My work extends from visual and kinetic text to a focus on digital writing in
networked and programmable media. It explores language in New Media and how
innovative poetics can be a means of engaging digital media. My focus is on
the poetics of New Media insofar as New Media explores the materiality of the
medium it engages. I am interested in the resonance between digital installation
art, experimental film/video, and innovative poetry and in how we tend to be
innovative in visual digital media while sometimes not seeing the opportunities
of language in New Media. I am interested in the way language is a force of
materiality, and the way it breaks through to become a force in its own right,
and the way code can also be a material presence in works of digital art. This
means image, text, interactivity, and programming. This includes creative writing
for digital media and poesis as a way of thinking through a given material.
The historical practice and theory of innovative poetics (such as 20th century
experimental movements, sound poetry, concrete poetry, procedural literature,
and language poetry) is of interest as a means of creating and experiencing
innovative work in digital media. Additional related fields of study that inform
this orientation include art, philosophy of language, cyberculture and theories
of computing, the social context of art-making and the ideological situation
of the work of art, experimental music, John Cage, writing systems, indeterminacy,
chance, assembly, Buddhist philosophy, and small press/samisdat publishing regardless
of format.
I try to include guest artists through events I help organize, such as the "E-Poetry"
festivals and the "Language & Encoding Symposium", to enrich course
content through contact with in-person practitioners. Students are welcome to
gain real world arts experience by contributing to the work of running some
of these events. I also direct the Electronic Poetry Center, one of the largest
and most cohesive digital collections of poetry in the world. I welcome internships
and projects related to the Center, such as author pages or other curatorial/editorial
undertakings, and students interested in digital publishing or similar engagements
of digital archival or special collections practice. I am a Core Faculty member
of UB's distinguished Poetics Program and I am active in extending the rich
context of that Program across disciplines. My own work engages the play in
language and explores new patterns of lexical expression. I am interested in
working with graduate students in a variety of contexts and a wide range of
media who wish to explore their own creative and theoretical possibilities in
programming, visual, and sound aspects of New Media, who would like to devote
attention to language in their work, who wish to gain exposure to works of networked
and programmable media, programming, and visual/kinetic/interactive text/image,
or who wish to study innovative poetry and experimental art movements of the
twentieth century.
