These two short books, Tactical Poetics and Optimised Poetics – written collaboratively by Darija Medić and Uroš Krčadinac – introduce poetic practices of co-creational textual production in the age of mass surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital commodification.
Using natural language processing technologies in (un)intended and (non)subversive ways of reclaiming appropriation and identity correction, the authors create forms of digital literature weaved in and responding to technical protocols of contemporary algorithmic culture.
The booklets gather several approaches of both authors into two methods of producing language as expression in computational culture: that of optimization and of tactics. The books follow the structure of this method – creating a conversational space between the two authors through their individual computational poetic pieces in both books, rather than separating books by author. The hierarchy of naming is also distributed so that both authors have one booklet for which they are read as the “first” author and the other for which they are the “second” one, exploring the confines of intersectional norming.
Together, these books form a proposal for thinking what could be today’s landscape of computational poetics. They are by no means exhausting the potentiality of methods in this space, but more so a capsule, in wish to be joined by other resonating poetic threads.
If we consider Katherine Hayles in her “We become the codes we punch” legacy and think of the transformative potential of the embodiment of daily habitual practices, then poetry – or what Donna Haraway would call speculative fabulation – doesn’t just end in being a form of expression. It becomes a form of survival.
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Uroš Krčadinac is a digital artist, technologist, writer, and educator interested in novel ways of sensing and feeling the shared world of humans, networks, and data. Spanning data art, computer science, writing, mapmaking, and animation, his transdisciplinary media projects introduce novel poetics of understanding invisible systems, structures, and feedback loops within which we live. Currently working as an Assistant Professor of Digital Art and Computing at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade, you can find him at https://krcadinac.com/.
Darija Medić is a poetic media explorer of (un)coded behavior in the networked world, interested in language and its social practices, media and its archaeology, technology and its philosophy, public space and its shaping. Finding meaning through making and experiment, she develops exhibition and knowledge exchange formats as an artist, curator and researcher. Currently at the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance PhD program at CU Boulder, Colorado, USA, you can find her at http://syntaxerrror.com, @d4rm4r IG, and at the local open market.
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