Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In this issue of TCR, the relationship between technology and writing is explored both creatively and critically. Some of the featured work will be available only in electronic format, while other pieces will have an electronic and print version. The electronic version will feature additional attributes that propel it into an entirely new genre of writing – the RSS feed. Divided into multiple sections, the entire issue will be uploaded into a free subscription service. You can subscribe to this free feed here: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/feed/

Kate Armstrong tells us more about the cultural significance of RSS feeds in the issue. The Vancouver artist and writer is one of Canada’s most important theorists and practitioners in the field of new media and technology studies. Scholars like Laura Marks show how art forms as seemingly disparate as Islamic writing and new media share an interesting cultural “lineage” via their common deference to the “line” as a visual measure of infinity. In her essay, “Taking a Line for a Walk,” the spatial design of Islamic script in history presents an alternative, more abstract concept of reasoning closer in structure to digital writing than to prior, more verbally-centred western traditions of representation. Some of the recent developments in the visual structure and appearance of writing on screen derive, as we see in Jim Andrews’s piece, from new networking technologies. The “network,” for Andrews, functions not just as a structure of information exchange with multiple nodes of input and output, it suggests an actual paradigm of cognition as a continuous, process-driven social activity. The writings and artworks he reviews in his article share a creative interest in exploring these key aspects of the Web as important aesthetic qualities. The network as a model of both cultural creation and organisation retains a growing influence outside the Web, as is evident in both Sandra Seekins’s research into biotech art and Sharla Sava’s review of recent work by this issue’s featured artist, Antonia Hirsch. Hirsch’s inventive reconstructions of cartographic information exemplify the visually abstract nature of modern knowledge, discovering in it a wealth of creative patterns and image relations – many of them as politically informative as they are aesthetically pleasing. A more critical approach to current artistic interests in networks and digital media appears in Gordon Winiemko’s account of New Media installation art, where he shows how a clearly fetishised response to information networks can result in a too naive appreciation of abstract processes over creative agency and wilful design.

Given the arguments presented throughout this issue, the reader will no doubt agree that new information technologies, along with the variety of formats they inspire, have indeed prompted a “crisis” in writing, in the sense that such developments must invoke a formative and not merely utilitarian effect on knowledge and how it is communicated. Perhaps this complex cybernetic intermingling of machine and mind appears clearest in Darren Wershler-Henry’s contribution, an inspired exploration of the typewriter as a device uniquely representative of the historical and epistemological convergence of the dicté and typist into a single dictation apparatus. Wershler-Henry’s typewriter as authoring machine invokes an especially dynamic image of all media technology, one forever fraught with the tension of being part language document, part language system – part artifice, part intelligence.

Andrew Klobucar / Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies

• other islands in this text-fed stream

  • Guest-Editor: Andrew Klobucar
  • Alternate Readings: The “In This Issue” Remix
  • Alternate Readings: Questions
  • Alternate Readings: Minimalist
  • Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams Vancouver Launch
  • Kevin Magee
  • Average Country
  • Early Attempts at Computer Poetry
  • YouTube Poetry
  • a crisis in cognition
  • Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies
  • J. R. Carpenter
  • Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams