C.T. Funkhouser - Böcker

For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today's most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre's prehistoric period. Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication. In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.

As poets continue to use digital media technology, functionalities of computing extend aesthetic possibilities in documents focusing attention on crafting verbal content. Utility of these machines and tools enables multiple types of compounded articulation (combinations of verbal, visual, animated, and interactive elements). Building larger public awareness of the mechanics of digital poetry, New Directions in Digital Poetry aspires to influence the formation of writing with media in literary society of the future, specifically as a record of a particular technological era. Emerging from these studies is that digital poetry as a WWW-based, networked form happens 'in stages', 'on stages'. Few works require singular responses from viewers — both composition of works and viewing them are processes involving multiple steps and visual scenarios. For anyone interested in the interplay of poetry and technology, this book provides an informed look at digital poetry in its contemporary state. In the process of performing "close readings," Funkhouser makes suggestions and provides methods for viewing works, for audiences perhaps unfamiliar with mechanical and semiotic conventions being used.