Digital Poetics • Syllabus • Assignments • Resources• Discussion

8:173 TOPICS IN DIGITAL MEDIA
Digital Poetics

Professor Dee Morris
Office: EPB 460
Office hours: Thurs. 2:00-3:45 pm & by appointment
dee-morris@uiowa.edu

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COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

When Ezra Pound compared artists to antennae that pick up and transmit the signals of emerging environments, he was referring to early 20th-century wireless technologies like the telegraph and radio.  The focus of this course is the work of early 21st-century writers who produce, distribute, and archive their work in digital technologies.  Our specific aim will be to explore contemporary digital arts and culture through the emergent formations of new media poetry. 

Beginning with an examination of the transition from oral to print to digital means of creating, disseminating, and storing information, we will consider such questions as these:

• How does new media poetry alter the definition and activity of the "writer" and the "reader"?
• What do digital poems teach us about transformations in cultural logic and forms of cognition in an age of information? How is new technology altering the ways in which our minds work?
• How do the sounds, sights, animation, and interactivity of programmable media refashion traditional poetic components like the line, the stanza, and the page? 
• What is the relationship between digital poetics and popular culture? How, for example, are digital poetics shaped by contemporary sampling, mixing, and collaging, gaming, advertising, and ambient music?
• Is it possible read a website as a mutable, collaged, and collaborative poem?
• How do websites, discussion lists, zines, and flame wars reposition poetics as a communal rather than a solitary art?
• How has new media archiving of hard-to-find avant-garde poetry changed the contemporary poetry canon ? 
• The end of the Cold War and the design of the Web both took place in the 1980s. What are the potentialities--utopic and dystopic--of a system connecting the world's computers into a single network?
• All that aside, what are the pleasures and perils of new media poetry?

In addition to web-based poetry and art, readings for this course include historical and theoretical texts in three areas: the transitions from oral to print to digital technology, media-specific analysis of networked and programmable poetry, and theories of cyberculture. 

To help us come to grips with the language of new media, course work will include required posts in response to the readings, in-class presentations, creative experiments, 2 short papers, plus a midterm and a final examination.

KEY TO THE HOT LINKS IN THE CLICKSTRIP

SYLLABUS: This overview of the course includes a list of required texts, a reading schedule, descriptions of collaborative and written assignments, and a statement of classroom ethics.

DISCUSSION: This is a place to post, to ask questions, to make observations, and/or to think out loud.