The Pleasures of Collaboration

Abstract

New media literature — composed, disseminated, and read on computers— exists in various configurations. Many of these digital “events” (to borrow a term from Kathryn Hayles) are kinetic, visual, written, and sounded, published in online journals and stored eventually in archives. Unlike mainstream print literature, which typically assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media literature assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. In the case of new media poetry, the work sometimes remediates procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, while contributing to an emergent poetics.