Digital Poetry and Digital Industries: A Fatal Attraction?

[Paper] Enrolled in the avant-garde of the 1950’s, digital poetry first asserted itself in opposition to print literature. It questioned the status of the creator by delegating poetic generation to the machine. The animation of letters and touchable words offered text a new iconicity. Artistic works assumed their ephemerality by connecting through hyperlinks to the flows of the World Wide Web or by propelling code on the front-scene. Yet nowadays, some of these approaches seem exhausted, running wild in the cyberspace without any audience. While fighting lyricism, immersion, readability, they reached their goal: causing discomfort to the reader and stultifying him. In addition, some of these approaches still refuse to reckon with the industrial nature of tools and devices in the creation and dissemination process whereby digital works are characterized by a fundamental instability that becomes highly problematic when it is partly “programmed” by a handful of manufacturers of operating systems and software. Yet, in regards to the close relationship between a work and its material device, digital technologies can no longer be thought of as “neutral” but should be viewed through the prism of domination relationships. This presentation would like to question and outline the consequences of the “fatal relation” in which digital poetry seem to be engaged with the software industries and devices manufacturers. Should we consider digital poetry as definitively “sold”to digital industries? First, we will propose a critical point of view on experimental approaches, which, unintentionally, through lack of awareness, recklessness or pessimism, have ironically entered into a fatal relationship with digital industries. Secondly, we will propose to put the emphasis on experimental works that, despite the overall administrated digital system, still rely on a strong aesthetic involvement and bring to light a “value of truth.” They propose uncertainty spaces, salutary shifts and, in a segregated world, open up “micro political” terrains.

Alexandra Saemmer, Nolwenn Tréhondart. Digital Poetry and Digital Industries: A Fatal Attraction?. Conference and Festival ELO 17: Electronic Literature: Affiliations, Communities, Translations, Electronic Literature Organization, Jul 2017, Porto, Portugal. ⟨hal-01718058⟩ - lien externe