Glitch Poetics:Critical Sensory Realism in Contemporary Language Practice

A practice-based research project that introduces the term "Glitch Poetics" as a mode for reading and writing in the digital age: this term overlaps different creative (and uncreative) writing methodologies, and forges new lines of connection between "new media" and the literary and textual. The work is relevant to fields such as Literary Theory, Experimental Writing, Electronic Literature and New Media Art. The research methodology was interdisciplinary, including: synthesising key conceptualisations of "glitch" from media theoretical areas such as media archaeology and software studies, and new media art practitioners such as Rosa Menkman, with those of historical approaches to 'poetics'; performing close readings of contemporary literature, performance and other artistic language practices; and producing art works that move between live performance, exposition and textual practice. Over the course of 4 years, the project achieved a significant level of depth, concluding that "glitches" offer a moment of correspondence between the (already diverse) concerns of poetics and those of critical media practices, forming new disciplinary allegiances and necessitating new hybrid forms of critique. In recent published material I have also illustrated how this critical framework can be deployed to analyse influential books and artworks alongside emerging technologies. The new term "Glitch Poetics" gained traction through a publications in national specialist media, such as Art Monthly, Resonance FM and Poetry Wales, and was developed through interdisciplinary contexts including invited talks at Transmediale festival, Onassis centre in Athens, academic appearances at conferences for new media, literature and poetics, and as a chapter in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. The practice-based components were commissioned by the Bluecoat and FACT, and a final outcome was developed into a publication with Entr'acte records in Antwerp, streamed in its entirety on The Wire website

Compound city: social, economic, and environmental impact in the production of generative urban space

Compound City will focus on the implementation of an open source, social infrastructure, as a methodology in addressing the on-going urban crisis in Lagos. Dealing primarily with urban informality, Lagos will serve as a theoretical testbed, providing a natural precedent in which to test these ideas. How can open source technologies - softwares & hardwares - subvert or embrace existing infrastructures/processes as a means of alleviating inadequate living conditions? Identifying the coincidental pressures in Lagos will help establish project parameters, driving the development of design criteria to be addressed by the new, open source, platform

Noise poetics: A flow of cuts

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The motivation of this research is to explore the potential and (dis)functionality of noise in experimental language practice. In this, my task has been to expand on more highly developed noise-discourses, such as music and philosophy, and their corollaries to language – but also to seek an original conception of what noise can, and does, produce in an experimental language context; along with the political, philosophical and artistic implications arising from it. Following Charles Bernstein’s affirmation that ‘one might be able to read novels or letters or scientific treatises in terms of their poetic qualities’ (Bernstein, 1992, p. 151), I seek the implication of poetics in the works of major theorists and philosophers who inform ideas of noise, including Julia Kristeva, Fredrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. In tune with the nature of the subject, I have chosen to make some radical gestures within the formal submission, infesting the text itself with cross-references, strike-throughs, syntactic and layout glitches, which add a kind of visual and cognitive noise to the reading. The resulting thesis is an example and an interrogation of practice-as-research, making use of the tension between its formal qualities, and a non-linear imperative. Findings include a rich network arising from integral terminology, such as ambiguity, glitch and abundance which are explored for their relational productivity as part of a complex milieu around noise and poetics. In my live performance and print work, as with the thesis itself, I seek to affirm that these notions can be deployed in an affecting and original poetic – producing an active and performative document which enacts a fission of dichotomies, particularly, the flow of cuts invoked in the title