Joe Amato: Three Movements in Search of a Medium

Boliou 104, 7:30 p.m. [Sponsored by the Department of English]

In a performative presentation that is part narrative, part critical prose, and part poetry, Amato will explore how the digital sphere alters the materiality and urgency of our public and private transactions. The talk will constitute a demonstration, too, of how language may embody the shifting effects and affects of the digital.

Statement: "Sometimes new forms of expression comprise not simply different ways of asking (and answering) the same questions, but ways of asking (and answering) different questions. I believe that new media comprise new forms of expression -- or at least, can constitute such forms; and I believe that, even as the web becomes more and more a device for furthering the programmatic agenda of any number of institutional bureaucracies [cough], it yet holds promise for helping us to cope with the world as it is, and might be. Which suggests that the age-old questions will continue to be with us, but that some new, equally provocative and urgent questions will likely arise.

"Specifically, there are at least two issues that I've grappled with of late in my own thinking and writing and making. First, I wonder to what extent an unedited sea of information (term used advisedly) can overload our collective capacity for making meaningful meanings (which is not solely a matter of developing more efficient navigational tools, not least because these tools generally help and hurt matters). Secondly, I wonder whether the tried & true binaries of print culture -- professional vs. amateur, academic vs. nonacademic, indie vs. mainstream -- are still useful in coping with the situation we now find ourselves in. My "we" is especially problematic, both because of increasing global disparities (access, sure, but e.g. hunger as well) and the many ecological and geopolitical consequences of our sprawling social habitats.

"But implicit in this way of understanding our circumstances, too, is an awareness that print culture never operated independently of other cultural and aesthetic movements in any case. Radio, television and film have served right along as the popular cultural backdrop for the print artifacts of the past half-century, whether novels, poems, plays, refrigerator manuals, or oils-on-velvet. And while our theories of media, for instance, like our economic theories, require a certain capacity for bracketing the particular aspect of reality under scrutiny, it's nonetheless the case that, taken at face value, isolating concerns can produce a somewhat distorted account. What's at stake, personally and politically, when Ahmad and Muriel initiate a transatlantic correspondence online about a collaborative arts project after having hooked up in a chat room decorated with animated banners and punctuated by the sounds of Phish?

"It's in the conjunction of formal practices, social movements and all-too-human motivations that our digital sphere continues to hold so much potential for aesthetic and, possibly, social reform -- provided we don't lapse into the dogmatic slumber of the merely new."

Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age (Viet Nam Generation, 1994), Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (SUNY Press, 1997), and Under Virga (Chax Press, forthcoming 2004). His poetry, essays, reviews and digital art have been published here and abroad in such journals as The Iowa Review Web, Computers and Composition, Postmodern Culture, New American Writing, Jacket, Chain, electronic book review, Crayon, Writing on the Edge, Denver Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Studies and Voices in Italian Americana. He is currently on leave from the University of Colorado at Boulder and teaching with the Department of English at Illinois State University.

Interested in Electronic Writing? Try these resources:

Electronic Literature Organization
SUNY/Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center
The Iowa Review Web
The trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University
Jim Andrew's VISPO -- Langu(im)age
Robert Kendall's Word Circuits
Brian Kim Stefans's ARRAS -- New Media Poetry and Poetics
Ubu Web: Visual - Concrete - Sound