Following a post on my old blog, SpamJam poetry as I called it (and other spam/e-mail art concerns on my previous blog @camillepb::e-textuality), I wrote an essay for the to-be-published new bilingual FR/UK academic review called “regards croisés / crossed looks” (by the researchers of Laboratoire Paragraphe / dept. Hypermedia / Paris 8) that focuses on digital literary forms, with a multicultural and pluridisciplinary perspective (literature, communications studies and new media studies, semiotics, psychology…).

My essay targets non-identified textual forms that help reconsidering the Jackobsonian poetics in the light of the conceptual frame it is derived from: the theory of communication by Claude Shannon. These are interventional processes: the Codeworks of the collectives NN and JODI on virtual communities' listervs. What is new in them which could define these processes as poetic? What is at stake in the context of information processing by a community that both welcomes and rejects them, thus determining their practice as parasitic? I will try to reconsider one of the great metaphor of post-modernist poetry, noise, but I will re-materialize it in the digital context of protocols and codes. Out of this “Spam art”, there is an agency effect which repositions actors in the informational system. A new set of literary metaphors will then emerge, among which a textual economy of noise processing in text and the deprogramming of social conventions.

Essay - in English / in French

more references to e-mail/spam art

- very cool interview of Frédéric Madre (who I mention in the essay but whom I didn't spend enought time on) by Josephine Bosma on the subject of "spam art" (on Rhizome) - and more on F. Madre on Homo Numericus

- a networked artists' community project: "Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour", on the http.uk.net website, initiated by Furtherfield.org. 

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