Looking back on this blog – I realize I should focus a bit more. Liveblogging should probably not go here, but somewhere else, and I can link to it from here.
I could also go back through every post to add tags. Cleaning up my other blogs seems impossible because they’re too huge already, but this one’s not so bad.
Why this blog? I thought it could help me to have a public non-pseudonymous presence. I have these essays on poetics from a few years ago, which I should post here and be done with it. I have feelings that my thoughts and visions about literature and blogging and my approach to the Internet have roots in common. Whatever that unity is, I have not yet found a way to explain it, even thought the feeling’s still strong.
Since my first encounter with computers and even the thought of AI, I have felt that computers in relation to humans are beautiful. Part of the love I feel is twined with feminism; the Cyborg Manifesto expresses this very well. Now, I had not read the Cyborg Manifesto when I was 10 and pounding away on the keys of my neighbors Apple II or Kaypro to make it write poetry. And yet felt so deeply sitting there that I was in love in an science-fiction-loving way, with the future, with a key, a key to liberation or unity of something broken in myself and in society. Before my contact with the net, I loved the idea of it. In front of the fuzzy glowing green letters on the black screen my mind was taking off to imagine infinite things; my own robotic arms extending into space in a mining colony, or the beautiful moment when the computer talked back. When you meet a tool like that, that is not quite a tool, that is an artistic medium but more than that, it’s an important moment. While all machines have beauty to me, I don’t feel the same about a xerox machine or even a typewriter, though maybe about certain architecture or performances or cities. Complexity, constructedness, potential and space – space as in room; an organic work of art that invites participation in its own construction. It makes the human imagination bigger. Some vast imaginariness collective unconscious reservoir of potential opens up!
This is nonsense and mysticism, but I still want to talk about it.