Encapsulating E-Poetry 2009: Some views on contemporary digital poetry

This was the first time I’d attended this biennial festival where I presented a selection of remixes from R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX. Here’s what Funkhouser had to say about it in the section on the May 26 Panel of works:

Wilks (whose comments on the presentation—as well as links to several works she showed—are posted at http://crissxross.net/wilx/2009/06/07/remixing-at-epoetry-barcelona-2009/) showed a series of works that have been presented on a collaborative blog titled remixworx. Members of the group have done roughly 500 multimedia remixes since 2006 (Wilks usually uses Flash). She presented “trails” of posts to the site—which is set up as a blog and artistic responses are posted in comment fields—that reflected how the works evolved, and also read a couple of text pieces from the site. Beyond the high quality of the works presented, the collaborative axis of remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing on the site is marvelous.

Above are thumbnails of the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX set I presented at ePoetry 2009 in Barcelona. A combination of still images and animations accompanied by a playlist (see below) of music, ambient sound and spoken word pieces from the remix, plus a live reading of two poems from reVamp to end reUser.

I was on a great panel with Brian Kim Stefans, Serge Bouchardon and Jody Zellen, who all gave impressive presentations – very enjoyable too! Chris Funkhouser chaired the session, which was particularly fitting as far as I was concerned because later he presented a stimulating paper about ‘Creative Cannibalism’ – the way many electronic poems, remixes and mash-ups eat other texts and/or digital data. This kind of cultural anthropophagy (cannibalism) was first practiced by Brazilian artists nearly a century ago and for 50 years has been a feature of much computer-generated poetry. Funkhouser maintains that:

in recent years the potential content and media of such cannibalistic approaches to creativity has expanded wildly with the growth and capabilities of the Web.

Since R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a particularly cannibalistic beast, I hunted down his paper from the previous ePoetry 2007 symposium, where he first put forward these ideas, Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry (download). Here’s a brief section from it:

Transformative expression appropriates given data then warps or reconfigures it to new ends. Such a method certainly corresponds, or perhaps responds, to Dadaist techniques of appropriation, and also corresponds to the type of cannibalism seen in examples of digital poetry. An anthropophagic text, in which the author or authors engage with multiple languages or idioms, devours other texts, icons, and is free to remix discrepant methods and philosophical approaches. Discovery and re-discovery of meaning is reached through the cannibalization of texts, which may then establish alternative perspectives on cultural or personal subjects taken up by authors in textual composition, re-composition, and composting. Through anthropophagy, artists are free to reshape external influences. This open acknowledgment of plurality is what makes the concept still relevant today, as an active principle for the creation of “difference.”

That certainly gives me a lot of food for remixing thought! As I said a year ago in my article about the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX experience:

the remix machine, of which we are all part, devours whatever is given and regurgitates it in wonderfully unexpected ways.

ePoetry remix audio playlist:
verb
codecs mash
screw
GlassOnBotReverb
Falling
Look Inside
outpost msg
binnorie_babel_beetle
IntraMusicPulse
ambientDigestion
dragonbath2
SwirlBotXXclips
dragobaC-1