"[It should be noted that
because of their archived and heavily intra- and interlinked sites, the blogs of
the virtual poets have an unnaturally high keyword density and interconnectivity
built into their design; Google favors their daily compounding of intralinks and
keywords without compensatory handicapping.][41]"
i (Thanks for the link, John) kinda
welcome the article because it points out some
things about Google that are obvious to me but unknown to many, especially to
those who are engaged in trying to put the pathetic monster to artistic use, a
practice that mostly resembles what my youngest son used to do with big scissors
until he stopped attempting to cut his own flesh and actually succeeded in
cutting out a squarish circle from the paper. Getting your fingers in the
holes does the trick, somehow.
Likewise, other artists may get interested in the
techniques that drives this google power quest and try to stick some real poetic
wood in its wheels. Until then the critiscism in the article, i think, should be
broadened to where it really matters. When Alan invited me on this list (
thanks Alan, happy birthday!) i was at first seriously troubled by the fact that
i could not offer the reader any of the high quality writing it carries and
any communication to it would be hindered by my lack of ability to write
anything decent in English, so i just flarfed my Dutch poem of the day there,
hoping the irony wouldn't be lost completely. It doesn't
matter.
The quote above
is probably the most important thing in the article. It's a pity it only hints
at it with a bracketed note somewhere in the middle. Inasmuch as the 'montage'
acquired by a simplistic using of search results is predetermined by the
process, and hence utterly devoid of any Cageish quality (so it's as good a
'liberating' montage as a papercut version made by using only images cut from,
say, issues of 1989's Playboy Magazine), the whole of online writing,
including the academical, the outright scientific, the artistic and the
individuated (ahum) blog (ahum) revolution, carries a lot of
uncritically-taken-for-granted, unperceived meaning derived from the process of
'publication' itself. The economical recoding of any writing, the encapsulating
processes at work here should ofcourse be approached critically, making us aware
of the privacy issues ( the pathetic google juvenile trying to hang on to its
public image, amazon's equally pathetic in trying to be bluntly commercial,
aiming its tentacles probingly to regions just beyond the strictly legal, - i'ts
quite inevitable they'll meet any day now somewhere halfwhere there, no need to
cover the planet twice), but that's just symptomatic of the problems that arise
from our web 2.0 configuration and google or amazon or microwhathaveyou are just
the accidental names we are forced to use. ( butterflies, Alan, i think,
are meaningful because they refer to the graphs of hysterical topologies
in catastrophy theory, the use of the butterfly imagery 'had' to come out
because it was already there in the scientific describing process, some of
these graphs just happen to look like butterflies, the meaning got there by a
human invention of the invented just as the butterfly was invented into the
invention of psyche - needless to say their may not be a spiritual bone in
you, but the manifold sondheim spirits keep emanating from your work
nonetheless)
As much as the diving into sub-word experimentation,
the Kervinen and Magnhildøen searches in sub/supra/infra human-machine code
spittings we find here make for at least a meaningful and consequential artistic
approach to these matters, we should, i think, try to focus on the big
picture without resorting to inconsequential cries of apocaphilia or
escapist technotopian visions. Worried about your copyrights are you you poor
authors ? prrt prrt: copy where? i copy Alan who copied Jamais but who's the
nerd and who's the celebrated pionier? I find it rather a sick joke that the
inevitable commercial invasion of our libraries are only met with critiscism
inspired by outdated notions of economically valued authorship. If you want a
copyright flow to your attick, build yourself a danbrown or a silliman, the
source code is all over the place. Instead, as a serious author, you might want
to find out what the business is doing to your writing, how much blog is in the
writing of your blogpost and how it got there in the first place (what a very
bloggish way of putting it, i only point, i do not say anything on what i mean,
exactly). Or you just ignore it, because the writing matters
more.
So the Vekemans Family, represented here by it's most
infamous Kessel-loosian graft, thriving on the smog of its own confusion,
doesn't wish to quarrel with the Quarle of Quarles', it's all very yackety-yak
indeed, allthough we wish to point out that his eloquently expressed analogies
with bio_meme_ôOrhetorics are exquisitely naârty but rather obscuring because
they inadvertently cover an aesthetically pleasing but practically incorrect
prehension of machinic processes with further furry, ekphratic layers of
beautifully bleeding poetry. You're doomed, Lanny, mez will never marry
you.
dv
essay in jacket magazine, targets flarf and other "google-sculpting" poetry techniques. might be of interest to some here. i'm still mulling over some of the arguments & would be curious to hear what anyone on this list thinks about the piece.
Van: WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Namens John Lowther
Verzonden: vrijdag 3 februari 2006 4:06
Aan: [email protected]
Onderwerp: essay critical of google/poetry
http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html
