Keyboard Performances single work   prose  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Keyboard Performances
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Keyboard performance is a form of visual poetry tracing the invisibilia of a text as it is typed. Specifically, the texts are others’ poems and, to date, mine have all been written by women. Surfacing the poem’s marks through keyboard input returns an abstract gaze of both the poem and the keys. Just as Winkler’s (2021) spelled-forms use process to visually represent words, clues for keyboard performances are in their design. A keyboard interface is the framework to atomise poems into individual keystrokes, and choices are made regarding title, colour scheme and keystroke style. Where letters repeat, layered keystrokes suggest density, which is reminiscent of Winkler imagining repetition in spelled-forms as three-dimensional (p. 39). In contemplating how Emerson (2014) relates the procedural capabilities of digital media to labour, keyboard performance transforms a labour-oriented task like word-processing into a literary subject experimenting with form. The inclination to perform poems written by women challenges the presumption that feminised work is necessarily obedient, subservient or invisible. These visual poems contribute to the field of poetry by expanding notions of simulacra and translation-as-concept. Additionally, they draw attention to how “elusive keystrokes can be captured and reused” (University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 1).' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon TEXT Special Issue Digital Realism no. 69 2022 25658613 2022 periodical issue 'The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a heavy reliance on digital technologies: workplaces and classrooms have retreated to Zoom meetings; online video game narratives and streaming services have become a staple of contemporary entertainment; and social media pervades our life and seeks to distract us at every turn. Existence is now infused with non-human computer language. Even contemporary print texts display what N.K. Hayles calls the “mark of the digital” (2008, p. 159). Hayles (2008) argues that contemporary literature is deeply
    interpenetrated by electronic textuality:

    digital technologies do more than mark the surfaces of contemporary print novels. They also put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… More than a mode of material production (although it is that), digitality has become the textual condition of the twenty-first-century literature. (p. 186) (Publication abstract)

    2022
Last amended 17 Jan 2023 09:36:14
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X