The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg

Abstract

For the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.