Eden+T.+Hade+2

Noland, Carrie. “Digital Gestures.” //New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories//. By Adalaide Kirby Morris and Thomas Swiss. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. 217-43. Print.


 * Eden Hade, Critical Article Presentation**
 * "...knowledge is transformed into a written analysis...the //kind// of knowledge it is changes. To know something in the body is not the same as to know it in the conscious mind, just as to know something consciously is not the same as knowing it in the body" (Pierre Bourdieu, qtd. in Hayles, original emphasis).**


 * Overview: “Digital Gestures”**

Carrie Noland’s article, “Digital Gestures,” printed in //New Media Poetics// in 2006, analyzes the claim that digital poetry evokes bodily machinations and kinetic energies in highly inventive ways. She researches the historic context and artistic renderings of the connections between mind and body and art, all the while reinforcing the concept of the body’s relation to text in the digital realm and inscription. Essentially, she codifies the term, “gesture,” as the “physical movements of the body in space” (218), as opposed to other researchers’ focus on digital art as an investigation of rhetoric.

Noland claims that digital poetry brings human consciousness of the motions that are necessary in interpreting and enjoying the act of writing. She defines “digital gestures” as almost an act of collaboratively dancing with one’s computer, which is the current writing tool of contemporary society. She continually reiterates that the purpose of her article is not wholly focused on analyzing digital poetry as a creative work of rhetoric, but of the visualization and animation of the words on the page: “I am less interested, then in the activity of words, sentences, or lexia than in the movements of letters, the traveling, warping, and morphing of characters. It is in these specific types of animations that the gestures of handwriting return in a new form” (219). Noland sets up her argument then by first addressing the counterarguments to her claim:


 * Counterclaim 1:** Computer technologies only dramatize the poetry on the screen; the technology expects us to reverse our subjectivity and undermine our “boundedness” by “refiguring perception” (220).


 * Counterclaim 2:** The body’s gestures are learned due to specific cultural demands, and the kinetic body responds when it is called on to perform; essentially, the utilization of the computer as an art of composing is a new gestural body, but performing the tasks (keyboarding, mousing, “surfing the net,” etc.) are considered unnatural body movements that we have conditioned our bodies to accommodate for.


 * Counterclaim 3:** Computer technologies dramatize the body’s otherness to computation and composing, “making palpable the distance between the individual body and the traces it leaves on the page” (221).

Noland dismisses the first two counterclaims, calling into our remembrance as readers and students of history that human beings have a long antiquity of adjusting to modern tools and resources as they are made available to us. Thus, we are bounded to technology because technology shapes us and our world, whether it is the invention of the wheel, the telephone, or the computer. She then focuses on the third counterclaim to her argument. She insists that digital writers are infatuated with the “fantasy of immediacy” (222) and that the argument put forth by critics concerning the act of writing as more intimate than typewriting is null and void in our current world of technology. She goes on to illustrate that a child’s entrance into the world of handwriting is traumatic, unnatural, and forced at the elementary level, and it is a painstaking process of fully integrating into the world of literacy (of which writing is a part). Other times, the children associate the study of handwriting with “barely bridled kinetic and libidinal energies” and often with the act of drawing (223). Noland argues that the act of handwriting and inscription should be viewed as synonymous with keyboarding; the act of composing is one of disciplined energies and physicalities, just within a different framework than physically writing on a page.

Nolan creates a compelling argument for “digital gestures” as a genre of literature as an art. All forms of literacy – the interaction of words, meanings, movements, and letters – are disciplined physicalities that one must transition through in order to achieve comprehension and enlightenment and, hence, acquire education. Digital artists’ ability to play with the letter has touches of Modernism from the 20th century; there are remarkable similarities in which Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams re-contextualized and played with the conventions of the letter on the written page. By viewing digital poetry more so as an art form than literature, Nolan illustrates to readers that we are returning to the Socratic time of writing and reading as an interactive, kinetic experience, in which viewers are engaged with orality and performance. By setting written language in motion, digital poetry entices audiences to realize that text need not be fixed in time and on the page, but is a movement in which our understanding and comprehension is in direct conjunction with the space in which the text is seen on the screen and how we, as vusers, interact with it (//how// the text “performs,” not simply //what// the text is). In other words, digital poetry achieves the illusion of writing as a living art that is meant to be performed, not simply read silently.
 * Commentary**

I absolutely appreciate Nolan’s argument of digital poetry as an art; however, this article appears to suggest a movement away from the English/Literature departments in academia towards the Performing Arts. Again, the question is raised as to what academic department “claims” digital literature (Cayley labels digital poetry as “digital cultural production,” which can be an argument unto itself) as a discourse. I am not sure if Noland’s intention in defining “gestures” as dance was to achieve this commentary on discourse, but, again, we must look at purpose: is the digital piece’s purpose to illustrate a narrative fiction or poetic rhetoric or is it to demonstrate a visual performance for an audience? Is it to convey a thematic purpose in a creative space or is it to learn the programming in order to engage audience with animated visuals? This appears to be the unanswered questions in an ever expanding, undefined field of academia.


 * For Further Discussion:**

As writers, the act of composing is very personal to us. Does the computer screen take away the personal interaction of pen and paper? Or, are we so completely assimilated into a technological world, typing is only a natural progression of writing and composing? Or, do we lose our personal connection to writing by bypassing paper and pen?

As academics, are we “stuck” in the traditional idea of poetry that we cannot move beyond the ideas of syntax, semantics, theme, metaphor, etc. to appreciate the new world of digital poetry? Or, is written poetry and digital poetry simply two different mediums that should be analyzed and comprehended within two different frameworks?

As Noland suggests and Cayley reiterates, is digital literature only an extension of the history of writing in which authors engage with new tools and ideas in order to create something new? Or, again, is digital literature losing sight of the necessity of a carefully chosen word and moving towards a carefully chosen animated movement?

From “The Pixel/The Line”: Has writing become as much about the design of the interaction and the text as it is about the composition? Is this generational? Is this new age? What is the implication for our courses with "digital native" students? Should academia rethink its structure as a whole to incorporate these technologies for the "new age" thinker?