.

Rita Raley’s giving this morning’s keynote at Digital Poetics and the Present, an ELMCIP seminar in Amsterdam, and in a larger discussion titled “Living Letterforms: The Ecological Turn in Contemporary Digital Poetics”, she’s offering a reading of David Jhave Johnston‘s Sooth, a cycle of six video poems, where the reader’s clicks draw out lines of poems superimposed on video that drifts around a natural scene. She argues that Sooth is emblematic of a recent shift in digital poetry towards a concern with ecology, where non-human actors are animate and lively. She describes this as a step away from the intense focus on the code, the technical and computational processes that dominated digital poetry at the start of the last decade.

The lyrical subject valorises his lover in each of these poems, and yet the pieces are grounded in the material world. The subject seeks a connection not only with his lover, but with the natural world. Jhave’s project, Rita Raley argues is to create digital poems that respond as though they are animate, alive. This isn’t about artificial intelligence. It’s not simply about emulating life but about prompting (in us, the readers) an embodied recognition of life.

We’ve added all the papers from the seminar to its entry in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base of Electronic Literature, and will be adding references and documentation after the seminar (slides and hopefully video).

1 Comment

  1. Bradford G. Saron

    a turn from computational to ecological digital poetry | jill/txt – http://t.co/cc40u2fw Very neat post about the evolution of poetry

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. ā€œImagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]