Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe

This thesis is about the poetic edge of language and technology. It inter-relates both computational creation and poetic reception by analysing typographic animation softwares and meditating (speculatively) on a future malleable language that possesses the quality of being (and is implicitly perceived as) alive. As such it is a composite document: a philosophical and practice-based exploration of how computers are transforming literature, an ontological meditation on life and language, and a contribution to software studies. Digital poetry introduces animation, dimensionality and metadata into literary discourse. This necessitates new terminology; an acronym for Textual Audio-Visual Interactivity is proposed: Tavit. Tavits (malleable digital text) are tactile and responsive in ways that emulate living entities. They can possess dimensionality, memory, flocking, kinematics, surface reflectivity, collision detection, and responsiveness to touch, etc…. Life-like tactile tavits involve information that is not only semantic or syntactic, but also audible, imagistic and interactive. Reading mediated language-art requires an expanded set of critical, practical and discourse tools, and an awareness of the historical continuum that anticipates this expansion. The ontological and temporal design implications of tavits are supported with case-studies of two commercial typographic-animation softwares and one custom software (Mr Softie created at OBX Labs, Concordia) used during a research-creation process

The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg

For the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong

Implants, IA & art (une méditation)

La technologie a rapidement décalé les paramètres du possible, mais l’appareil instinctif intuitif de nos corps auto-orientés tribalistes et émotivement volatiles reste limité à une mentalité de troupeau.Au cours des 15 prochaines années, l’interactivité vocale et subvocale deviendra accessible au grand public, et les interfaces cerveau-machine filtreront hors des laboratoires pour se glisser dans le cerveau des premiers adoptants.Interfaces cerveau-machine (IMC) : que vont-elles changer? Cet essai est une exploration et une idéation de quelques-uns des problèmes éthiques potentiels de l’IMC à partir du printemps 2020

SloMoVo [Slow (Almost Silent) Voice Experiments]

SloMoVo is mostly inaudible voice/grunts/hums triggering synths generated in real-time. It is throat synthing: making silence into sound. Each word makes a mountain. Each breath begins a tide. SloMoVo asks: how do tiny seemingly inconsequential gestures of our lives reverberate through networks? How potent is the seemingly impotent unheard voice when augmented with tech? What effect does the unheard or repressed or invisible have on the resonance of the universe? Is network technology and media software capable of expanding identity? What is the resonant frequency of society

SloMoVo [Slow (Almost Silent) Voice Experiments]

SloMoVo is mostly inaudible voice/grunts/hums triggering synths generated in real-time. It is throat synthing: making silence into sound. Each word makes a mountain. Each breath begins a tide. SloMoVo asks: how do tiny seemingly inconsequential gestures of our lives reverberate through networks? How potent is the seemingly impotent unheard voice when augmented with tech? What effect does the unheard or repressed or invisible have on the resonance of the universe? Is network technology and media software capable of expanding identity? What is the resonant frequency of society

The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg

For the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong