RE: [-empyre-] on electronic poetry

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> >Interesting,  about  ambiguity in the choice of topic
> >title. It was deliberate.  Literature is always
> >already misleading about something.  Could a poet
> >'fake' a hypertext?
>
> Isn't this the most interesting aspect of the discussion of 'digital art'?
>
> ...the essential underlying play between the technology itself, the
> use of it and the [seemingly unrelated] outcome...

'outcome'?

> and I guess also
> the marketing 'presence'... [by that I mean how academics, curators
> and journalists like to try interpret it for us]

'marketing'?

there's 'marketing' pr and then there's insightful criticism. the two should be distinguished,
though they are sometimes present in the same piece of writing. and criticism plays an important
role in the art beyond 'marketing', wouldn't you say? walt whitman said something like 'great
poetry demands a great audience'. part of what he meant is that it cannot exist without a great
audience, they arise together, the poet and the audience for which there is something important
at stake in the poetry and the state of the language.

> I was thinking about how anyone would|could define and recognise a
> 'fake' hypertext and how the creative|interpretive|cognitive
> processes work in ourselves to lead us through these experiences.

'fake' in what sense?

> It also 'speaks' to the point melinda and others made earlier about
> not relating personally to a specific technology or communicative
> form and how to define 'immersion'.
>
> I have a wide range of friends and relatives... some with head
> injuries, some blind, some deaf... some very repressed and
> conservative and some just crazy... all with their own internal
> narratives and relations to technologies that are in the most part
> incomprehensible or at least mostly opaque to me.
> I am still pleasantly surprised at these unique ways of interpreting
> and relating to the world.
>
> Why do we even need a term like 'poet' and 'hypertext' ?

as opposed to what other (necessary) terms?

i have tried to drag poetry along with me for twenty-five years. sometimes you have to let go,
it's true, but it's all around.

the works themselves will probably not survive. mine or many others', particularly given that
they are exe's or read by other exe's. a lifetime of work can eventually boil down to changes in
how people think of a word like 'poetry' (and its relations to other words like 'art').

a friend of mine named Joseph Keppler did a magazine called Poets.Painters.Composers. The
magazine appeared in various media and usually involved collaboration between artists of
different types. I asked him 'why the periods in the title?' He said something like 'they
separate them and allow them synergy as distinct things'.

ja