Digital Visual Poetry
Programmed Writing and Kinetic Typography
Dr. Wiebke Vorrath
The main objective of this postdoc project is to define and categorize contemporary visual digital poetry. Pursuing the central questions of how its effects and functionalities as well as its forms of digital writing can be described and analyzed, it will also discuss the genre within the context of its literary history. In this regard, the project will ask to what extent digital poetry can be construed as an adaptation and further development of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements.
In the tradition of the literary avant-gardes, which foregrounded automatisms in language use (relating to speech and writing), current digital poetry reflects on the functional logic of computer-based language technologies. This project will thus ask what happens behind the interface in order to scrutinize the operating principles of programming languages and algorithms in digital poetry. The project’s hypothesis must therefore be seen within this context: varieties of digital poetry are not only marked by poetic characteristics such as language and media reflexivity, excessive structuring, or qualities of alienation; rather, it seems that the possibilities provided by computers as tools for text production and as media for poems are particularly well suited to implementing the characteristics of poetic forms and functions.
Examining these questions requires an interdisciplinary approach: in order to develop an analytical framework for kinetic script and image-text relationships in visual digital poetry, the project will consult theories and methods from the fields of media and literary studies regarding the multimodality, intermediality, and materiality of writing, as well as paratextuality in literature and new media. Furthermore, approaches from the digital humanities – in particular from computer philology and critical code studies on kinetics, and the meaning-making potentials of source code – appear promising for this purpose. In order to investigate the visual qualities of different script systems, e.g., the amalgamation of human and machine languages, the project will also draw on concepts from studies on multilingualism. Finally, the project will review the utility of approaches from art history and visual culture studies for the delineation of iconic and symbolic writtenness, and from performance theory for the specification of temporality and processuality in visual digital poems.
Wiebke Vorrath’s study “Digitale visuelle Lyrik. Programmierte Schriftlichkeit und kinetische Typografie ” will be written in German.