[-empyre-] e-poetry of the future

[Alan Sondheim]

> I'm interested in where artists and theorists think E-Poetry will
> move/transform in the next five years.
>
> What kinds of technology seem promising?
> Mobile devices?  GPS?  Paper thin screens?
>
> Will poetry journals start seeing digital poetry as a staple
> of their herd?
>
> cheers, Jason
>

Surely whatever comes along (thinking of a span greater than give years, 
which seems oddly limiting) will, like capital and sex, sex-capital, seep 
through available technologies - just as sex and literary cultures 
colonized / were colonized by newsgroups, mobile device already carry 
seductions and experimental texts. Why not wire a smart home to reflect a 
coded sonnet?

Practically, I find it odd how quickly hypertext disappeared as a reifica- 
tion; the well is deeper now.

And will surely extend past planar surfaces to 3-dimensional flows - vrml 
was an early attempt at this.

YouTube and Twitter expand everything and everyone - video, interactive or 
not, embodies a plurality of digital poetics within a somewhat exponent- 
ially expanding field. Think of YouTube as hypertext - following links 
from clip to clip, description to description. There seem to be no limits 
to these directions.

Other technologies - inertial motion capture equipment, hacked kindles, 
embedded linux devices, Wii and all that implies, hacked guitar heroes. 
Oddly, little seems to have been done with voice-over, at least in my 
limited experience - Second Life for example has remarkably clear voice 
settings. Think of digital work which is only audio, which interacts with 
the listener's voice - and you have something close to the new ipod 
shuffle...

Finally, I've seen no reason why modeling programs - which are excellent 
for texts (see of course Cayley's use of the cave at Brown) need succumb 
to 3-space; I would love to see someone rewrite Blender, for example, to 
reflect a projection of 4-space into 3- which then is mapped by relatively 
simple project onto the screen.

- Alan (promise not to continue)