[Nettime-bold] reading cyber

But he was explaining what he "saw", but not what was felt whilst experiencing it. 'Immediately, I don't know what it said. The impression I'm left with is ~soley~ visual/kinetic. (The typography may have been multicolored, too.)' Maybe he was concentrating on the purely textual elements or signs of meaning, to use a term introduced by Kristeva, the phenotext, the text you can see on paper as object, rather than the genotext, the words and all else that layers into it to create the poetic experience ie just looking at the words in a cyberpoem without reading the visual and aural semiotic elements that make up the whole experience. Jeffrey identified 'that people have said on WebArtery that they read "differently" on-line than off . . . but I begin to wonder if one ~can~ read on-line, "read," at least, in that perhaps more contemplative, intake mode of reading "poetry" and "literature" informs.' Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon recently published a paper showing differences in the way read text and heard text are processed by the brain. Areas of the brain that process information immediately were activated when words were heard. When text was read from a page the areas of the brain that store information for later processing were stimulated. Two seemingly different ways of processing. In experiencing cyberpoetry(insert/net.art/new.art/web.art) where it is experienced visually and aurally simultaneously, The experience must be different to sitting alone with a book of poems, the act is more performative, more participatory, appealing to a range of stimuli(signs) and code systems(ways of interpreting signs). So perhaps you can't "read" poetry (and I assume this means deep read poetry, analyse, interpret, re-read, re-interpret) the way you read printed poetry, but perhaps it is designed for those of us who like a "hit" out of poetry, and perhaps we scan more cyberpoetry to find "hits" and then we move on. Before the printing press, to be "well-read" meant a person could read the bible, almost to the point of reciting it. At the beginning of last century to be "well-read" was to know a few texts really well. To own books you had to be rich, to be well read meant you knew a handful of books, a canon of books really well, and books were available in libraries for most who couldn't afford them. The paperback changed again the meaning of "well read", which changed to mean you were up-to-date with the current releases in your genre of interest and it would be impossible to have read all the poetry published. I propose that to be "well-read" in this cyberage is to surf extensively, find poetic "hits", not necessarily remember the content that gave you the "hit", but remembering the pathway to finding it again if you ever need to re-visit. Motion is an important new device available to poets on the web, but it seems people distrust all this movement in cyberpoetry. As Jeffrey Jullich posted, "Put somebody in a large parking lot, wherever, and let them sit or walk around and look at all the cars there, and they could probably tell you something abt. what they saw: fenders, chrome, a fox tail hanging from a radio antenna, . . . But >put the same person the same amount of time at the curb of a highway and have the same number of cars race and drive past,--- and I don't think we have the same retention, definitely not the same perception, where there's motion."

A nice analogy but put the same person in the seat of a car that is rushing past and they will see the world, perhaps the details of the vehicle they are travelling in become less important to the breadth of experiences they are being exposed to in the car. There is the perception that wherever visual is combined with verbal, the visual tends to gain the upper hand. But who said that reading printed poetry is not a visual experience? The first thing you see is a visual arrangement of words on a page, a pattern, a sign which lets you read it as a poem, before you start reading and interpreting. Instead of making a contest of visual and aural it can be seen alternatively as "the visual and the aural combining to give a richer experience. Language in the new medium is not at a disadvantage, it has always been a code for communication of the experience of the senses and remains so in cyberspace. For the writer, if a piece comes into their imagination which requires movement or interactivity they will use software to express it, if a poem comes into their imagination that can be actualised with pencil and paper, then let it be. Trying to fit what was constructed for one medium into a form suitable to another medium is not what creating in cyberspace is all about. Although i have found several of my previous text printed poems have benefited from the new ways of accessing a poem afforded by the web and computer technology. Critics point out that cyberpoetry and much net.art gets like a X-Mas tree. This is true, and cliches stick out, like sore thumbs, in any medium. There's a ~heaping~ of novelty upon novelty it would seem, but let us remember the first commercial use of motion pictures was an arcade viewer people paid 10 cents to see a man sneezing. We are at the edge of a very large ocean and only dipping our toes into the shallows. Sure some is i(eye)-candy. and sure there's a lot of "let's try this cos we can", but that is how we learn, by experimentation. Web artists are not saying this is what it should be, and you should do it the same. It could be a matter of personal choice also, this is not the way you like to access your words. Not everyone is the same. I can't stand reading fiction novels, too much detail, too much control of the environment of characters, of plot.

And I would add; sound poetry; modernist and post modernist printed poetry; performance poetry; slam poetry; videopoetry, etc. In fact we have seen in most major avant garde movements a challenge to the way we read text as poetry, as language, we are just experiencing another challenge. I am proposing that parataxis is a major device in poetry, that the way in which parataxis has been used at various periods of literary history has changed from parataxis of stanza (in traditional rhyming. rhythmic poetry), to parataxis of lines (eg walt whitman). to parataxis of subject/context, foreground/background in surrealism,to parataxis between lines of a poem as in modernist non-rhyming poetry (lines broken to give alternate readings), to parataxis of differing 'emotional' units of text in projective verse and beat poetry, to parataxis of statements within the same line (l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry), to parataxis of words and syllables in 3d spaces with cyberpoetry/kinetic text. I see the movements in poetry as a challenge to the syntax of prose, these changes happen in avant garde poetries first and then get incorporated into the mainstream poetry and the novelists even appropriate the techniques into prose. When the 'innovations' introduced by the avant gardes become the norm, there is a challenge and movement in a new direction as the new device or style gets practiced.

The interpreted self-constructed mental image derived from a textual code is still a very powerful tool. The Harry Potter example we have around us at the moment is pretty good testimony to that. Single mum working away at her kitchen table with pen and paper imagines and produces the text for the multi media phenomenon we are experiencing now. 'Can animated text convey non-trivial meaning more economically than is possible with static text?" -- Why would we wish to create an a. is better than b. comparison. Wouldn't it be better to look at both animated text and static text as separate modes offering unique opportunities? It seems to me that one thing that has hurt the electronic lit community horribly has been its claims to be *better* than static, linear text. It is other than static text -- OTHER being the operative word for me.' Jennifer Ley

Certainly I see three distinct poetry industries, print published, which is diminishing in audience, spoken word performance, which still has healthy audiences, and cyber-poetry, which is experiencing asymptotic growth. what concerns me is that as those who have worked in the area of print-published text (static text) begin to familiarize themselves with the discourses of cyber-literature and begin participating in lists like this, and setting up their refereed online journals, that they don't bring with them the prejudices that exist within the print published industry. That they don't expect cybert-texts to behave like printed texts. that they don't make cyber-poetry other to print-based poetry. We have to compare and we have to say that print-based poetry is better at some things, and spoken word poetry is better at some things and cyber-poetry is better at some things. Why not accept them all as being valuable as poetry.

>"The Construction of Experience : >Interface as Content " by David Rokeby > >"It seems that we stop seeing, hearing, smelling as soon as we have >positively identified something. At that point, we may as well >replace the word for the object. Since identification usually >happens quickly, we spent most of our time not really sensing our >environment, living in a world of pre-digested and abstracted >memories. > This explains our attraction to optical illusions and >mind-altering experiences (chemically-induced or not). Those moments >of confusion, where identification and resolution arenít immediate, >give us a flash of the raw experience of being. These moments of >confusion are also the fulcra of paradigm shifts. Itís only when our >conventional way of dealing with things breaks down that we can >adopt another model, another way of imagining and experiencing a >scenario." > >http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/articles.html