Morris.+New+Media+Poetics

=Morris, Adalaide. "New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write."= //New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories//. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. 1-46. Print.

Abstract
No Abstract.

Argument
New Media Poetics: As we may think/How to Write, is the first article in a complete of New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Morris aims to not only set the tone and establish the meaning for new media poetics for this selected works that follow in the book; the author aims to establish the primary difference between poetry that is made with current technologies, such as JavaScript or QuickTime and digital poetry that utilizes hypertext mark-up. Morris argues the difference in viewing digital text as a product versus seeing it as a process. She supports her argument by explaining “the three inseparable components” (9), of digital poetry. The components include: data fields, code and display. Morris acknowledges that the last component of display is the only element immediately visible to an audience. However, without the other two components of data fields and code, digital poetry would not exist as we know it. With this argument Morris along with using supporting research and works from Lev Manovich, Vannevar Bush, Gertrude Stein and others Morris establishes the foundation of how culture thinks about new media poetics.

Key Passages
Adalaide offers an explain for the title of her article:

"The choice of the term "new media poetics" as a title for this volume, is meant to bring into view on ongoing elastic and capacious process rather than a taxonomically precise product: as befits the processual or process-driven nature of computers...the focus in on the act of making rather than the thing made, on forces rather than stable formations" (6-7).

Adalaide poses a question to her audience, which builds the foundation for new media poetics:

"What is it we know, but do not yet know we know? The most interesting thinkers of contemporary media are those who, like Stein, insist on a knowledge that exceeds current conceptual categories: the embodied knowledge...what we think is conditioned by concepts developed, for the most part, in a world of print" (2).

Selected Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. //Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.// Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Andrews, Jim. 2004. "Avant Auteur: An Interview with Jim Andrews." //Avant Gaming//. http://www.avantgaming.com/andrews.html. (accessed February 4, 2005).

Bernstein, Charles. 1992. //A Poetics.// Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bush, Vannevar. [1945] 2003. "As We May Think." In //The New Media Reader//, ed. N. Waldrip-Fruin and N. Montfort, 37-47. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev. 2001. //The Language of New Media.// Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev. 2003. "New Media from Borges to HTML." In The New Media Reader, ed. N. Waldrip-Fruin and N. Montfort, 13-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stein, Gertrude. 1998a. "Composition as Explanation." In //Gertrude Stein's Writing's 1903-1932//, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 520-529. New York: Library of America.

Stein, Gertrude. 1998b. "Portraits and Repetition." In //Gertrude Stein's Writing's 1932-1946//, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 287-312. New York: Library of America.