Thinking New

Isn't that a beautiful thing, to think that we are all being recorded and as such elegized continually?

I think that a poet is really just a way of perceiving and interacting with the world. For fun, I would like to call it an interface, though more often than not it is considered an identity. Poetry is the expression of whatever comes out of that perspective in language. Of course, the term artist may best evoke what I'm describing, a person who is deliberate in her observation, and revelatory in his actions, but in regards to our world of technology I think the term poet fits better. Html is, after all, a string of numbers and letters, not pigments. A person who perceives and interacts with the world wide web in ways of significant insight may or may not be classified as a poet. Physicist, mathematician, engineer, may also be appropriate terms for people who choose deliberative language as their mode of expression, even if that language is actually a non-lingual iteration of latinate-aribic forms.

Tom Bissell makes the case for video games in his book, and what is clear from his analysis is that information technology, when it produces art will be something more than a composite of previous art forms, and may even border on something new. In his book, he lobs complaint against the gaming industry for failing to produce a legitimate work of art. I believe his blame is only halfway accurate. Before logic can take on the form of art there must be a sensitivity for consuming it. Imagine, how will that even come about? A purely logical, hypothetical reality construed as the part of us so completely irrational, numbers impregnated with affirmation and doubt.

All of the new technologies may be simplified as masses of information, tricked through metaphors into modes of interaction. (I could simplify information to basic operations, and from basic operations to elementary arithmetic--1,0) These are constructions of logic. They were created by and for people who, at least according to the mythic stereotype didn't care for, or understand art. It has been shudderingly whispered that the new technologies are incommensurate with art. Another way of saying that our future is incommensurate with art. Which, if you ignore the obnoxious art world image that the word connotes and imagine instead a word that conjures up fundamental questions of consciousness, gives cause for great concern. Now that we have finally accepted technology as our common denominator route to the future there has been a scramble to figure out what this perfectly logical construction means for the illogical mess that is the rest of us. The gap is enormous. But in a world where so much personal meaning resides in these machines, the imperative is huge.

What Bissell is asking for isn't possible from a design side only. It will only arise out of our shared experience with these logic devices. Once we exchange intellect that is bound up in unmediated organic experience, and receive one that is inextricable from the visceral experience of hypothetical logic we will find out that we can perceive meaningful art in our experiences with technology. Simply put, it will take a new way of thinking.

What will that new way of thinking be like? It is impossible to say. But rest assured that the work is underway. Every day millions of people interact with the new technology and make personal connections between the logical underpinnings of the data they see, and the illogical complications of their own lives. Every day the paradigm shifts and we split our reality between a world governed by subterranean calculations and a world governed by unknowable calculations. The new thinking is inevitable.

Unfortunately there is no consolation in inevitability. Because it is inevitable that our consciousness will be altered by our experiences with technology does not mean that the resulting consciousness will make beautiful things. Or even be aware that that is a possibility. Or even be aware that there are possibilities beyond vanity, pop-culture, and unrestrained consumerism. In fact, without some effort being made, there won't even be any awareness of the new consciousness. It will take a poet. By this I mean a person whose mode of expression is language, or any string of letters and numbers governed by semantics. It will take a person with a particular sensitivity to their environment to perceive the world of information and render it in a way that is evocative and meaningful, and perhaps, with luck, establishes some modicum of understanding for what the new thinking is, or at least points us in the direction of perceiving it ourselves. Who will we be calling poets in the next 10 years? Programmers, engineers, Sony?

Ander Monson is a traditional poet exploring a new medium. So far as I can tell he isn't writing poetry in html or making code haiku. But he is intending to innovate with the internet. What I've seen is pretty primitive, some hyperlinking between poems, an evocative interface. But he is a poet, which presupposes a certain sensitivity, and he is publishing on the web. Assume that means that he is paying attention to his experiences, perhaps even tracking what happens to him as he commits day by day to the new paradigm. It is this work of using the new technologies while trying to understand them that will bring the humanities a revelatory presence on the net.