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This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactives), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.

Movement, and in particular, gesture are arguably essential aspects of engendering human experience. But rather than taking “the body” or “cognition” for granted as conceptual starting points, we attend to the substrate matter in which gesture takes shape and place. An experimental approach to such questions motivates the exploration of responsive, and in particular, computational media created for sustaining experientially rich, improvisational activity. This book explores rehearsed as well as unrehearsed activity in distributed, continuous fields of responsive media—topological matter. This philosophical and interdisciplinary investigation reworks our understanding of embodiment and the formation of subjective experience. The investigation also puts in play notions such as interaction, responsive media and performativity, contributing to contemporary exchanges between art and philosophy. This draws on emerging techniques in computational video, realtime gestural sound, sensors, and active textiles, as well as experimental techniques in performance, movement, and visual arts. It also offers insights and inspirations for designers, media artists, musicians, movement artists, architects, researchers in multimedia, interaction design, interactive and responsive environments, architecture, science and technology studies, philosophy and cultural studies.

A visual culture of environmental deterioration, pollution and disaster has fast become part of our everyday media lives. This is accompanied by a wider move towards recognition, consciousness, and critique of the politics, flows of goods, and capital and consumer cultures, increasingly held responsible for environmental degradation. This book explores how artists can provide alternative ways in which to understand, visualise and critically intervene in the entanglements between media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. Chapter by chapter Screen Ecologies shows how artists are merging visual and new media methods to carve out alternative ways to understand, visualise, comment on and intervene in the complex entanglements of media and environment of the Asia-Pacific. In doing so it takes a new approach to advancing an agenda already shared by scholarly, activist and art critiques of climate change.