New Media Poetics Meet New LEA Interface Design

Great news digital poetry sports fans. LEA (Leonardo Electronic Almanac) has a new online look, complete with downloadable .pdf files, and the inaugural issue contained within the new interface is focused on "New Media Poetics and Poetry":

"In the new media environment, we deal with an expanded notion of "poem" as praxis of surface level and sub-textual computer code levels, and an expanded awareness of the digital poem as process. The reading and reception of this writing occurs in a networked context, in which the reader becomes an "ergodic" participant (to use Espen Aarseth's term) and helps shape the form of the new media poem," defines New Media Poetics and Poetry issue guest editor Tim Peterson.

Peterson has woven together a marvelous mix featuring Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg and Matthias Hillner. Don't forget to scurry over to the equally exciting gallery, exhibiting works by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska, Daniel Canazon Howe, mIEKAL aND, CamillE BacoS, Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. For the first time also, be mesmerized by Mathias Hillner and Augusto de Campos' Shockwave creations.

Do these essays and artworks foretell a growth spurt in electronic literature within the academy? Like experimental creative writing and alternative '70s-styled art before it, will e-lit find refuge in the hallowed halls of the leaking institutions?

It's already happened big time with diigital / new media art. Where are all of the fully supported, internationally visible electronic writing / new media studies programs?

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Metadata: poetry, creative writing, digital poetics, academia

I Am A Digital Image

Tonight, while working on my own High-Def film, I realized that Matthew Barney's new film, "Drawing Restraint #9" was playing in town. Would I leave my own film to go and see his?

No, I decided not to. (I'll wait for the DVD.)

But then, during an editing break, on my way to the kitchen, I saw an incredible virtual reality scene right out of my window and the nature photographer in me took over my fluid identity and, like a zombie, I grabbed my digital camera and went outside to capture the images right in front of the studio:




Images shot by
Mark Amerika Nature Photography Studio

But as I have said numerous times, I am not really a nature photographer. I would prefer to say that I am a digital image that processes other digital images and in processing them, become an embodied digital image that generates on the fly remixes of my pseudo-autobiographical Life Style Practice. Those images above? They are part of me, enacted via a body - brain - apparatus achievement, an interactive hallucination between the artist-medium and the natural surroundings.

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Metadata: nature, art, photography, philosophy

New Media, Modern Twist

According to the New York Times:

The Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday that it had created a new curatorial department to focus exclusively on the growing number of contemporary artworks that use sound and moving images in gallery installations. The media department, once part of the department of film and media, will deal with works that use a wide range of modern technology, from video and digital imagery to Internet-based art and sound-only pieces, said Klaus Biesenbach, who was named chief curator of the new department. Mr. Biesenbach, who has been a MoMA curator since 2004 and the chief curator of P.S. 1, the museum’s Queens affiliate, since 2002, said that works relying on media techniques and ideas of conveying motion and time had become much more prominent over the last two decades at international art fairs and exhibitions. “And it’s even more visible now,” he said. “I think artistic practice is evolving, and so museums are evolving as well.” The creation of the new department brings the number of curatorial departments at the museum to seven. The other six are architecture and design, drawings, film, painting and sculpture, photography, and prints and illustrated books.

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Metadata: net art, MOMA, collecting

Steve Katz Writes

Somewhere in the middle of launching Mark Amerika Nature Photography studio, teaching, blogging, editing my HD film, and planning my temporary release from custody (from the academic institution I am presently entwined with), I saw one of my favorite fiction writers, the affable and outrageous Steve Katz, give a reading here in Boulder. The septuagenarian Katz, who I took great honor in publishing on Alt-X many years ago (when html and literary content were still King), shared his new "memoir-ies" as he called them. He said he liked the short, episodic, non-clinging aspect to them (those are my words in his mouth). They could be shuffled up and placed in a folder for readers to read at will. I agreed, and suggested that he take up blogging. I hope he does!

From his bio:

Steve Katz was born in May of 1935, and that's all there is to it. That was in the Bronx, and he couldn't help it. Then some kid with a stiletto stabbed his basketball and that was CREAMY & DELICIOUS (eat my words in other words), published in 1970 by Random House, that started the avant-snack movement in the pre-postmodern revolution.

[...]

Today Steve Katz has given up writing to volunteer for a program that puts him in feathers, transforms him from a human being (of which there is an enormous glut), into a california condor (of which there be a pitiful few). So if you feel the shadow pass over your body as you stroll in Santa Monica or Borrego Springs, and happen to look up to find its silent source, it could be steve katz that poopoo in your eye.

Some vintage Katz books, especially Stolen Stories, along with work by Ron Sukenick, Mark Leyner, Euridice, Russell Banks, and Samuel Delany can be bought at my prose publisher FC2's website.

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Metadata: Steve Katz, writing, FC2, Alt-X