Connect and immerse: a poetry of codes and signals

Abstract

This article investigates how codes and signals were employed in avant-garde poetry and art in the 1960s, and how such attempts were performed in the wake of cybernetics and (partly) through the use of new media technologies, such as the tape recorder and the computer. This poetry—as exemplified here by works by Åke Hodell, Peter Weibel, and Henri Chopin—not only employed new materials, media, and methods for the production of poems; it also transformed the interface of literature and the act of reading through immersion in sound, through the activation of different cognitive modes, and through an intersensorial address. On the one hand, this literary and artistic output can be seen as a response to the increasing intermedation (in Katherine Hayles's sense) in culture and society during the last century. On the other hand, we might, as contemporary readers, return to these poetic works in order to use them as media archaeological tools that might shed light on the aesthetic transformations taking place within new media today.Jesper Olsson is LiU Research Fellow and Swedish Academy Researcher at the Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests include literature and contemporary art, media history, avant-garde aesthetics, and memory studies. His most recent books are (edited together with Jonas Ingvarsson), Media and Materiality in the Neo-Avant-Garde (Peter Lang, 2011) and Remanens. Bandspelaren som re-pro-du-dak-tionsteknologi (CO-OP Ed. 2011).