Monday, December 04, 2006
Between the poet and the machine lies the shadow
Resistance to machine poetry takes two forms. The first is simply to ignore it. new media poetics, a collection of essays by seventeen experts in the field, makes not a single reference to generated work--digital poetics is the province of the human artist. As Marjorie Perloff declares in her essay, "Screening the Page/Paging the Screen," "No medium of technique or production can it itself give the poet (or any other kind of artist) the inspiration or imagination to produce works of art."
What every single one of these writers believes is that the new media made possible through computational technology are all expressive media--raw material the artist molds into art. And it is certainly that. The computer makes available to the artist a plasticity of material never before possible--the opportunity for, not hundreds, but thousands of visions and revisions. But the computer is so much more--it affords the possibility of invented intelligence, not just invented visions--the computer as expressing medium.
The scariest thing of all: The existence of artificial intelligence implies the possibility of an artificial poet. The real threat is annihilation--if the critic is the poet's shadow, then when the poet disappears, so does he.
Part II tomorrow.
# posted by Jim @ 4:13 PM 
