|
Digital
Gestures
Carrie Noland
My
claim in this chapter is that digital poetry, far from attenuating our
relation to the human body, actually evokes this body and its kinetic
energies in a variety of highly inventive ways. The relation between fingers
and font in digital writing might not be as immediate as the relation
between hand and symbol that characterizes manual inscription. But this
has not stopped poets--forever intrigued by lost immediacy--from sounding
all the possibilities of that particular relation as it is manifested,
distorted, and re-created in the digital realm. Digital poetry has turned
out to be a genre of computer-based writing concerned with recalling to
the user's consciousness a memory of the motions required to produce letters
manually on a flat support. The motions associated with the use of paper
and writing implement return in digital poetry both literally, as small
motor movements involving only the fingers and wrist (shifting the mouse,
clicking, dragging, and so on), and figuratively, as replications of letter
production acted out on the screen. Whether letters are constructed stroke
by stroke by an anonymous program (as in Bill Marsh's "Aria"
or Jim Andrew's "Nio") or moved about the screen and made to
appear or disappear according to the hand motions of a real-time user
(as in John Cayley's "riverIsland," Stephanie Strickland's "Vniverse,"
or Camille Utterbach's "Rain"),1 digital poems mime and displace
the corporeal energy channeled by the gestures of handwriting. Writing
poetry on the computer makes it possible to retrieve aspects of a subject's
experience of writing as a corporeal practice that cannot be captured
by more traditional print forms.
Arguably, the single most innovative
feature of digital poetry is animation. Concrete and visual poets of the
past have tried to free letters from linear arrangement and an assigned
place within a word.(. However, digital works distinguish themselves from
these earlier efforts by the increased liberty of movement they accord
to both entire semantic units and individual letters. Flash, Director,
and DHTML animation programs extend the visual experience of the verbal
construct in ways that earlier works could not; programmers and users
can, for instance, move words and letters around the screen, make them
flicker, pulse rhythmically, or morph.(3). Whether generated by pre-programmed
algorithms or initiated in real-time by interactive users, the transformations
and transpositions these letters undergo on the screen recall the corporeal
energies that drive inscription.(4). When letters move, morph, or pulse,
they expose digital writing's nostalgia for the hand, the producer's creative
will to reengage with and express the kinetic impulses of the body.
I therefore intend to approach digital
poems as gestural, that is, as alluding to physical movements of the body
in space. I am distinguishing my use of the term "gestural"
from that of Robert Kendall, who has proposed that animated poems can
be divided into two groups: the "gestural" and the "structural."
By "gestural," Kendall means that the kinetic features of the
text serve "the same function as gestures of body language or the
inflections of speech. They provide emphasis, build tension, or evoke
a mood."5 Meanwhile, "structural" animations are those
which affect "meaning and syntax at the deepest level," not
simply emphasizing words, but bringing them in and out of being in a manner
that contributes directly to the semantic content of the poem (as in Kendall's
"Faith"). While I recognize the validity of Kendall's distinction,
I want nonetheless to appropriate the expression "gestural animation"
for my own use. Pulling "gesture" in the direction of movement
rather than emphasis (which can be achieved by vocal inflection as well),
away from rhetoric and toward dance, I hope to restore the choreographic
dimension of the word. I am interested here in the gestures, the actual
small motor movements, involved in the execution of handwriting and how
these gestures/movements are displaced--in what emerges in my analysis
as a kind of secondary order of displacement--onto the computer screen.
For me, a "gestural" animation corresponds to and evokes the
ductus, or stroke, of the writing hand; it reinscribes the movement of
the body as it is engaged in the production of individual or connected
letters.
I am less interested, then, in the
activity of words, sentences, or lexia than in the movements of letters,
the traveling, warping, and morphing of characters. It is in these specific
types of animations that the gestures of handwriting return in a new form.
The ductus of the letter is the conduit for corporeal energy; it embodies--in
an inscription--the gestures required to form it. In order to make my
argument about digital poetry as a gestural form, I will take a detour
through the work of two visual artists of the twentieth century, Robert
Morris and Cy Twombly, both of whom maintain a significant, if sometimes
ironic, relationship to gestural abstraction, an important movement in
painting of the 1940s and 50s. While Morris and Twombly cannot be said
to "morph" letters--or even move them around the canvas--they
do focus attention on the gestural origins of inscription, on handwriting
or, more to the point, on proto-writing. Their de-skilling operations
are aimed at exposing the kinetic impulses that underlie the act of inscription,
impulses that, when repeated compulsively, threaten to render the inscription
itself illegible. My argument is that these same kinetic impulses--disciplined
but potentially transgressive--can be seen to motivate the way animation
techniques are put to use in digital poetry. Digital poetry is the domain
of cybertextuality in which the gestural energies of the body are powerfully
evoked through strategies of displacement that, when repeated compulsively,
challenge the very semantics of inscription. Thus meaning in digital poetry
is both posited and undone through, for instance, the rhythmic pulsating
of letters (as in Mez's or Brian Kim Stefans's works),(6) the morphing
of letters over time (as in Diana Slattery's "Glide"), or the
dragging of entire words or letters to create entirely new visual languages
(as in Jean-Luc Lamarque's "pianographique"). Software that
sets the letter free of its positional constraints and allows it to dance
on the screen offers digital poets entirely new ways of playing with the
visual properties of letters. In sum, the play of the letter that characterizes
the poetic genre as a whole emerges in digital poetry as indexical of
a kinetic body that both generates and obscures signification achieved
through written signs.
How has the body been approached by theorists of digital writing in the
past?- Treatments of cybertext's relationship to the body generally make
one of three claims (all of which contradict the hypothesis I will explore
here). First, in the wake of Donna Haraway's influential "Cyborg
Manifesto," scholars of hypertext and digital literature have argued
that computer technologies merely dramatize what has always been the case,
namely, that there is no purely "natural" or organic body, but
rather all bodies produce culture (and themselves) by interfacing with
prosthetic devices.(7) Christopher Keep, for instance, claims that reading
and writing hypertext (in particular) are activities that undermine our
boundedness as discrete physical bodies and even "refigure our perception
of ourselves" (165). According to Keep, our very flesh loses its
organic plenitude and becomes indistinguishable from the pulsating electronic
signals extending and traversing it. "Hypertexts inscribe themselves
onto the skin of the human as deeply as the human writes itself into the
machine," states Keep (174). In a sense, then, even when computer
technologies mediate inter-corporeal communication, the body cannot be
lost--and it would be a mistake to speak of a "nostalgia" for
it--since the computer itself is implicated in producing the very body
that such means of communication are supposedly manifesting. Interactive
computer technologies, the story goes, encourage us to revel in our dispersed
subjectivity, our unbounded physical form, thus allowing us to nip in
the bud whatever "nostalgia" for the sujet unaire we might still
harbor.
The second claim, one that follows
from the first, goes something like this: not only is the body produced
by its prosthetic extensions, but the body's gestures, its specific form
of kinetic instantiation (as well as its desires) achieve a certain phenomenological
existence through interaction with devices such as the computer.(8) As
Marcel Mauss once argued in an entirely different context (he was speaking
of cultural inscriptions rather than media inscriptions), the body's gestures
are not necessary and natural to it but are learned responses to specific
cultural demands. The kinetic body is thus created by the tasks it is
called on to perform. Writing about cyberspace, Keep makes a similar point,
insisting that the body never springs forth fully realized but is instead
shaped and constructed by the gestures that machines impose upon it. Dragging
the mouse and lightly tapping the tips of the fingers are gestures that
define a new gestural body, one coterminous with a keyboard and screen.
Once in dialogue with the machine, not even our desires can be said to
be ours alone (or to originate in our libido). Choices made during the
process of reading (or interacting) are partially determined by features
of the programming; they are not realizations of a unified subject's autonomous
and individuated desires.
I don't intend to spend much time
taking on these first two claims, except to say that, to my mind, the
argument made for the influence of prosthetic devices on the body, its
gestures, and its desires is, in the case of the computer, hugely overstated,
given the long history of commerce between human beings and their tools.(9)
It is difficult to see how the computer undermines our discretely embodied
subjectivity any more than a telephone does. The body as a unit capable
of suffering, as wired by a finite set of nerves to pick up changes in
the object world, remains bounded, no matter what device it employs. It
is still our wrist that gets cramped, our neck that gets sore, and not
the computer's arched frame. The small motor movements the computer requires
may eventually become inscribed as unconscious habits; however, these
movements also produce conscious sensations in a body that cannot be entirely
changed. These visceral, internal sensations of movement, posture, and
orientation that come with having a body at all are precisely what the
digital poets I study attempt to convey. They seek to capture the quality
of what Sally Ann Ness has called "kinetic chaining," movement
procedures that feed a mind "exploring its environment," as
Ness puts it, "through something other than its eyes and ears"
(5). To be sure, in computer writing, the relation between the body as
a sensory apparatus exploring a machine with its fingertips and the actual
shapes of the figures that appear on the screen is highly attenuated,
mediated to a large extent. (In contrast to handwriting, a process in
which the hand mimes the shape of an "R" and, if furnished with
the proper implement, simultaneously produces the shape of an "R"
on a receptive support.) Yet even the swish of the tiny arrow of the mouse
across a flat space of light mirrors in proportion the sweep of the arm
as it directs where that arrow is to go. Such mirrorings, or visual reproductions
of "kinetic chains," are frequent in the digital poems I analyze
here. In fact, the software programs digital poets use provide many opportunities
for creating a bond between the writer's visceral experience of tracing
letters and the graphic instantiation of this tracing, a bond that is
closer, I would argue, than that produced by the technologies of the typewriter
or the printing press.
This last point brings me to the third
approach to the body offered by recent theorists of digital writing. Scholars
such as Mark Poster and Mark Seltzer have made the claim that not only
is the body's originary mediation--its otherness to itself--dramatized
by computer technologies, but computer technologies accentuate that mediation,
making palpable the distance between the individual body and the traces
it leaves on the page. Poster and Seltzer both insist that computer writing
renders less immediate, more attenuated, the contact between the hand
and its product, the inscription. Poster, for instance: "Compared
to the pen, the typewriter or the printing press, the computer dematerializes
the trace. As inputs are made to the computer through the keyboard, pixels
of phosphor are illuminated on the screen, pixels that are formed into
letters. Since these letters are no more than representations of ASCII
codes contained in Random Access Memory, they are alterable practically
at the speed of light. The writer encounters his or her words in a form
that is evanescent, instantly transformable, in short, immaterial"
(111). Seltzer echoes this view in Bodies and Machines, stating that writing
with digital instruments "replaces . . . that fantasy of continuous
transition [from hand to mark, from body to page] with recalcitrantly
visible and material systems of difference; with the standardizing spacing
of keys and letters; with the dislocation of where the hands work, where
the letters strike and appear, where the eyes look" (10). The significant
word in Seltzer's description is of course "fantasy"; handwriting,
he notes, appears to fulfill the fantasy of an immediate relation between
the body and its form of self-expression, a fantasy that a word processor
employing an electronic keyboard cannot even pretend to entertain.
As opposed to Seltzer, I believe that
digital writers are obsessed with the fantasy of immediacy because of
rather than despite the computer's attenuations of contact between touch
and type. Further, and somewhat paradoxically, I would maintain that this
fantasy of immediacy is retrieved through the very technologies accused
of displacing it. What occurs in certain forms of digital poetry in particular
is not the acceleration of that "radical decentering of the subject
effected by earlier writing technologies" (Keep, 170) but, on the
contrary, a recuperation, in another form, of that hand-page contact that
was supposedly lost. Finally, one cannot assume that handwriting provides
greater intimacy between the body and its inscriptions. Handwriting may
provide, for Keep, Poster, and Seltzer, a fantasy of immediacy, but historically
handwriting has represented the very opposite, namely, the body's submission
to regimes of gestural training that are neither natural nor easily acquired.
In fact, almost all scenes of writing
throughout the history of philosophy--those found in Plato, Hegel, Husserl,
Foucault, and Derrida are most familiar to me--stress the degree to which
human intention and affect are distorted in chirographic cultures (as
opposed to oral cultures).(10) According to many, the body that makes
contact with the page, the hand that produces the script, has already
been disciplined, self-alienated, at once device and limb, expressive
tool and conditioned flesh. As Foucault writes suggestively in Discipline
and Punish, good handwriting "presupposes a gymnastics--a whole routine
whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points
of the feet to the tip of the index finger" (152; emphasis added).
Handwriting is a kind of telescoped athletics, a compressed "gymnastics"
that is at once tightly constrained and potentially explosive. The acquisition
of proper orthography involves a degree of coercion and conditioning,
but it also provides a support for the transmission of a bodily energy
that might not otherwise find an acceptable cultural outlet.
Melanie Klein, in an essay of 1923
entitled "The Role of School in the Libidinal Development of the
Child," goes one step further, emphasizing that this contained energy
is not only corporeal but also libidinal in nature and that handwriting,
therefore, possesses an erotic dimension. Studying a group of schoolchildren
first approaching literacy, Klein observes how they submit themselves
to the physical discipline of writing and yet find ways of charging this
writing with the energy of the very body that has--through the behaviors
demanded by penmanship--been repressed. Klein's reflections suggest that
children invest individual letters not only with personal meanings but
also with barely bridled kinetic and libidinal energies. The practice
that disciplines the body, Klein advances, becomes the support for the
body's expression, that is, for the discharge of a corporeal energy that
has been diverted from its "natural" course. Klein narrates
stories in which little Fritz, for example, imagines the dotted 'i's to
be penises, or in which little Ernst, while learning to perfect the lower
case "l," thinks of masturbating as he moves the pen repetitively
up and down, up and down. It is worth keeping in mind this rhythmic aspect
central to handwriting when we observe works of digital poetry that employ
rhythmic devices, such as the regular flashing of letters on the screen
or the addition of a light pulse beneath the written character.
Other theorists of orthography less
concerned with sexuality per se have also suggested that letters can serve
as the support for a wide variety of expressive investments. Pierre Duborgel,
for instance, claims in Imaginaire et pédagogie that the first
graphemic exercises of the child tend to associate the letters of the
alphabet either with faces or with the animals and objects the letters
resemble. Typically, during the period when the child is first learning
to sketch letters on paper, she does not distinguish between the two activities--drawing
and writing--maintained as separate disciplines by the educational academy,
and thus, as a result, letters can easily bear iconic value.11 Duborgel's
most interesting point, however, is that, ontogenetically and phylogenetically,
both letters and depictions are preceded by "griffonages," or
seemingly random scribblings. At the origin of writing, then, is "une
gesticulation," a gesture, or really a set of motor movements, that
Serge Tisseron (another psychologist of early child development) names
the "inscriptive gesture." As Tisseron writes, the "genesis
of the text, as of any written mark . . . , must be considered from the
viewpoint of the original spatial play which the hand stages" (29).
And he adds--tacitly invoking Melanie Klein--"what is at stake in
the hand is the very nature of the psychic investments which are bound
up in it." All writing, in short, is disciplined corporeal energy;
as a corollary, then, writing always involves an originary alienation,
a moment of negativity, that is not necessarily exacerbated--but only
inflected differently--when new implements, such as the electronic keyboard,
are introduced.
Now, it might seem at first that this
narrative of writing's grounding in gesture is irrelevant to an account
of digital writing, especially of digital poetry, which supposedly depends
upon the "material effects" of the letter rather than upon the
letter's capacity to transmit a libidinal charge.(12) The computer keyboard,
one might argue, obviates the need for pressure, for marked bodily investment,
and thus computer writing is as far from handwriting--and its gestural
disciplines and pleasures--as one can get. However, it is by no
means clear that the hand and its "psychic investments" (Tisseron)
are forgotten in computer writing. On the contrary, according to Tisseron,
writing on the computer reestablishes our connection with earlier writing
practices: "The importance given to hand gestures," he states,
"does not exclude the increasingly large share of textual creation
which is performed by machines, starting with the home computer. In fact,
the current technological evolution is drawing noticeably closer to the
conditions presiding over the manual creation of a manuscript" (29-30).
It would seem, then, that when using a word-processor, the body rediscovers
in a displaced form elements of its kinetic connection to the support
(page or screen). Not only does the mouse engage the hand (wrist, arm,
and shoulder also play a role), allowing it to draw invisible figures
with the cursor (and these figures can be made visible, as we shall see),
but the fact that portions of text can be displaced from one spot in a
manuscript to another, that simple movements of the fingers can alter
fonts, or that letters and words can be dragged, distorted, rotated, or
even set spinning--suggests that innovations specific to digital technology
have the unprecedented power to recall, for the eye and the hand, the
rhythmic and gestural components of inscription.
It is in this light, I believe, that
digital writing must be seen. The conventional genealogy of digital poetry
traces it back to movements in concrete and visual poetry, thereby emphasizing
the letter's attributes as a visual entity. This approach to digital poetry
is of course valid and illuminating, but it does not allow us to focus
sufficient attention on the way the digital letter's graphic materiality
is embodied, the mode of its apparition on the screen. Thus, instead of
situating digital poetry in the genealogy of concrete and visual poetries,
I will place digital poetry in the context of other traditions in the
arts that share certain aspects of digital poetry's particular form of
material embodiment. While it is true that concrete poems can evoke indirectly
the kinetic basis of writing, there have also been other, equally pertinent
regions of aesthetic activity in which the gestural and rhythmic components
of writing have received emphasis. I believe it is fruitful to consider
digital poetry--or at least some varieties of it--in tandem with works
created under the rubric of "gestural abstraction," works that
can help us to recover some of the more provocative and even subversive
uses of animation in contemporary poetic practice.(13)
But before I launch into my reading
of gestural abstraction and its relation to digital poetry, I need to
justify my recourse to painting (and drawing), since it is not transparently
clear why an argument concerning the kinetic features of digital poetry
would involve establishing an analogy with static--as opposed to animated--works.
In truth, many digital poems are relatively static; that is, while blocks
of text or letters might be moved around the screen (as a result of interactive
or preprogrammed procedures), the letters themselves do not, in isolation,
move or morph. Yet, even in these relatively static poems, attention is
drawn to the act of shaping, to the gestures required for creating the
strokes that produce inscriptions. The static works of the visual artists
I study here share certain features with the digital poems of this variety.
In addition, there is a further link to be made between, on the one hand,
Morris's and Twombly's imitations of handwriting and, on the other, digital
poems that mime the ductus, either by allowing the user to morph or trace
a letter by interactive means or by staging the letter as movement, as
an animated form (as, for instance, in Bill Marsh's or Jim Andrews's works).
So while Twombly and Morris create figures that do not themselves literally
move on the canvas, they nonetheless evoke a physicality, the physicality
of proto-writing, reminding us that without what Tisseron calls "the
inscriptive gesture" no inscription could come into being. Morris
and Twombly draw our attention to the gestures rooting but also potentially
undermining the integrity of the written character. They attend to the
most simple and repeatable motor movements undergirding tracing systems
in order to bring to mind the kinetic energy central to but tamed by all
acts of inscription. Their fascination with exercises productive of writing
is coincident with their desire to understand the nature (and the culture)
of inscribing in general.
Although primarily known as a sculptor
and performance artist, Robert Morris has long been interested in the
relation of art to written language. In 1973, Morris began working on
a series of drawings called Blind Time--Blind Time I (1973), II (1976),
III (1985), IV (1991), V (1999), and VI (2000)--each of which made explicit
reference to the relation between handwriting and its gestural impetus.
The procedure he developed for producing the series involved several different
elements: time (he gave himself a certain number of minutes in which to
finish the drawing); touch (Morris worked blindfolded with bare hands);
gesture (his physical movements involved the entire upper torso and sometimes
the feet as well); and writing (Morris imitated the spatial orientation
of Western writing systems, often moving his body--and thus tracing lines--from
the upper-left hand corner to the lower right-hand corner). According
to Maurice Berger, Morris "would define a particular drawing task
(related to such conditions as pressure, distance, location, and shape),
estimate the length of time needed for its completion, and finally, close
his eyes and draw on paper with his fingers using graphite mixed with
plate oil" (150). To each drawing, Morris appended a text carefully
handwritten in the margin (first, at either the left or right bottom corner,
then at the top or along the bottom margin, and finally on the back of
the paper/vellum). This handwritten text describes the task assigned and
the length of time it took to complete it. Morris's experiments in Blind
Time explore the similarities and differences between more immediate,
overtly gestural inscriptions (involving larger motor movements) and more
mediated, carefully regulated writing practices (in which these movements
are condensed and telescoped), and thus speak directly to the concerns
of this essay.
An example will suffice to make the
connection between digital mediations and procedural mediations clear.
In a drawing from Blind Time I (figure 1), Morris juxtaposes a "scrupulously-penciled
text" with a double set of graphite smudges (14).14 The text, or
legend, reads as follows: "With eyes closed, graphite on the hands,
and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend
the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep an even
vertical column of touches. Time estimation error: +8 seconds."
This "even vertical column of touches" shares certain features
with the Western organization of text as it appears in the legend on the
lower right-hand side.15 But whereas this legend announces itself clearly
as writing, the vertical columns of touches confuse the boundary between
writing and smudging, between the highly constrained gestures required
to produce legible handwriting and the more full-bodied mark-making gestures
that can mime but not reproduce the rigors of handwriting. And yet even
the smudges, aligned almost neatly in two rows, recall the disciplinary
imperative of written language. Here, Morris seems to be attempting to
train his hands to behave in an unnatural, choreographed fashion: both
hands strive to move in concert, setting themselves the impossible task
of producing two identical sets of marks. The imposition of identity on
two hands that are often trained to execute two different types of gestures
mirrors (yet displaces) the de-naturalization of the body's movements
in general as this body is submitted to other types of socialization,
such as the acquisition of handwriting or draftsmanship. The double-column,
two-handed drawings thus render visceral the immediate connection between
hand and support while simultaneously focusing attention on writing as
a physical discipline. The Blind Time drawings reveal graphically and
dramatically the tension between discipline and self-expression that structures
both writing and smudging but is of course far more successfully veiled
in former. In other words, the drawing re-stages, within a different context,
the scenario that initially produced the authoritatively neat handwriting,
whose own performance is here relegated to the margins by the kinetic
energy of the drawing, or graphic text. In sum, there is no pure immediacy
in Morris's "gestural abstraction"; all strokes--minute, neat,
and observed by the eye, or larger, messier, and freed of optical surveillance--submit
to mediating disciplines. The latter inscription, however, exposes to
both the view of the spectator and the proprioception of the producer
the potentially dangerous kinetic energies that have been restrained and
transmitted (to varying degrees) in the case of each.
The same juxtapositions between more
overtly physical and rhythmic inscriptions, on the one hand, and contained
and standardized inscriptions, on the other, characterize the works of
Twombly as well. Another member of the late 60s-early 70s generation of
artists obsessed with print and written language, Twombly also concentrates
his energies on writing and its origins in drawing, marking, and, implicitly,
movement. Particularly relevant to my concerns are the dark-ground canvasses
created between the years 1967 and 1972; just as Morris turned at approximately
that moment to the relation between drawing and writing, so too did Twombly.
Both were fascinated by the relation between a task-oriented exercise
(with all its implications of imposed rigor and restraint) and a more
generous--yet still controlled--use of the body's movements (with all
the risks of its irregularities and uncontrollable impulses). Consider
"Cold Stream" of 1966 for instance (figure 2, oil and crayon
on canvas). Here, we witness a proliferation of marks, their careful insertion
into a defined space, and the strange tension between copying (or repeating),
on the one hand, and going beyond the bounds of the model (or initiating),
on the other. The allusion to handwriting is again clear (this canvas
and others like it have been compared to the proto-writing exercises of
a Palmer Method primer). As in the Morris drawings, the marks are arranged
along rows and follow the itinerary of a (Western) written text on a blackboard.
One is tempted to view these repeated spirals as simultaneously exercises,
attempts to achieve the perfect form, and, conversely, de-skilling operations,
perverse or dogged efforts to release the energy of the body through form.
Curiously, the same gestures that produce form eventually instigate its
undoing; the letter-like shapes begin to lose their integrity (see left
hand lower corner) and become somewhat angular in the process of a kind
of ferocious, driven repetition.
In a related painting of 1970, "Untitled"
(figure 3), the circling, swirling gestures again appear to move from
the left to the right, and each line of spirals is stacked upon another,
forming three distinct rows. However, this time these lines of spirals
increase markedly in size as the hand moves down the canvas/blackboard.
If the swirls began as more contained movements (and if they even seem
at times to achieve the status of letters, as at the end of row two),
they nonetheless soon become violently erratic, moving in and out of legibility
as letters. Similar although not identical gestures, initially telescoped,
seek a greater radius, revealing thereby the quantum of explosive physical
energy propelling handwriting but usually veiled by skill. Finally, the
background of the painting places stress on the notion of support--more
particularly, on that peculiar notion of the virgin support of writing
that is the schoolchild's fantasy of creation. Here, making marks is cast
as an act of resistance; the marker has to counter the dynamic orientation
of a previous writing, barely discernable underneath. The painting seems
to be telling us that part of the energy of writing is in fact antagonistic;
it comes from a force applied against writing itself. Writing, or, more
precisely, the act of inscribing letters, seems to want to destroy writing,
to return to the gestural impetus, to the initial corporeal investment
in leaving a trace. Twombly discovers an interesting paradox: that the
gestures responsible for writing, performed repeatedly, threaten to destroy
writing itself.
How does all this relate to digital poetry? I would argue that digital
poetry's play with the letter, a play facilitated by animation programs,
can be situated within this trajectory of artists working to re-animate
the letter, to reveal its hidden energies. My detour through the visual
arts is meant to indicate how gestural force is always displaced and disciplined
in any act of inscription; digital poetry merely displaces and disciplines
the gestural impulse in an entirely different way--by introducing its
own mediations, its own checks on subjective agency, such as aleatory
or algorithmic procedures and the transfer of kinetic energy from corporeal
practices to digital operations. Some digitally animated poems even follow
inscription into the troubling domain where Twombly led it; such poems
allow the user to alter to the point of illegibility the letters that
her gestures initially brought into being. One of the points I hope these
images have made is that the kinetic energy deposited in codified marks
can be evoked in a great variety of ways. A Morris does not look like
a Twombly; and yet they accomplish similar displacements. I see digital
poetry as reclaiming, by means of its own unique innovations, this same
expressive ground.
Philippe
Castellin, a conceptual artist and digital poet, has himself claimed to
belong to the Morris tradition, having been influenced by Morris's attempts
to stage inscriptions as performances. In an essay linked to the DOC(K)S
website, Élodie
Moirenc demonstrates how Castellin draws on Morris's use of gesture
to create verbal-visual works in "Man/Oeuvre," an installation/performance
produced in collaboration with Jean Torregrosa in 1998.16 Just as Morris's
sculptures (and, implicitly, his drawings) engage the bodies of both the
producer and the viewer, so too Castellin's works transform the space
of viewing (or reading) into a stage upon which masses and words--or,
here, word-masses--are displaced through gestures executed over time.
In the 1998 installation/performance, which Castellin would soon recast
as a digital poem entitled "Le Poème est la somme," a
set of large cinder blocks ("parpaings") are stacked in four
columns, each block bearing one word of the sentence "LE POEME EST
LA SOMME DE L'ENSEMBLE INFINI DES FORMES A L'INTERIEUR DESQUELLES IL SE
SENT TOUJOURS EGALEMENT A L'ETROIT" [THE POEM IS THE SUM OF THE INFINITE
TOTALITY OF FORMS INSIDE OF WHICH IT ALWAYS FEELS EQUALLY [ALSO] CONSTRAINED]
(Figure 4). The words of the sentence can be read either horizontally,
from left to right, or vertically, column by column, in which case the
(now ungrammatical) sentence reads: "LE SOMME DES DESQUELLES
TOUJOURS/ POEME DE FORMES IL EGALEMENT/ EST L'ENSEMBLE A SE A/ LA INFINI
L'INTERIEUR SENT L'ETROIT" [THE SUM OF THE OF WHICH ALWAYS/ POEM
OF FORMS IT EQUALLY [ALSO]/ IS THE TOTALITY TO ITSELF TO/ THE INFINITE
INSIDE FEELS CONSTRAINED]. During the performance of the piece, the separate
blocks are first placed all together in the form of a large cube; then
Jean Torregrosa and Philippe Castellin employ a set of wheels to lift,
transport, and rearrange the blocks, one by one, first into lines, then
into columns. Sometimes these columns form nonsense sentences, and sometimes
the two artists manage to recompose a significant sentence, such as that
quoted above. The sculpture/performance/construction /poem contains the
following elements: the passage of time, repeated rhythmic gestures, writing
(understood broadly, as involving the artist's entire body), and reading
(on the part of both the producer and the viewer).17 As Moirec notes,
"a rigorous and repetitive gestural routine [gestuelle]" is
established as essential for the production of inscriptions; blocks of
letters become, literally, blocks of matter, transported--and thus given
meaning--through the expenditure of a visibly large quantity of physical
force.
In Castellin's digital remake of this
same piece, "Le poème est la somme" of 1998, the energy
required to displace words is transferred from the bodies of the producers
to, on the one hand, the machine (a pre-programmed algorithm determines
the position of each word on the screen) and, on the other, the hand of
the interactive user (a click halts the movement of the letters or propels
them into entirely different relationships). While the poem cannot be
said to begin at any precise point, when the user pulls up the site she
is most often confronted with a screen filled with traveling, flipping,
flickering words, the original words found in "Man/Oeuvre" (plus
the author's name and the date of the poem), in bright neon colors against
a black background. These words float in seemingly haphazard directions
for between one and fifteen seconds before they suddenly halt in their
tracks, forming an ephemeral and disjointed page of legible signifiers.
The circulating words never stop for more than a few seconds, just long
enough to give the reader time to form a visual impression, but not long
enough to provide her with a readable text. The viewer responds to the
kinetic quality of the radiant words by following their movement--and
their arrested patterns--with her eyes, thus tracing out a variety of
optical paths that a "normal" text would never produce (figure
5). The learned response to text is challenged, and thus the skills acquired
in literacy are temporarily undone, when animation sets written language
in motion. The poem never seems to contain the same combinations of words
twice; presumably, the permutations of syntax and content are limitless,
"à l'infini," even as the sum ("la somme")
of the poem remains constant, a given quantity of signifiers placed in
temporary arrangements that appear to be limitlessly renewed.
Whereas the earliest manifestation
of the poem, "Man/Oeuvre," operated its permutations only on
the level of syntax (entire words could be rearranged, but not letters),
the digitalized "Le poème est la somme" begins to isolate
letters as units of matter that can also be circulated, displaced, submitted
to the gestures of the machine or the user who clicks on a word to stop
or restart its rotation. This can be seen with the decomposition of the
word "EGALEMENT," which appears on the screen as "EGALEMEN"
with the "T" positioned beneath. The word play is delicious:
meaning "equally" or "also," "EGALEMENT"
suggests that all permutations of the poem are equally valid and that
there is no master text toward which the circulating letters are convening.
The scission of the word "EGALEMENT" into two parts further
indicates that, on the level of their material existence, the letters
are themselves nothing but building blocks, each equal to the other (just
as the cinder blocks in "Man/Oeuvre" were exactly equal in weight);
these building blocks can always break off to form new visual spectacles,
new choreographies of language in space. Thus, no single version of the
poem--provisionally fixed--is superior to any other; rather the power
of the infinite is reserved for the poem in its "ensemble,"
in its fluid, unfixed state. As the sentence in "Man/Oeuvre"
tells us, the poem always feels its infinity constrained by its static
forms: "Le poème est la somme de l'ensemble infini des formes
à l'intérieur desquelles il se sent toujours également
à l'étroit," which translates roughly as "The
poem is the sum of the infinite totality [ensemble] of forms inside of
which it always feels equally [also] constrained." Poetry, it would
seem, is conceived here not as fixity but as incessant movement: whether
the result of physical gestures or programmed codes, poetry (movement)
works in the service of both meaning construction (static, legible inscription)
and meaning displacement (illegible but suggestive re-combinations of
the elements--kinetic and durable--of inscription).
Clearly, Castellin is troping on Morris's
idea of inscription as a type of performance involving kinetic energy
expended over time. The user who plugs into "Le poème est
la somme" is at once observing and taking part in this performance.
She is brought into confrontation with the skills she has acquired to
read and write (moving the eyes from left to right, using the fingers
and hand to produce inscriptions, in this case digitally on a screen);
but this reader is also asked to de-skill, to liberate her optical movements
from the strict regime of literacy, and to accept the explosive, unregimented
shapes of proto-writing as words and letters dance erratically but rhythmically
about the screen. Just as young children learning to write enjoy drawing
letters all over the page, truncating words and placing their constitutive
units in any arrangement whatsoever, so too the interactive user of "La
Poème est la somme" responds with pleasure to the inventive
placement of the "T," or to the upside-down "POESIE"
which hurtles diagonally across the screen like a jetplane shot down in
mid-flight. Inscription is here resituated with respect to time (we feel
time elapse), space (we become vividly aware of space as an active participant
in communication), and movement (the gestures required for inscription
are re-evoked through the trajectories of words on the screen). Finally,
we recognize that the poem itself is composed not only of an infinite
number of word sequences (as in Oulipian word games), but also of an infinite
number of movements--movements that occur both in virtual and real time/space.
In my reading, "Le poème
est la somme" merely hints at the fact that the movements generating
signs are related to movements that challenge and obscure signification.
Castellin never allows words to be smeared or letters to be altered beyond
recognition.18 The link, however, between gestures that create signs and
gestures that destroy them is dramatically underscored by Jean-Luc Lamarque,
a digital artist whose "pianographique" I would like to discuss
in conclusion. While Lamarque's "pianographique" is not a poem
in the same way that "Le poème est la somme" attempts
to be, this complex and multi-faceted work integrates inscriptions into
its rich visual universe in such a way as to emphasize the connection
between proto- and post- writing, the kinetic energies that produce signs
and the kinetic energies that distort them. "Pianographique"
is a collective work by a dizzying number of French web artists and musicians,
a "multimedia instrument," as Lamarque tells us, created in
1993 on CD-ROM and distributed on the web.19 The interactive user is presented
with a keyboard on the screen that corresponds to the keyboard beneath
her fingertips. Each letter of the user's keyboard, when pressed, produces
a distinct sound score and an animation that can be displaced by the hand
of the user by means of a mouse. Playing the "piano" of graphics
and sound bites, the user can create an infinite number of verbo-visual-aural
collages, while hitting the space bar effaces all that has come before.
It is not possible here to discuss
all ten sections of "pianographique" (each of which contains
a verbal element of varying complexity, such as "Jazz" or "Je
te contrôle et tu n'as pas de choix" [I control you and you
have no choice]), but I would like nonetheless to take a quick look at
one section in particular, "Rude Boy," programmed by Lamarque
with images by Frédéric Matuszek and sound by Jantoma. The
imagery of "Rude Boy" is clearly chosen in order to play with
the visual differences between discrete types of signifiers: by tapping
on "a," "s," or "r," the user produces
what looks like a page of type or bar codes ("t" produces the
same in red, "z" in white); by tapping on "b," "l,""q,"or
"x," the user produces some kind of icon or conventionalized
non-alphabetic symbol, such as an arrow, a road sign, or, in the case
of "x," the Nike insignia; by tapping on "d," "g,"
"k," or "n," the user produces a graffiti Tag or Wildstyle;
and finally, by tapping on "h," the user produces the word "listen"
in lower-case, red letters. If at any point the user decides to engage
the mouse, and therefore to distort the image by dragging it around the
screen, the sign-quality (and semantic value) of the image is soon lost.
The page of type becomes a tapestry, a cloth of woven writing (figure
6), while the Wildstyle inscription, "No Racism," abandons its
semantic content as it hollows out the screen and fills it with illusionary
three-dimensional space (figure 7). In other words, Lamarque has programmed
"pianographique" in such a way that the same constricted motions
required to form a letter (curves and lines) are responsible, when digitally
processed, for the letter's disfigurations on its radiant support. The
swirling motions of the user's hand are mirrored perfectly on the screen,
only this time, when the implement is the letter itself, these gestures
render the letter illegible; its constituent marks are returned to proto-writing,
to the status of meaningless shapes and lines. What is remarkable about
the programming of "pianographique" is that it allows such small
displacements to effect such huge distortions. Whereas in Twombly's paintings
the letter-like quality of the mark is lost once the body's gestures are
magnified and a greater quantum of physical energy is released, here,
in the digital universe, even a hand gyrating carefully within the confined
radius of a mouse pad can humble legibility, can bring legibility, so
to speak, to its knees. Digital poetry is perhaps, then, the ideal
genre in which to expose not only the visual properties of written language
but also writing's status as a performed activity, its relation to the
body's dance.
Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Stephanie Strickland for
exposing me to the work of Camille Utterbach, who presented "TextRain"
at the Technopoetry Festival, Georgia Tech, 2002.
2. For a genealogy of digital poetry
that connects it back to earlier concrete visual poetries, see Bohn and
Bolter.
3. The very innovations I will be
discussing here have been attacked as imitating too closely the aesthetics
of commercially-oriented animated inscriptions, such as film credits and
advertising blurbs. The controversy concerning the imbrication of digital
poetry software (especially Flash) in commercial contexts has in fact
been quite heated. For an overview of this controversy, see www.webartery.com,
contributions by Andrews and Howard. See also Hayles on "flickering
signifiers" in "Commentary on the 'Dinner Party.'"
4. Katherine Hayles very astutely
noted at the New Media Poetics Conference, where this paper was first
presented, that in the case of algorithmically produced displacements
of the letter there is no immediate investment of human energy involved.
My point is that even if the machine is "having all the fun"
(as she and John Cayley put it), the gestures the letters execute on the
screen provide an experience for the viewer that is different from that
provided by static text. Within that difference there are, of course,
further distinctions to be made; I can only begin here to sketch out a
phenomenology of reading animated texts. Future discussions of the kinesthetic
experience of screen-viewing will have to rely on recent scholarship in
film reception, which has been particularly attentive to the ways in which
movements on a screen affect the body of the viewer.
5. Robert Kendall, e-mail dated October
8, 2002. Kendall proposes the term "scriptal" animation (in
response to my suggestion, "ductile" animation). He writes:
"most animated poetry is invoking not so much the movement of the
hand in handwriting, but the movement of the typewriter pattern or the
word-processing cursor. There are a few poems I've seen (such as Bill
Marsh's 'Aria') that build letters kinetically stroke by stroke, but most
of them either build words letter by letter (in a process that looks like
text being typed on a word processing screen) or else work with larger
units, building texts a word or line at a time. Maybe the term 'scribal'
animation would be more appropriate, since this implies handwriting but
could also apply to typing" (e-mail dated October 8, 2002).
6. See, for instance, Mez's "Fleshistics"
and Stefan's "dreamlife of letters."
7. See Haraway, Poster and Hayles
(1999).
8. With respect to the production
of the desiring body, Keep underscores the vulnerability of our "own"
desires to those of the pre-programmed hypertextual system. When we sit
before a computer screen and engage our desires with the hypertext's desires,
he suggests, our unified subjectivity is compromised.
9. See, for instance, Leroi-Gourhan.
10. See Ong for a classical, if flawed,
treatment of the problem.
11. According to Duborgel, the child
has to undergo a kind of apprenticeship of the arbitrary (142), since
the child's instinct is to invest the letters themselves with pictographic
values. See also Georgel.
12. I am referring here to Paul de
Man's association of poetry with the play (agency) of the letter (divorced
from any lexical or semantic function) and his theoretical reflections
on "materiality" and "material effects" in "Phenomenality
and Materiality in Kant." For de Man, the letter, as mark of support,
is an entirely inhuman thing; seen in this light, the letter most decidedly
cannot be interpreted as embodying the kinetic energy of a human body.
De Man's battle against the anthropomorphizing moves of phenomenological
criticism are astringent and thought-provoking; however, his position
cannot account for--and is to some extent contradicted by--a long line
of artists and writers (including Twombly and Morris) who approach mark-making
as a corporeal practice in which kinetic investments leave a visible remainder
in the trace. De Man's argument should be contrasted with Barthes's in
Cy Twombly and Strickland's in "Moving Through Me As I Move: A Paradigm
for Interaction."
13. "Gestural abstraction"
refers to a movement in American art of the 1940s and 50s that included
painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack. Robert Morris
does not, strictly speaking, belong to this group; however, his interest
in gesture, and his decision to foreground its productive contribution
in his works, allies him with some of the artists working in that mode.
Twombly's relation to "gestural abstraction" is treated by Varnedoe
in Cy Twombly where he writes: "Their gestural abstraction [that
of the New York School] expressed the notion that the most acute moments
of self-realization were epiphanic and to be externalized only by heroic
acts of Zen spontaneity, disengaged from control and committed instead
to dynamism, risk, and chance" (24). In contrast, according to Varnedoe,
Twombly's works submit spontaneously to compulsive repetition, the transgressive
physicality of the stroke to an obsessive discipline.
14. Meltzer explores the public nature
of writing versus the private investments we make in it. "Learning
to write," she suggests, "we learn to belong to and participate
in a public mode of inscription, to subordinate the private and disordered
gestures of the hand to the measured and mathematical means of writing"
(16); "Morris's de-skilling repetitions turn back the school's clock"
(17); "They reveal that underside of language, where presence and
incarnated inscription are hidden from view" (18); "Blind time
turns text into trace, unravels writing into drawing . . . . The drawings
are about writing forgetting itself as such" (19).
15. The slant of the columns suggests
the natural leaning, the list of the body as it moves toward the end of
the row. This detail is not insignificant: here the graphite "marking"
reflects the body's engagement in a way that the neat script on the right
does not.
16. The essay by Élodie Moirec
is entitled "Akenaton" and was read in February 2002 at the
occasion of a conference presentation on Man/Oeuvre at Beaubourg.
17. Moirenc writes: "at the beginning
of the performance [there is] a cube which, during all the action, is
transformed and is transported. We can comprehend it as a minimalist sculpture,
because it is a volume of modular structure, of minimal, denuded forms,
on the human scale and realized with industrial material. It is decomposed
in an aleatory fashion, then recomposed until there appears a poem-wall
with the inscription of words on select cinder blocks. . . . [T]he volume
[acts] as a reference point and a register of the rhythm of the body that,
through its action, displaces the blocks. The words appear without any
ephemeral order having been decided in advance: as soon as they are positioned
they are unveiled. The execution is thus based on the intervention of
chance. We read: forms, totality, also, is, always, poem, constrained.
The action. By means of the action, the artist has access to words. .
. . The cinder blocks pass from hand to hand; words and volumes are transmitted
by means of the same gesture" ("Akenaton," n.p., my translation).
18. A comparison might fruitfully
be drawn here between Castellin's work and that of Komninos Zervos, whose
"Beer," for instance, operates by distorting the shapes of letters
until they form other letters or a series of lines. In "Beer"
there is a kind of morphological motivation at work: the shape of a letter
(and not its phonetic or metrical value) motivates the next letter that
appears.
19. Lamarque's collaborators include
Jean-Christophe Bourroux (credited as "webmaster"), Jérôme
and Xavier Pehuet, Guillaume Delaunay, Nicolas Clauss, Jean-Jacques Birgé,
Jantoma, Frédéric Matuszek, Serge de Lambier, NKO, Olivier
Bardin, Bérangère Lallemont, Lior Smilovici, Ed Coomes,
and Nicolas Thépot.
Works Cited
Andrews, Jim. ?Nio.? Nio Home. 2001. http://vispo.com/nio/index.htm
(1 October 2002).------ and Peter Howard. ?Continuing Conversation on
Flash.? Webartery.com. September-November 2002. http://www.webartery.com/.
(nd.).Barthes, Roland. Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres
sur papier de Cy Twombly. Milan: Multhipla Editions, 1979.Berger, Maurice.
Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s. New York: Harper
and Row, 1989.Bohn, Willard. ?From Hieroglyphics to Hypergraphics.? Experimental?Visual?Concrete:
Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos, and
Johanna Drucker. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996. 173-86. Bolter,
J. David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Castellin, Philippe. ?Le Poème
est la somme.? n.d. http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/DOCKS-datas_f/collect_f/auteurs_/f/C_f/CASTELLIN_f/anim_f/lasomme_F/poeme.html
(10 November 2003).Cayley, John. ?riverIsland.? Nd. http://www.shadoof.net/in/riverisland.html
(22 June 2004).De Man, Paul. ?Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.?
Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996. 70-90.Duborgel, Pierre. Imaginaire et pédagogie.
Toulouse: Privat, 1992.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Viking, 1979.Georgel, Pierre.
?Portrait de l?artiste en griffonneur.? Victor Hugo et les images, ed.
Madeleine Blondel and Pierre Georgel. Dijon: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989.
75-119.Haraway, Donna. ?A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.? Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81.Hayles, N. Katherine. How
We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.------. ?Open-work: Dining at
the Interstices.? Commentary on ?The Dinner Party.? Nd. http://califia.hispeed.com/RM/haylesfr.htm
(10 June 2004).Keep, Christopher J. ?The Disturbing Liveliness of Machines:
Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Fiction.? Cyberspace Textuality:
Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999. 164-81.Kendall, Robert. "Faith."
n.d. http://wordcircuits.com/faith (1 November 2002).Klein, Melanie.
?Le rôle de l?école dans le développement libidinal
de l?enfant.? Essais de psychanalyse. Trans. Marguerite Derrida. Paris:
Payot, 1967. 90-109.Lamarque, Jean-Luc. ?pianographique.? n.d. http://pianographique.com/datas/inter_fr.php
(4 May 2003).Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Trans. Anna
Bostock Berger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.Marsh, William. ?Six String
Aria.? 1999. http://www.factoryschool.org/btheater/works/6strA/aria.html
(18 November 2003). Mauss, Marcel. ?Les Techniques du corps.? Sociologie
et anthropologie. Paris: PUF, 1973. Originally published in Journal de
Psychologie 32 (1936): 3-4.Meltzer, Eve. ?How to Keep Mark Making Alive.?
Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.
June 2003.Mez [Mary Anne Breeze]. ?Fleshistics.? internal damage report
vers 1.1. n.d. http://ctheory.concordia.ca/multimedia /dirt/fleshistics/page_1.htm
(18 November 2003). Moirec, Élodie. ?Akenaton.? 1998. http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/
(1 February 2003).Ness, Sally Ann. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic
and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing
of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1999. Originally published 1982.Poster,
Mark. ?Derrida and Electronic Writing: The Subject of the Computer.? The
Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990. 99-128.Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New
York: Routledge, 1992.Slattery, Diana. ?Glide.? n.d. http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/apps/collabyrinth.html
(1 October 2002). Stefans, Brian Kim. ?the dreamlife of letters.? UbuWeb.
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream (3 October 2002).Strickland,
Stephanie. Vniverse. 2002. http://vniverse.com. (14 February 2003).------.
?Moving Through Me As I Move: A Paradigm for Interaction.? 2001. http://califia.hispeed.com/Strickland/
(14 February 2003).Tisseron, Serge. ?All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial
Development of the Manuscript.? Yale French Studies: Drawing and Writing
84 (1994): 29-42.Utterback, Camille. ?Text Rain.? 1999. http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html
(28 February 2003).Varnedoe, Kirk. Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. New York:
MOMA, 1994.Zervos, Komninos. ?Beer.? 2004. http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos/beer.html
(28 February 2004).
|