Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.40.0111051755110.14538-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: CYBERMIND@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: might be of interest here - alan, might not then again -
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 17:55:56 -0500
Subject: [webartery] codepoetry for myself, i feel less and less that i fit in with webartery although i love the list - i don't see my work as codepoetry or as poetry, but as a kind of investigation of issues - sexual/political/linguistic/philo- sophical - every so often i try to explain myself - as in the sex/ anthrax/video piece I sent out a while ago. my interest in the literary - in terms of my writing (not reading necessarily) is secondary - peripheral - to the other issues. i'm not doing dynamic/interactive work - in the past week i've finished a cdrom w/63 tracks, as well as two large video pieces and a series of still image plus the texts - but this isn't in evidence online - you'd have to get the cdroms or cds of course - the bit i did in javascript years ago sits stillborn - i still use perl or what- ever is necessary but sending out programs wouldn't mean much to most people who don't work in a unix/linux environment. so - on one hand on poetics, i'm seen - not as a poet but as some sort of weird phenomenon - here i'm not seen as working in electronic poetry / new media, but as some sort of weird phenomenon. not fitting in, i edited the american book review issue on 'codework' - a term worked out with florian and myself as far as i know - ken wark as well - to replace 'codepoetry' or whatever. so that was published, covering talan (who also wrote for it), nn, myself, mez, and others - jodi for example - now there are more people - but the work doesn't fit in anywhere else - why doesn't anyone talk about nn's use of language here for example which is equally original - then it's made clear that language isn't enough - so we could bring her nato55 into the mix or discussion. and if we're talking about talan or mez, why no dis- cussion here about the _ideas_ in their work? who cares about influence or style? if we stopped there, we'd be discussing scansion of sonnets. or for that matter - the ideas in my work, etc.? the discussion seems, here, also about tuning more and more - i've done piece _x_ - we'll discuss the tuning - i don't do anything tunable unfortunately. where is brenda laurel when we need her (computer as theater approach)? so the reason i'm writing this - which isn't a rant or a fit but a sub-woofer murmur - i'm not sure - i saw i wasn't in deena's examples - her compendium - and then someone used the word or concept codepoetry to apply to my work and i felt, this is missing the mark widely - so if i'm going to be in the interstices, between the cracks in the floor (insisting there's no foundation), i'd rather at least not be put in a literary camp - somewhere else, people were trying to see me as a 'language poet' for example which fits even less - elsewhere i'm a 'video artist' which makes no sense - on muckraker i'm a musician - who knows whatever became of the dance work or early choreography - so i'd rather be seen as unfit/fitful/not fitting-in - than placed in uncomfortable positions - now they're interviewing mark anthony or marc antony on television, i'd better go - alan