&Now 2019 Conference

To say we live in media-saturated times would be an understatement, but it would also be a mistake to think “more mediated” than others. What would a world desaturated of mediation look like? Impossible. Rather than lament our media-saturation, poetics can interrogate the way communications travel through an always-already media-saturated world of substances. Poets don’t just write language, they build mediated infrastructures of possible communications, or impossible communications, that re-render Language’s conditions of possibility: the substance we live in and are surrounded by and are. This panel suggests media and language as co-constitutive of a topological poetics: a poetics that refuses distance in favor of an immanent critical examination of the language, poetry, and media our bodies, and our poems, are made of.

This panel will include Amanda Hurtado presenting S ACE   P, demonstrating that Clark Coolidge’s SPACE is based on a carefully regulated inscriptive network at the intersection of the disciplined body and a specific technology (the IBM composer), revealing otherwise hidden aspects of Coolidge’s compositional process. In an effort to disenchant the magical of twitterbots, Blair Johnson will examine the ramifications of technoanimism and the history of technological enchantment through a reading of two twitterbots: the lively and popular @LostTesla and Nick Montfort’s @one_algorithm. Brent Cox will present the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI), a poetics “think-tank” that is a creative-critical interrogation of the “becoming-institutional” of poetry, poetics, art, and, in an epoch living under the cosmos of management and financial culture, increasingly all things. Simon Eales will present findings from this year's Ecopoetry Workshop in Val Taleggio, Italy. And Travis Sharp will present a critique of poetics of alternative materialities, including biopoetics and digital poetry, which too often offer a liberatory aesthetics of substrative distension while remaining deeply imbricated in colonial and regressive logics.