In his TCR 2-50 essay, Interstitial, David Jhave Johnston describes his Poetic Method:
I am a poet
Or at least I call myself one
Even though I rarely write in verse
I am a digital poet
In naming files and displaying those phrase-like named structures
Concurrently with the images or sounds or films that they name
Poems emerge
interstitial
interstice
(suture) (itch)
mathematied
mathematizing
mathematamachine
Kevin Magee / to write as speech
Digital poetics occurs at a computer, but instead of pulling out a feather and quill or a moleskin and a fountain pen, and instead of opening Notepad or Word or whatever processing software normally allows access to writing, alternative methodologies exist:
step 1. record a lot of little distinctive audio/video files
step 2. import, sort and open in a viewer/player
step 3. slip clear and resiliently concise into empathic logic
step 4. rename the audio files if words occur in your mind
step 5. upload
step 6. display file names on website during playback
Jhave’s listing of “Constraints” to his process calls to mind other artists who use poetics to define, shape and reticulate their process - whatever they may be. Many of Mark Amerika’s “spontaneous theories” unfold in this way. In a 2005 essay called “Portrait of the VJ” he lists “Ten Things You Can Say about VJ-ing without Wondering If It’s Necessarily True.”
1. What You See Is What You Get.
2. What You Get Is Simultaneously Cinematic and Pixelated.
3. What You Transgress Is Video Art.
4. What You Point Back to Is Video Art.
5. What You Refrain from Repeating Is Video Art.
6. What You Do Is Changer the Way You See.
7. What You Steer Clear of Is Conceptual Art.
8. What You Reinvent Is Beauty as a Subliminal Force in Consciousness.
9. What You Create Is Always Hyperimprovisational.
10. What You Avoid Is Theorizing Your Practice to Death
Or in his 2000 online concept art ebook: How To Be An Internet Artist Mark Amerika instructs us:
1. Create a fictional identity.
2. Begin the branding process by turning this fictional identity into your domain name.
3. Register you domain name and set up an account with an Internet service provider (ISP).
4. Build a site-specific narrative mythology out of bits of data and then use the ISP to distribute this data to the niche markets that are waiting to form (digitally converge).
… and so on.
(both lists reprinted in META/DATA (MIT Press)
Another example of a poetic method that becomes part of the work are Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings. In the book Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings (1995) Ono writes:
“Thirty years ago, in 1962, I did an exhibition of instruction paintings at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. A year before, I did a show of instruction paintings at AG Gallery in New York, but that was exhibiting canvases with instructions attached to them. Displaying just the instructions as paintings was going one step further, pushing visual art to its optimum conceptualism; it would open up a whole new horizon for the visual arts. I was totally excited by the idea and its visual possibilities. To make the point that the instructions were not themselves graphic images, I wanted the instructions to be typed.”
In 1966, speaking at Indica Gallery, London, Yoko Ono said:
“Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot foresee, and brings the concept of “time” into painting. It immediately eliminates the usual emphasis put on the original painting, and art comes down from the pedestal.
Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the concept of time and space. And then, sometimes later, the instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.”
David Jhave Johnston writes that created Interstitial withing the following Constraints:
The filmmaking process:
1. The equipment needed to fit into my pockets; and to be discrete, instantaneously usable, yet of sufficient quality for online viewing.
2. The subjects of the film (the objects, insects, and animals) were not to be manipulated in anyway, but simply witnessed.
3. No external/artificial lighting.
4. No changing any details of the context or setting.
5. No post-processing.
The web-design:
1. The work is generative from an archive of material (400 AV files, action script.)
2. No interactivity. The work is simply viewed.
3. No special effects. The only transition is a cross fade.
4. No end. Endless loop: once begun the website streams: sequentially then in stochastic variations ad infinitum …
5. Only the rhythm of the editing changes (as breath changes). This is controlled homeostatically by bandwidth and cpu power.
other islands in this text-fed stream
