Acknowledgments.zip

Compressing acknowledgments for this book requires zipping up two decades of diverse forms of collaborative media play: scanning books, writing code, making poems, ripping movies, coding pages, remixing contents, reading essays, playing games, and sharing files. These assemblages took shape before the book was even an imagined outcome, in everyday practices before media scholarship, in the poems before the poetics. If much of this book is about the limitations of certain normative forms, a ZIP file rendered in three pages is surely the most incommensurate format for thanks. I mourn the data lost in the compression format called “acknowledgments” and beg forgiveness for the gaps and holes in these notes.

The earliest components of this project were created in 2008, but their imagination extends back to 2004, when I began my work with Craig Dworkin at Eclipse. Of course, Craig’s impact on this work can be traced in so many of the preceding pages. For now, I’ll suffice it to say here that no one has played a bigger role in the why or the what or the how I read. Similarly, in 2006, I had the opportunity to start collaborating with James Hoff on the little magazine 0 to 9 and the Complete Minimal Poems of Aram Saroyan, for whom my gratitude is both endless and nameless. Great things come in three—my heartfelt thanks to the profundity of collaborator-ship with Avi Alpert will never be, as they say, “good enough.”

Growing up in rural Utah, I craved the forms of academic mentorship that have characterized my postsecondary education. I must list a few mentors here, whose conversations echo throughout these pages: Christopher Bush, Eduardo Cadava, Rubén Gallo, Tom Levin, Mendi+Keith Obadike, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Keith Sanborn, Kaja Silverman, P. Adams Sitney, and Cornel West. Added to this list is another set of three: mentors from my graduate study at UPenn. Charles Bernstein gave me the opportunity to work for PennSound when I needed it most and has shaped my sense of play and poetics before and beyond our work together. Al Filreis has anchored and inspired work that scales from the printed page to the live mic to the recorded track. Outside the institution, I remain transformed by all networks of publication and conversation with Tan Lin.

After graduate study, this project continued over a two-year interlude at Northwestern University, where I found support in a digital humanities postdoctoral fellowship at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. I remain grateful for the conversations and friendship of Thomas Burke, John Alba Cutler, Harris Feinsod, Hi’ilei Hobart, Jim Hodge, Jules Law, Susan Manning, Ira Murfin, Wendy Wall, and Tristram Wolff.

It would be a gross understatement to say that the 2020s have, thus far, been a challenge. Pandemics, wars, losses, and countless crises have marked my time since joining the faculty at UCLA. And yet, within this turbulence I’ve found an intellectual community that continues to buoy me through it at all points. I’m profoundly grateful to Michael Chwe, Helen Deutsch, Johanna Drucker, Matthew Fisher, Yogita Goyal, Jonathan Grossman, Ursula Heise, Grace Hong, Chris Johanson, Nour Joudah, Sarah Kareem, Rachel Lee, Summer Kim Lee, Saree Makdisi, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Chandler McWilliams, Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, Romi Morrison, Veronica Paredes, Miriam Posner, Todd Presner, Casey Reas, Brian Kim Stefans, Wendy Sung, Chris Thompson, Justin Torres, and Erica Weaver. My UCLA Game Lab comrades have kept these ideas in play, with special gratitude to John Brumley, Jenna Caravello, Chris Kelty, Tyler Stefanich, and Eddo Stern for bringing me into their magic circles.

Most of all, a series of undergraduate and graduate students have been my testing ground for play and experiment within and beyond the classroom since the project began. In many ways, this book is written for them, to afford the freedom to invent new forms of playing readings at every interface: Andrea Acosta, Megan Anderson, Brian Arechiga, David Brown, Eunice Choi, Brenna Connell, Elliott Couts, Rosemary Galloway, Sarah Garcia, Taylor Leigh Harper, Annie Howard, Dylan Karlsson, Emma Keenan, Zackary Keibach, Chelsea Kern, Anthony Kim (to whom I owe additional thanks for his brilliant work on the index to follow), Rae Kuruhara, Maya Sol Levy, Tony Wei Ling, Yi Liu, Michael Luo, Mason McClay, Rhiannon McGavin, Eve McNally, Dandi Meng, Luca Messara, Sam Malabre, Janice Montecillo, Enrique Olivares, Jackie Quinn, Jinha Song, Angel Tolentino, Dalena Tran, Ariel Uzal, Jesslyn Whittell, Wiley Wiggins, Leia Yen, and Elliot Bear Yu.

The poetics of this project have been forged in conversation with a group of poets and artists with whom I have shared stages, ideas, and (perhaps most important) libations, while working on the manuscript. The list is too long for even an attempt at summary, but at its core are conversations with derek beaulieu, Andreas Bülhoff, Nancy Baker Cahill, Cori Copp, Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford, Jesse Damiani, Amze Emmons, João Enxuto, J. Gordon Faylor, Sophia Le Fraga, Alessandro de Francesco, Rainer Diana Hamilton, Sam Hart, Mark Johnson, Josef Kaplan, Alli Katz, Shiv Kotecha, Ilan Manouach, Steve McLaughlin, Holly Melgard, Tracie Morris, Joseph Mosconi, Jena Osman, John Paetsch, Allison Parrish, Jake Reber, Miljohn Ruperto, Alvaro Seiça, Ara Shirinyan, Divya Victor, Barrett White, Aaron Winslow, Peter Wu, Joey Yearous-Algozin, and Steve Zultanski.

A scholarly community of peers has kept this project timely and impacted my work in both conversation and written work. I would be remiss not to mention the profound effects of Mark Algee-Hewitt, Dušan Barok, Paul Benzon, Simone Browne, Jason Camlot, Lori Emerson, Kareem Estefan, Chris Funkhouser, Alex Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Annette Gilbert, Tung-Hui Hu, Patrick Jagoda, Tsitsi Jaji, Ben Kudler, Zach Lesser, Erica Levin, Danny Marcus, Meredith Martin, Shaka McGlotten, Joe Milutis, Omar Miranda, Michael Nardone, Josephine Park, Marjorie Perloff, Scott Pound, Rita Raley, Brian Reed, Sophie Seita, Paul Stephens, Kazys Varnelis, and Darren Werschler.

Above all, my thanks are owed to the team at the University of Minnesota Press, who have been truly exceptional in bringing this project together for both page and screen. From my initial conversations with Electronic Mediations series editors to the insightful readings of my anonymous reviewer to the exceptional work of Leah Pennywark, Anne Carter, and, truly, every single person I have had the pleasure of working with at the press across all departments: I never could have imagined that a publication process could be as pleasurable as this, or as inspiring. Before going to print, I am already overcome by the unmitigated honor to shelve this book within the series that has most impacted my thought to date.

This honor, I know, will be lost on a few. The writing of this book has seen too many losses to enumerate, but prime among them, for me, are my father, Scott James Snelson (1959–2021), and my mother-in-law, Sona Hakopian (1958–2016), to whom the work is dedicated. When I think of my most profound little databases, they revolve around these inventories of loss. Loving thanks are due to my family—Luann, Kristi, Clay, Sammy, LesLee, Jayla, Kylie, David, Naira . . . and Asta Theodore—to which I would like to add my gratitude to the many Elliotts who first taught me how to work and to the kinship networks we’ve since found in Glendale, California.

Finally, the phrase I’ve used to describe my relationship with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian has always been “living in collaboration.” It continues to be the most accurate in its radical compression: there are no words, or spaces between the words, that I have inscribed without her. For Mashinka, I would like to reserve the exception to the arguments I have made in this book: she remains the only non-contingent, un-conditional constant I have had the privilege to know.