[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP==Cayley questions, tomorrow

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All--

Below I'm pasting a series o questions that were sent to John Cayley, who is
joining us tomorrow to discuss his work. The questions are assembled from
various emails, notes, telephone calls, and chance encounters amongst various
group members.  These questions will help frame tomorrow's discussion.

And a last reminder: we will meeting in the Beinecke tomorrow for our session.

Onward,
Richard Deming



++++++++++++++++++


Is digital poetics an apt name for the work that you're engaging in? Do you
prefer another term?  Why and why not (here the question wants to establish
what you take to be a genealogy for what you do)? How do you self describe your
work? These are initial questions leading to a larger question about genre in
that at a certain level hypertext/digital poetics seems to cut against
traditional boundaries of writing, visual art--dissolving them, revising
boundaries, and so forth.  Is this your understanding of your work?  Does it
defy these conventional distinctions and by so doing dissolve the idea of
distinct genres?  Or does it produce a new genre that will sit comfortably
alongside the others.  In some ways, this is an inquiry into what effect you
see digital poetics having on the arts as a whole.

Given that with visual art and writing, there are centuries' worth of aesthetic
judgments (no matter how contested these might be, especially in recent
decades), what new criteria are brought to digital poetics?  Also, what
aesthetic criteria carry over? This question is a desire to find out more about
what you mean when you say you don't make distinctions between digital
literature  and more traditional page-based literature.

How important is the insistence on writing as a trope in your sense of digital
poetics?  Is the necessary, or is it a trope that is a vestige, a ladder to be
eventually thrown away in oder for the work to really develop.

In more practical concerns, could you describe the
installation process of your projects and the responses you got from the
audience.  What do people in these spaces respond to?  What do they resist?