Fashionable Noise: Reading as Parsing January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , trackbackBecause CPs has no creation narrative – programs essentially have written their works even before you compile them (unless they are playing on live texts, such as the internet) – it is up to the digital poet to animate this “attractor” by simulating the sensation of the poem’s having been created through time. That is, the narrative or syllogistic imagination has to be animated artificially in order to put that kinetic sensation of the work’s “becoming” into place. If this doesn’t occur, “readerly” activity would be reduced to mere parsing or, worse, indifferent viewing of a map of data. This can be seen as the obverse of the trajectory of those factions of the avant-garde who seem to want to take a whole called “language” and break it down into its constituent parts in order to liberate suppressed meanings – Dadaists, Language poets, Concrete poets invested in the “post-semiotic.” But “noise” – semantic play that is so free it can’t be recuperated into discourse – is where the digital poet starts, and digital culture has grown to accept noise as an innocuous byproduct to the smooth functioning of technology – as a burp, not a bomb. Since the CP starts from noise, it is in the position of gunning all the way for “convention” with the hope that its algorithmically assembled congeries of data might take on the properties of the “poem.”
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