct styles, the first 3 using a documentary-style presentation (I think these were all from the Chernobyl Generation vignettes). However, these transcended straightforward documentary, inflecting the ‘narrative approach implicit in this genre by subtle use of chopped, filtered and re-tempoed visuals, and fragmented audio reminiscent of something Gregory Whitehead might do. The final 2 films were more abstract. Both of these – My Head is a Basket of Apples, and, in particular for me, Communal, were simply beautiful pieces of work especially enjoyable on such a large projection with audio filling the room.

Cris Cheek’s work was pretty predictable in the sense that it was awesome. He showed several pieces of work, including a wonderful video of some of his collaborative work with Sianed Jones. For anyone who has heard Songs from Navigation, it will come as little surprise that both fit together vocally very well in this video. But there’s more to collaboration than this, and the video confirms, as does Songs from Navigation as a whole, the true collaborative compatibility of the pair. Sometimes it’s words. Sometimes sentences. Then it’s fragments and then it truly is music. Personally I thought that seeing the two face to face in a kind of brutalised Smith & Jones feature added an interesting dimension, mesmerised as I was by the mouth movements of the pair, and the facial expressions and movements in general.

Cris performed some textual palimpsests from paper and projection:

performing the surface of the work, which also illuminated the hand-held material he read. It was great to hear, and visually striking. Along with “Dear Bob Cobbing,” a realtime projection of Cris writing and performing improvise, err, writing. On paper!
Great fun.

My thanks to:

John Cayley for organising my brief detour to Brown and giving me a wonderful opportunity to take part in the class and local scene.

Justin Katko for having me on the Firhouse bill, for putting me up, for putting up with me, for scouting out a place to drink a beer at 12:30am in pouring snow, for introducing me to a rather handsome young ladycat who lives with him, for lending me a brightly coloured towel, various books, and for watching me sleep.

Aya Karpinska and students, for listening, probing, producing.

Cris Cheek for picking up on my throwaway comments on Amy Winehouse and not letting me get away with them, and for generally being very nice

Angela Veomett for the gig share and interesting vids

All those people I met whose names I can’t remember, I’m sorry.

John Cayley, imposition

John Cayley, to whom I attribute a great deal of inspiration with regard to digital poetics, features in the Anthology in the first section of PART 2. imposition was performed at an Openned night which I regrettably had to miss. This is a shame, as it’s a piece of work which I find conceptually very interesting, and was keen to see how the concept was realised in a live setting. The Anthology coverage forms a link to the main Openned site (in the real internets) which opens up a Quicktime panorama of the Foundry setting, with the audio of the performance over the top. The inclusion of the panorama certainly is not an arbitrary aesthetic decision; part of the brief for the audience was to arrive with any laptops handy, and with the software installed and ready to go. The result is that the audience form much of the performance – an achievement strikingly visual as around 1/3 of the audience sit with their laptops all working in tandem.

The notes on imposition state that the project is “the networked performance of an evolving collaborative work engaged with ambient, time-based poetics and harmonically organized, language-driven sound.”¹ As loaded as this statement may seem, it makes more sense given its origins in overboard (footnoted in imposition’s notes), a ‘textual painting’ in which, as far as I can tell, noise and a stable text interact, one emerging through the other.

Such a setup seems relevant for the performative setting of imposition, since it foregrounds a reciprocal creative process between human beings and their language, all in terms of a wider reflexive participation with the media of flesh and machine. Random generation within algorithmic constraints produce textual variations, and it would appear that the same algorithmic system has been remapped onto the compositional strategies of Giles Perring.

I hope I can participate in one of these performances soon.

Fiona Templeton, imagining being at the republican convention

Before picking up Mum in Airdrie (available here) I was really only familiar with Templeton’s work YOU–The City. Like Mum, this excerpt utilises mainly extremely short lines of text which, as I noted in Robert Hampson’s work, seem to blur the starting and finishing points of phrases. This is helped by the occasional neologism (or perhaps partial erasure), as in the following:

bang

off the realm of
eager range
sun pists down
hold you on hold
like fire spreading

a scale of dampnation
and this is where I really
oozes itself
disturb
lack of
kid knownly²

This extract scans fairly easily but turns away from comfotable closure at every turn. “pist” here could be a partially erased “piste” turned into a verb. It also phonetically demands a reading as “kissed” as in sun kissed (or even Sunkist) or (the way I like to read it) “pissed” turned into a kind of past-participle present hybrid verb. I like this reading better, as it complements the neologism “dampnation” later in the extract, a word which seems to imply wet damnation as well as simply an adjective and noun fused. “kid knownly” might go unnoticed as “knowingly” at first glance, only to refuse that reading alone. Interestingly for me, the persistent grammatical disagreements produce a plateau through which such tensions come through with exciting energy. Such has been the joy of reading Templeton’s page-based work for me.

This post has taken longer than I’d expected! I’ll carry on in my next Anthology roundup with Steve Willey’s excerpts from his extended project (to be presented as part of his MA disertation) writing through Walter Benjamin. His relationship with this project, I assume, will eventually drive him mad.

As an aside, it would be interesting if anyone has anything to add / disagree regarding my comments on these works so far. No pressure, but feel free.

1. Cayley, notes on imposition, http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/impose/impnotes.html. Accessed 5th August 2007. See also the PDF download of the same notes. [↩]
2. Anthology p. 52 [↩]