AoIR AbstractAuthor(s): Janez Strehovec

Title: " The Internet Verbal "

***The mainstream of new media culture is bound mostly to digital images

and their remarkable transformations designed by means of 3-D computer

graphics. The Verbal, however, has not turned out as old-fashioned or

useless in the age of the Internet either. The word itself has also been

adjusted to the demands of speed of light, digital morph, digital

compositing and virtual reality. It has been transformed into a digital

word-image-body-movement (as a key component of on-line textuality) and

brought to life on computer screens and screens of mobiles and pocket PCs.

We bear witness to the birth of a highly visualized and flexible word,

incorporated into the film of verbal messages. These messages are often

based on the encoding of the verbal into a new language that omits vowels

and uses numbers as syllable substitutes. This can be classified as an

example of the sms language, which is otherwise divided into units with

the upper limit of 160 characters, and of netspeak. Although literati, in

comparison with artists in the field of visual and performing arts, find

it more difficult to adapt their activities to the trends of new-media

technology, we have been witnessing the rise of a number of digital

literatures. This does not only concern hypertext fiction, digital

literary objects on CD-ROM and web novels with collaborative authorship

but also literary creativity that uses the specificity of the web medium

in a creative manner and in this category falls also digital poetry in the

form of language art. By (Internet-based) language art we mean those

digital textual pieces with literary scripts, the existence of which is

rendered possible by means of modern software and which are placed on the

web and have highlighted visual and kinetic features. They can function

only on computer screens. Were they translated into a printed medium, they

would lose many of its specific features and turn into something of

entirely different nature. The Internet language art comprises literary

pieces, based on digital poetry in expanded sense and integrated into a

film of words, code based enhanced texts or even into a textual

environment of virtual reality. In order to understand the specific nature

of this new medium, which is being formed at the intersection of visual

and concrete poetry, net art and text-based electronic installation art,

based on text (e.g. Jenny Holzer’s and Jeffrey Shaw’s pieces), one needs

redefined aesthetics and literary theory that is to be opened to the

concepts and devices of film, television and new-media theoris. The

Internet language art is not a continuation of the print based

poetry-as-we-know-it (and experimental writing) by other means, but a

linguistic creativity in digital medium of its own (i.e. language art),

set at the intersection of net art, software art, text based electronic-,

web- and VJ- installations, and literary avant-garde. In the traditional

as well as in the modern and contemporary print-based poetry, the

definition and criteria judging over literary forms are connected with

those aspects of the texts concerning the content, metre, motif, syntax

and organization of textual components. We come across lyric and epic

poetry, free verse and verse with rhymes and assonaces, there are also

forms such as the sonnet, triolet etc. However, in on-line language art

the instance that generates the forms and judges them, is connected with

the programs used. The Internet language art is actually a kind of

»software poetry«, that is to say it is poetry generated by very special

programming and scripting languages (and their artistic patches), for

example Perl, Java Script, Flash, Shockwave etc. Today some

writers-programmers themselves are defining their digital textual pieces

as poems of the Flash or Shockwave Poetry (for example Komninos Zervos and

Giselle Beiguelman); there are also on-line courses in Flash Poetry which

means that this sort of practice is already established as a genre of its

own. The first section of this paper (after the Introduction in which a

broader features of Internet textuality are discussed) deals with Flash

literary texts by analizying the enhanced, expanded concept of its

temporal and spatial synatx as well as the features like Mouse-Over event.

Flash aesthetics is based on vectorial graphics – characterized by

abstract compositions, reactualization of pure (geometrical) modernist

forms and original ligthness and flatness (connected with strong

superficial effects and with compression effects), and with complex

non-linear times filled with intervals characteristic of data compression

and functionality within low-bandwidth conditions. The second part of this

paper is devoted to software art texts (e.g. code poetry by A. Sondheim,

texts by Mez, Perl Poetry, poetry generators like The Jabberwocky Engine,

etc.) in a sense that we are facing short, very compact and attractive

texts based on heterogeneous signifiers-in-freedom which operate as they

were both seductive textual »naked bodies« and the documents of the

textual uncanny due to their very copy & paste nature (natural language

coexists with IRC, netspek, Unix commands, ASCII art and programming

syntax) . It is of importance that in the moment when we are dealing with

the software literary textuality the programming features and algorithms

as well as interface and navigating procedures begin to behaviour as they

were literary devices. An important emphasis of this paper is also on the

understanding of the text as a network of relations; the specificity of

this relations (also their spatial and temporal syntax) is essential and

not the quantity and the meaning of the words applied. Regarding a present

scholarship on this topic I need to stress a shift from classical

hypertext theory (e.g. texts and collections of essays by George P.

Landow) to the cybertext theories (e.g. texts by Espen J. Aarseth, Digital

Poetics by Loss P. Glazier, and essays written by contributors to

Cybertext-Yearbook series, Vol. 2000 - 2002/3). Keywords: expanded concept

of digital textuality, net art, browser art, code poetry, programming

language poetry, Flash poetry, kinetic poetry, poetry generators, language

art, "mix, cuts & scratches" sensitivity, text as loop,techno suspense,

the textual uncanny, text as a naked body. Abstract: The Internet language

art is not a continuation of the print based poetry-as-we-know-it (and

experimental writing) by other means, but a linguistic creativity in

digital medium of its own (i.e. language art), set at the intersection of

net art, software art, text based electronic-, web- and VJ- installations,

and literary avant-garde. The first section of this paper (after the

Introduction in which a broader features of Internet textuality are

discussed) deals with Flash literary texts by analizying the enhanced,

expanded concept of its temporal and spatial synatx as well as the

features like Mouse-Over event. The second part of this paper is devoted

to software art texts (e.g. code poetry by A. Sondheim, texts by Mez, Perl

Poetry, poetry generators like The Jabberwocky Engine, etc.) in a sense

that we are facing short, very compact and attractive texts based on

heterogeneous signifiers-in-freedom which operate as they were both

seductive textual »naked bodies« and the documents of the textual uncanny

due to their very copy & paste nature (natural language coexists with IRC,

netspek, Unix commands, ASCII art and programming syntax)

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