21.2 Poetics- Part Two

Rampike Vol. 21 / No. 2 (Poetics – Part Two): Michael Winkler, Leonard Cohen & Judith Fitzgerald, Charles Bernstein, Susan Gold & Mike Dyer, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Katie Solbeck, Terry Trowbridge & Alexander Brown, Richard Kostelanetz, Peter Jaeger, Jesse Ferguson, Cathy Wagner, Tim Atkins, Amy De’Ath, Brenda Francis Pelkey, Richard Parker, Marcus Slease, Edward Nixon, Christian Burgaud, Susan Holbrook, Louis Cabri, Brian Ang, Harvey L. Hix, Kevin McPherson Eckoff, Stephen Remus, Eric Schmaltz, Travis Kirton, Kelly Mark, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Gregory Betts, Hallie Siegel, Matt Donovan, a.rawlings, derek beaulieu, Steve McCaffery, bill bissett, Cyril Dabydeen, Babar Khan, Norman Lock, George Elliott Clarke, tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE, Denise Desautels & Norman Cornett, Amanda Earl, Nick Power, Lindsey Bannister, Paul Lisson, Raquel Torres, Camille Martin, Stephanie McKenzie, Justin Langlois, Robert Anderson, Andre Narbonne, Tray Drumhann, Eric Zboya, Mat Laporte, Nico Vassilakis, Robert Dassanowsky, rob mclennan & Sachiko Murakami, derek beaulieu, & Ottarormstad, Britt-Marie Lindgren, Michael Basinski. Front Cover Art: Reed Altemus. Back Cover Art: Andrew Topel

Can photography describe its own event? : the dissolving of the classical perspective in the concept of photography

The thesis title "Can photography describe its own event?" is purposefully designed to ask very complex questions of the medium of photography in it's present moment. It is a question, which employed under differing conditions of thought throughout the thesis tests photography against the fields of difference and creativity. Gilles Deleuze threw down a challenge to the medium by neglecting to include consideration of the photographic in his process led philosophy of difference, He purposefully ignores photography and seemingly locates it firmly within a system of representation and identity that his work was designed to systematically dismantle. Whilst presenting photography as a form of spatialised stasis, often consisting of pictorial clichés reproducing fixed bytes of information, his vitalist thought alternately seeks to interpret temporal continuity and constant variation in service of the power of creativity. The thesis asks, how can a concept invented in the service of facts and positivism contribute to a new world of speculative uncertainty. To describe its own event, photography must partake of difference and temporal paradigms such as a performative process-seriality. It must perceive itself as being an immanent practice consisting of all uncertainties and intensities of variation of any other event in the world. A temporal cryptography. The denouement of the thesis seeks to tentatively locate photography as working in an emergent fashion in the service of process-reality rather than representational model and copy. This new zerography strips away the well-worn conventions of photographic syntax and imagines resetting itself to zero. Moving past the informational and the symbolic and beyond the binary subject / object position it emerges into a world of quantum indeterminacy where it is no longer interested in defining other events but of contributing to a new speculative creativity and invention. The world as if rather than as is

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Feminist Improvising Group, and contemporary Malian music, as well as the virtual sociality of interactive computer music, the significance of "uncreative" improvisation, responses to French New Wave cinema, and the work of figures ranging from bell hooks and Billy Strayhorn to Kenneth Goldsmith

Turing-Completeness as Medium: Art, Computers and Intentionality

This PhD is a practice-based study of how the computer functions in art practice, which takes on the notion of a fine art computing “medium”. Current research, while sometimes referencing the computer as a potential art medium, mostly defines it non-explicitly as a type of “hybrid” media device or some sort of “multimedia” machine. These terms leave the existence of a specific computing medium in art practice undefined and have historically led the analysis of artworks that employ computers to rely on critical frameworks that were either developed for earlier physical media, or have no structural similarities to computers. Such approaches can fail to examine unique ontological issues that arise - especially at a structural level - when using a computer to produce art. To achieve a formal description of a hitherto loosely defined (or non-defined) art medium, the research employs a range of critical and theoretical material from fields outside art practice, chiefly among them Alan Turing’s definition of a "a(utomatic)-machine", (nowadays called a “Turing machine”) from his 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Turing described a machine which can “simulate” any other computing machine including all modern computers. His machine is here used to propose a ‘Turing-complete medium’ of art, of which every computer is a computationally equivalent member. Using this perspective/definition, the research undertook an investigation of a ‘Turing-complete medium’ by developing creative practice in the form of individual works that explored specific aspects of computing systems. The research then engaged in a written analysis of the practice, again employing the concept of a ‘Turing-complete medium’, working towards the development of medium-specific critique of any art made with any computer. In foregrounding the nature and functions of computing machines, the research explores how these elements can be made intrinsic to our interpretations of computer-based art while also being aware of the limitations of medium-specific critique as exposed within the modernist tradition

To have done with theory? Baudrillard, or the literal confrontation with reality

Baudrillard, Eluding the temptation to reinterpret Jean Baudrillard once more, this work started from the ambition to consider his thought in its irreducibility, that is, in a radically literal way. Literalness is a recurring though overlooked term in Baudrillard’s oeuvre, and it is drawn from the direct concatenation of words in poetry or puns and other language games. It does not indicate a realist positivism but a principle that considers the metamorphoses and mutual alteration of things in their singularity without reducing them to a general equivalent (i.e. the meaning of words in a poem, which destroys its appearances). Reapplying the idea to Baudrillard and finding other singular routes through his “passwords” is a way to short-circuit its reductio ad realitatem and reaffirm its challenge to the hegemony of global integration. Even in the literature dedicated to it, this exercise has been rarer than the ‘hermeneutical’ one, where Baudrillard’s oeuvre was taken as a discourse to be interpreted and explained (finding an equivalent for its singularity). In plain polemic with any ideal of conformity between theory and reality (from which our present conformisms arguably derive, too), Baudrillard conceived thought not as something to be verified but as a series of hypotheses to be repeatedly radicalised – he often described it as a “spiral”, a form which challenges the codification of things, including its own. Coherent with this, the thesis does not consider Baudrillard’s work either a reflection or a prediction of reality but, instead, an out-and-out act, a precious singular object which, interrogated, ‘thinks’ us and our current events ‘back’. In the second part, Baudrillard’s hypotheses are taken further and measured in their capacity to challenge the reality of current events and phenomena. The thesis confronts the ‘hypocritical’ position of critical thinking, which accepts the present principle of reality. It questions the interminability of our condition, where death seems thinkable only as a senseless interruption of the apparatus. It also confronts the solidarity between orthodox and alternative realities of the COVID pandemic and the Ukrainian invasion, searching for what is irreducible to the perfect osmosis of “virtual and factual”. Drawing equally from the convulsions of globalisation and the psychopathologies of academics, from DeLillo’s fiction and Baudrillard’s lesser-studied influences, this study evaluates the irreversibility of our system against the increasingly silent challenges of radical thought. It looks for what an increasingly pessimistic late Baudrillard called ‘rogue singularities’: forms which, often outside the conventional realms one would expect to find them, constitute potential sources of the fragility of global power. ‘To have done with theory’ does not mean abandoning radical thought and, together with it, the singularity of humanity. It means, as the thesis concludes, the courage to leave conventional ideas of theory and listen to less audible voices which, at the heart of this “enormous conspiracy”, whisper — as a mysterious lady in Mariupol did to Putin — “It’s all not true! It’s all for show!”

Wired for sound : on the digitalisation of music and music culture

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

A creative computing approach to poetry as data

With the rapid advent of emerging new services such as cloud computing, mobile technology, and social media, more and more people prefer posting their literary creations such as poems, on the Internet instead of in traditional papers. The era of Digital Humanities has truly arrived. With ever-growing concerns regarding literary data, ways to utilise and manage them has become a major concern. Many researchers have worked on that and proposed different solutions. However, owing to new challenges and creative requirements, traditional methods need adjustments. For example, most poetry data collection methods, such as surveys, are based on single target searching; that is, only relying upon keywords and themes. Thus, the result can be monotonous. Moreover, the accuracy of algorithms for poetry data analysis is no longer the only benchmark. The underlying meaning of poetry data has drawn people’s attention. Meanwhile, traditional poetry data presentation methods need to be enhanced to reflect diversity and media richness. The aim of this research is to present a Creative Computing approach to poetry data collection, analysis and presentation. The thesis demonstrates the feasibility and details the proposed methods in the following phases. Firstly, poetry data is being creatively regarded as an object with mass, volume and resistance, from an interdisciplinary perspective. A novel data relevancy rule is proposed to retrieve the closely-related data of an input, which is adapted from the Newton’s law of universal gravitation in physics. In this way, a broadened variety of data is being searched using web crawler based on multi-purpose rules. Then, the search results are filtered on the basis of buoyancy phenomenon and Ohm’s law. Secondly, with reference to chemical principles this research carries out innovative poetry data analysis based on the notion that chemical reactions always bring in brand new outcomes, despite having exactly the same elements. The mood, theme and personal reflection, after going through a piece of literature, presented difficulties for traditional data analysis. In this work, they have been investigated relying on acidity estimation, organic abstraction and oxidation-reduction reactions. Lastly, presenting the poetry analysis results through creative visualisation has been studied thanks to the elegant mathematics expressions of curves and shapes which are believed to effectively convey underlying emotions of poetry data. To illustrate this idea, a rainbow of variable spectrum and diverse types of trajectories are proposed as background and rolling titles, respectively. In summary, the proposed approach carries out manipulations on traditional poetry data processing based on models and algorithms of Creative Computing. The proposed approach was evaluated by a selected case study, where a prototype system was built for poetry analysis. Conclusions are drawn and future research is also discussed. Initial experiment results show this work contributes to an effective and Creative Computing approach to poetry data manipulation. This research has potential applications to academic research of texts, to making word recommendations for users to better comprehend literature such as poetry, a novel or drama. Furthermore, it sees the possibility of inspiring creative thinking for human art creation