Notes

1. On the “meaningfully collaborative” feedback loops that bridge little databases of play with large language models in AI Dungeon specifically, see Minh Hua and Rita Raley, “Playing With Unicorns: AI Dungeon and Citizen NLP” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14, no. 4 (2020): 26.

2. For one particularly salient recent critique of scale in large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP), see Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜,” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021), 610–23.

3. While it might be uncommon to italicize the names of websites, I introduce this typographic modulation to signal both the inheritance of the little magazine in these sites and the sense of an authored work or edited collection. Despite outward similarities, these sites are not Google Books, Spotify, or YouTube: they are little databases.

4. Here, I’m invoking an art historical lineage for theorizing “media specificity” or “media reflexivity” that includes Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss, among many others in an expanded field. For a historical foundation on these debates, see Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 23–38, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition” (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 47–56. More thematically, one might anachronistically head to a university library to peruse early issues of a little magazine called October. Whereas Greenberg argues that the essence and value of art lies in its ability to exploit the unique features and limitations inherent to its medium, Krauss challenges the very idea of a stable “medium” to instead emphasize self-aware explorations of media’s limitations as central to contemporary artistic practice. Both takes have been crucial touchstones for the criticism and, more importantly, production of art in the twentieth century and beyond. The “vivid evidence” that I propose in this sentence hinges on the ways in which media-reflexive works—from the historical avant-gardes and high modernism through to the neo-avant-gardes and beyond into conceptualisms, net art, and a range of post-digital practices—are often constructed to be “about” their own mediatic conditions. This very self-reflection often produces the most dramatic transformations to the ways in which these works inhabit their newly transcoded situations: offering a rare glimpse into otherwise invisible processes of networked digitization.

5. My use of “digital object” throughout owes to the philosophical work of Yuk Hui, whose On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) investigates the existential status of the digital object (see esp. 47–58). For Hui, digital objects are “objects that take shape on a screen or hide in the back end of a computer program, composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemas” (1). Most germane to this study, Hui delineates the parallel processes of individuation that constitute the digital object: the “objectification of data,” a mimetic process of digitizing materials, alongside the “datafication of objects,” a process of coding objects into a digital milieu (50). I return to Hui most directly in chapter 4 through a close reading of the database movies of People Like Us.

6. A key principle in Manovich’s foundational book The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), “transcoding” technically refers to platform conversions between digital formats. In computer science, this would apply to the recoding of an old program to function on a new operating system. Manovich expands the term to characterize the processes of translation operating between computer and culture, broadly construed. I deploy the terms “transcoding” and “transcoded objects” more specifically to characterize the effects that a digital milieu introduces to historical artifacts circulating online (45–48).

7. While I use the anachronism “world wide web” as a way to signal some distance from the early days of the internet, I’m also quite aware of the rapid half-life of media scholarship. As new developments in generative AI, the decentralized web, and virtual reality loom uncertainly on the horizon of the 2020s, I aim to both future-proof and historicize this intermediate study of the little database as much as possible. In just the same way that recently out-of-print periodicals remain the most difficult to discover as they await archival status, I believe that the history of the recent internet is constantly under erasure, happenstance disappearance, or wholesale reinvention, and thus remains as urgent a task for media scholars as any statement on the present or prediction of the future.

8. I present the history of my personal engagement with these sites here for two reasons. First, to acknowledge the specific positionality from which this study emerges. And, second, to point to the crucial role that embodied knowledge plays in this study. I foreground embodied knowledge in conversation with Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s principles of “data feminism,” which include the call to elevate embodiment over the illusory rationality and imputed objectivity of numerical data (Data Feminism [Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2020], data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/5evfe9yd/release/5).

9. For example, my working files for this project live within an elaborate hierarchy nested in a folder entitled “0_The-Little-Database” that currently contains 34.89 GB for 53,623 unique items. My personal repertoires of file management, naming conventions, and general organization all draw from these sites. Beyond this, I believe these hand-crafted sites also mirror nonspecialist user practices more generally. The connection between the two remains a core interest in all that follows.

10. For the printed poem, see: William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), 455. The audio recording of Williams’s reading for the National Council of Teachers of English and Columbia University Press Contemporary Poets Series on January 9, 1942, was one of the first files I produced for PennSound in 2008. That recording, among hundreds of others, can be found at writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC.php.

11. For a particularly germane example of this practice, Mark Goble concludes a final chapter on Williams in Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) by reflecting on “The Defective Record” from the current state of digital media: “The technologies of the present will also leave us with their histories, and whatever forms they might take, there is a good chance that they will look to many like a defective record that is better left behind. I hope someone saves them anyway” (304). Working in coordination with this hope, I take the challenge of Goble’s conclusion as a starting point, asking: what do we do, now, with what’s been saved?

12. Boris Groys, “From Image to Image File—and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

13. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008) and Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2021).

14. Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020).

15. Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) and The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

16. Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen (London: Sternberg, 2012).

17. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).

18. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

19. Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016).

20. The common knowledge on the role of the little magazine as both a vehicle and driver of modernism and the historical avant-gardes might be most tidily summed up by the slogan of a little database called the Modernist Journals Project, which has long maintained that “modernism began in the magazines.” Of course, this outsized statement is too complicated to unravel at a glance. While I return to some of the scholarship on modernism and the historical avant-gardes throughout this book, my focus is instead on the afterlives of these works, circulating online, which requires a different measure of attention. For a more complete argument on the essential role of the little magazine in the construction of these aesthetic and literary movements, the reader is directed to toggle between the Modernist Journals Project online (modjourn.org/) and its theorization by editors in Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).

21. On the provisional in little magazines and digital practices, following Bernstein’s concept of “provisional institutions,” see Sophie Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press: 2019).

22. See N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine,” in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 55–80.

23. Any list of these types of collections is bound to say more about the user’s proclivities than overarching technical specifications. My selection of the specific little databases featured in this book is driven by a focus on the revelatory powers of media-reflexive works of art and literature circulating online. That said, the reader is encouraged to explore some of these following public little databases to extend these arguments, to perform them otherwise, or to discover their limitations: AAAAARG, ed. Sean Dockray et al.; The Anarchist Library, ed. Anon; Artists’ Books Online, ed. Johanna Drucker; Cyberfeminism Index, ed. Mindy Seu; Electronic Literature Collection, ed. ELO; The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, ed. Al von Ruff and Ahasuerus; Library of Artistic Print on Demand, ed. Annete Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff; The Malware Museum, ed. Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen; The Marxist Internet Archive, ed. Zodiac et al.; Monoskop, ed. Dušan Barok; Net Art Anthology, ed. Rhizome; Open Door Archive, ed. Harris Feinsod and John Alba Cutler; The Post-Digital Publishing Archive, ed. Silvio Lorusso; Queer.Archive.Work and Library of the Printed Web, ed. Paul Soulellis; Queer Zine Archive Project, ed. Milo Miller and Chris Wilde; The SCP Foundation, ed. MAST Team et al.; Textfiles.com, ed. Jason Scott; and Vimm’s Lair, ed. Vimm.

24. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 44.

25. These engagements derive from the retrospective array of periodical codes articulated by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, in homage to a notion of bibliographic codes in the interpretation of social texts as articulated by Jerome McGann among others. See Brooker and Thacker, “General Introduction,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5, and McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 57.

26. Manovich, Language of New Media, 225.

27. Of course, our understanding of the database is also a cultural construction, one in which the one-to-one translation of “transcoding” inevitably falls flat; see Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 91–95.

28. Manovich, Language of New Media, 218–43.

29. Hayles, How We Think, 176–98. See, for example, Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1571–79. In response, Hayles cautions against privileging information over knowledge, advocating for a critical approach to digital technologies that recognizes the utility of the database while also acknowledging the importance of narrative in structuring human experience and knowledge (“Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts,” PMLA 122, no. 5 [2007]: 1603–8).

30. Across a range of works, Hayles advocates for the nuanced accounts of mediation found in the field of textual studies, which can be recalibrated as a mode of comparative media analysis within a complex of digital media environments. She proposes the necessity of “approaches that can locate digital work within print traditions, and print traditions within digital media, without obscuring or failing to account for the differences between them” (How We Think, 7).

31. I owe this orientation to The Working Group in the History of Material Texts at the University of Pennsylvania. The field is too vast to chart, but of particular note to this study, see Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Adriaan van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011).

32. N. Katherine Hayles, “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Postmodern Culture 10, no. 2 (2000): 3.

33. Hayles, How We Think, 13.

34. Kirschenbaum similarly contends for bibliographic methods of reading file formats and transcoded digital objects in Bitstreams. What distinguishes this method is an “uncompromising attention to conditions of meaning. Which is to say that bibliography is a way of knowing, a habit of mind whose remit is nothing less than accounting for all the people and things that make meaning possible, each in their own irreducible individuality” (13–14).

35. See Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–25. A wealth of works from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, media theory, sound and cinema studies, and queer theory inform my use of the term contingency, including, most prominently, among others: Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2006); Mary Anne Doane, Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); David Wylot, Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2019); Valerie Rohy, Chances Are: Contingency, Queer Theory, and American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2020); Dan DiPiero, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation In Music and Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022). Since drafting this introduction, I have honed my use of this term in conversation with Miljohn Ruperto’s kairotic formulation in An Operational Account of Western Spatio-Temporality (Los Angeles: X Artists’ Books, 2024).

36. Liu, Local Transcendence, 11.

37. Liu, 25.

38. For more on contingency, I discuss these reading practices at length in a special issue on “Inscriptive Studies” edited by Rita Raley and Paul Benzon: “Contingent Reading: A Poetics of the Search,” ASAP/Journal 7, no. 2 (2022): 385–407.

39. First published by e-flux in 2009, the article has led a viral afterlife in arts syllabi and media art social networks. For ease of reference, pagination refers to its location in the collected edition: Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 31–45. And yet, when calling the work to mind, the reader might best imagine these words inhabiting a circulating PDF or shared URL.

40. Steyerl, 32–33.

41. Steyerl, 42.

42. Steyerl, 44.

43. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, The Politics of Mass Digitization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 138.

44. See especially works that relate analog media formats to digital milieus, a sample of which is listed here in a sequential order featured in the chapters ahead: Dennis Tenen, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017); Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2012); Erica Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Media Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

45. Sterne, MP3, 11.

46. Sterne, 240.

47. See, for example: Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Safiya Umoja Noble Algorithms of Oppression (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 148–71.

48. Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 4–5.

49. Rather than attempt a pared-down citational list, perhaps a pedagogical anecdote will best summarize this position. In the fall of 2019, I taught my first graduate seminar at UCLA. I titled this course “Theory and Method on the Internet,” mostly so that we might operate under the acronym “TMI.” Wielding “too much information” provided both a methodological imperative for the study of internet culture and a statement on concomitant forms of affective overflow. In the first session of the course, I provided the students with reference to a little database of 262 recent monographs on the subject published over the previous decade for their own research alongside my own. I owe much to the conversations this course generated, which these pages can verify. Of course, these relations extend far beyond the limitations of academic prose. For now, a link outward to the course site—another little database—is perhaps the best summary of the network that informs this methodology: meta.humspace.ucla.edu/tmi/.

50. Adalaide Morris, “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write,” in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 6–7.

51. Nietzsche, letter toward the end of February 1882, in Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 1875–84, pt. 3, I: 172, quoted in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

52. To visualize this process, consider YouTube-ing the film Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames (youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0). While watching the play of pixels on your preferred device, connect a viewing of this digitized film once rendered in Flash but now streaming in VP9 through the YouTube interface, replete with related links, comments, buttons, your own account profile, the massive index hiding behind the search bar, the other tabs in your browser, and all the apps, icons, and files on your desktop or mobile phone waiting in the wings. Now oscillate back and forth from the movie itself to its public staging online.

53. Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History 30, no. 1, (1999): 26.

54. McGann and Samuels, 36.

55. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 160.

56. Inspired by Whitney Trettien’s articulation of the open-access Manifold platform in this same series, this project aims to “demonstrate how web-based platforms might be used today in tandem with a print monograph . . . in ways that are increasingly sustainable, technologically stable, and effective at shifting a field’s focus” (“Introduction,” in Cut/Copy/Paste [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021]).

1. This number fluctuates depending on the date the site is captured. The most complete rendering of the website I could track down was captured by the Internet Archive on June 24, 2004. As of this writing, I have assembled all files listed in site inventories, with the notable exception of the German version of Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I will discuss this particular file in more detail later in this chapter.

2. It is perhaps telling that the most established surveys of practices in the digital humanities are gathered as a series of “debates” rather than any other forum for collective knowledge building. (See the ongoing series edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein: Debates in the Digital Humanities.) Occasionally, these debates boil over into controversy. Recent examples include the wholesale critique of computational literary studies by Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 601–39 (and its various official and unofficial responses), and Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016, lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/ (and its attendant responses). From all directions, the practice of computational literary techniques remains an open question.

3. For a thorough accounting of the state of the field as of this writing, see especially Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte, eds., Global Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

4. Da, “Computational Case,” 601.

5. Ian Bogost Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 3–20.

6. Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies, no. 2 (2013): 7, gamestudies.org/1302/articles/nooney.

7. Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 3.

8. For a recent example of ongoing definitional boundaries, see Katja Müller’s Digital Archives and Collections: Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage (New York: Berghahn, 2021). Despite technical specificity, Müller justifies the use of “digital archive” as an “emic term” (27). From this anthropological perspective, a looser popular use of the “archive” for digital collections remains the accepted norm. This argument bolsters my interchangeable use of terms like “repository,” “collection,” “library,” or “archive” throughout the discussion of little databases to follow. I’d also like to point the reader toward Michael Nardone’s forthcoming work on the “repository” featured in his dissertation “Of the Repository: Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 2019), as well as Manuel Brito, “Electronic Poetry and the Importance of Digital Repository,” CLCWeb 16, no. 5 (2014).

9. See Kenneth M. Price, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a name?,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009); Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–125.

10. Price, p40.

11. Price, 40n11.

12. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 3.

13. Braddock, 6 (emphasis original).

14. Braddock, 6.

15. For an updated view of collecting aesthetics, see, in particular, Domenico Quaranta, ed., Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia, Italy: LINK, 2011).

16. See, Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 1–24.

17. De Kosnik, 9.

18. Kate Eichorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 5.

19. Craig J. Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 11.

20. Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice, 27. See also Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1999), 2.

21. The founding manifesto of Textz, “napster was only the beginning,” has recently returned to a pared-down version of the site at textz.com/about/. Images and citations from long-lost components of the site are referenced by original URLs throughout. These references can be tracked at various points of capture by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/).

22. For recent scholarship on copyright law and internet culture, see Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (New York: Zone, 2010); Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014); Aram Sinnreich, The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report (New York: College Art Association, 2014).

23. See Joe Karaganis, ed., Shadow Libraries: Access to Educational Materials in Global Higher Education, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), and Memory of the World, ed., Guerilla Open Access (Coventry, UK: Post Office, Rope, and Memory of the World, 2018). For more personal practices that shadow the little databases, see Henry Warwick, Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014).

24. See Michael S. Hart, “History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg,” Project Gutenberg, August 1992, gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philosophy.html.

25. Textz, “napster was only the beginning.”

26. For more information on Usenet and examples of the ASCII scenes that Textz references, see the little database collected by Jason Scott at textfiles.com.

27. See Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992). Importantly, this book was used a part of an elaborate ruse, described below.

28. See Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015). For Browne, dark sousveillance is “an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices” (21). For Textz, a critique of global networks of surveillance emerges from its hyperbolic simulation of pervasive web-trackers.

29. This statement is not to undermine a critique of representation in this or any collection of its type. Indeed, these facts should be made clear and immediate. In this instance, I highlight these aspect of the collection to point to basic critical reading practices that precede the need for analytics to confirm these facts. More generally, statistical approaches routinely run into presumptive biases in data analysis when attempting to encode race, gender, and ethnicity in order to make critical claims. See, by contrast, the “strangeness” of data in Yanni Alexander Loukissas, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 3.

30. For a concise history of “content” online, up to the present, see Kate Eichorn, Content (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2022).

31. Textz, “napster was only the beginning.”

32. “Content, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary online, oed.com/view/Entry/40144.

33. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 16. Sterne deploys Lewis Mumford’s concept from Technics and Civilization to describe digital encoding as a “disruptive container technology” that transforms the way in which works are stored, circulated, and consumed (8). According to Sterne, the format represents a radical shift away from the physicality and the constraints of analog media, dislocated from its original context and reproduced in a variety of digital environments.

34. Adriaan van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011), 39.

35. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

36. Dennis Tenen, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017), 5.

37. Tenen, 13.

38. Van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds, 40.

39. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 7.

40. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 160, 148.

41. Chun, 167.

42. For the most comprehensive of these histories, see Eric Fischer, “The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874–1968,” archive.org/details/enf-ascii.

43. Ambulanzen/Textz, “napster was only the beginning.”

44. Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, “ASCII Imperialism,” in Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, ed. Susan Leigh Star and Martha Lampland (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 177–99.

45. Tenen, Plain Text, 202.

46. Tenen, 3, 6.

47. Sterne, MP3, 16.

48. For studies relating the poetics of the glitch to the politics of digital infrastructures, see Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2020); Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011); Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).

49. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 153.

50. McGann, 151.

51. See Lisa Gitelman,“Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 5–6.

52. McGann, Radiant Textuality, 152.

53. Tan Lin, “Disco as Operating System, Part One,” Criticism 50, no. 1 (2008): 93.

54. Lin, 87–88.

55. For a sample of the book’s reception in the English context, see “Not a Ripping Read,” The Economist, August 29, 2002,: economist.com/books-and-arts/2002/08/29/not-a-ripping-read.

56. Here, the space-defying convergence of “plain text” (ASCII files in general) and “plaintext” (nonencrypted or decrypted text) might be seen to index the definitional crux of both this chapter and the Textz project as a whole. To maintain this realignment of terms, I use “plaintext” throughout the rest of the chapter, mirroring the site-wide modulation to the very idea of “plain text” that Textz introduces with this gesture.

57. Textz, “napster was only the beginning.” By contrast, see the influential essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute 1, no. 3 (1995), metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology.

58. Inke Arns, “Read_me, run_me, execute_me: Code as Executable Text: Software Art and its Focus on Program Code as Performative Text,” in Medien Kunst Netz 2: Thematische Schwerpunkte, ed. Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels (New York: Springer, 2005), 205.

59. Olga Goriunova, “walser.php,” runme.org, April 27, 2003, runme.org/feature/read/+walserphp/+6/.

60. From the pngreader project readme.txt file, pngreader.gnutenberg.net (accessed via Internet Archive), also released to the Runme.org feature database at https://runme.org/project/+pngreader/.

61. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 62–77.

62. Florian Cramer, “pngreader,” Runme.org, June 6, 2003, runme.org/feature/read/+pngreader/+58/index.html.

63. See Hannes Bajohr, “Operative ekphrasis: The collapse of the text/image distinction in multimodal AI” (preprint), July, 2023, researchgate.net/publication/372400146_Operative_ekphrasis_The_collapse_of_the_textimage_distinction_in_multimodal_AI.

64. Originally hosted online at rolux.net/crisis/index.php, accessed via Internet Archive.

65. Robert Luxemburg, “Luxemburg’s Law,” rolux.net/crisis/index.php, accessed via Internet Archive.

66. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” tr. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2: 1931–1934 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 486–93.

67. This note is featured as a readme.txt file in the “Complete Historical-Critical Edition” of Textz, which was released in early 2015 as an elaborate alternative reality game (ARG), only at the end of which the persistent player (or, in this instance, scholar) would recover an encrypted eighteen gigabytes of data via file torrent, including every page, each text, and all variants in the Textz enterprise. Both the labyrinthine procedure to unmask these files and the equally complex “edition” remain beyond the scope of this chapter. And yet, it remains telling that the little database warrants this type of expanded play. To extend that play (and the Textz project) here: readers are invited to write the author for free access to these materials.

68. Sterne, MP3, 15.

1. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 106.; see also McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 25–56.

2. McGann, Radiant Textuality, 109.

3. For a brief survey of recent approaches drawn from a range of fields, see, in particular: Jentery Sayers, ed. Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, eds., DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014); Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (New York: Routledge, 2021).

4. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 160. More recently, Seth Perlow describes this distinctly poetry-oriented approach to creative scholarship that moves across “the increasingly porous border between literary and scholarly writing, between poetry and criticism. Electronics enable us to read and write with the same equipment, technologically literalizing the indecision between creative and interpretive activities. The blurring of such generic and disciplinary distinctions leads experimentalists to write poetry that does the work of literary interpretation, criticism that is itself lyrical” (The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018], 4).

5. Lori Emerson outlines media poetics alongside the related concept of “readingwriting.” She defines media poetics as “the literary exemplar of media archaeology and a practice that extends deep from within the analog and well into the digital, . . . a practice not just of experimenting with the limits and possibilities of writing interfaces but rather of readingwriting: the practice of writing through the network, which as it tracks, indexes, and algorithmizes every click and every bit of text we enter into the network, is itself constantly reading our writing and writing our reading” (Reading Writing Interfaces [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014], xiv).

1. See Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and Ron Silliman, “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Distributing Service,” hosted by Eclipse, eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEDist/. Throughout this chapter, references to issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E will include page and issue, as well as a link to the specific page hosting the citation on Eclipse. Should any of these links disappear, one hopes an Internet Archive record will remain.

2. Charles Bernstein, “The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,” Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (New York: Routledge, 2012), 281–97.

3. These same digital modes of circulation afford opportunities of access not present in the print-based origins of the magazine. As anyone using a screen reader for this paragraph might attest, the distinctive spelling of the magazine title makes for exceptionally difficult listening. Since automated voices spell out the full title letter-by-sign-by-letter, even the four instances in the preceding paragraph leave little room for meaningful hearing. Given this barrier, I’ve opted to sacrifice orthographic fidelity in order to amplify aural access, rendering all but the first instances of the magazine in the body text equally as LANGUAGE. I encourage all readers to hallucinate tiny signs of equivalence (or nonequivalence) between the letters.

4. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E no. 1 (1978): 13, eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEn1/pictures/013.html.

5. Bernstein, Andrews, and Silliman, “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Distributing Service.”

6. Craig Dworkin, Eclipse homepage, eclipsearchive.org/

7. Continuing the ecliptic metaphors of this paragraph, Dworkin notes: “The name Eclipse is an explicit homage to Sun & Moon, a mark of the archive’s aspiration to document the moment of its predecessor’s apogee and to carry on the early mission of presses like Messerli’s, even after the disappearance of those illustrious celestial bodies” (“Hypermnesia,” boundary 2 36, no. 3 [2009]: 81).

8. Craig Dworkin, “Language Poetry,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, ed. Jeffrey Gray, James McCorkle, and Mary McAleer Balkun (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006), 880.

9. Following Bernstein’s own statements on the nomenclature of this cluster of publications, communities, and debates, I should note a revisionist editorial intention to use the magazine’s italicized title to refer to “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and its many different names—Language Poetry, Language Poetries, Language Writing, Language-Centered Writing” (Bernstein, “The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,” Pitch of Poetry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016], 60–77). However, for clarity of reading—and to differentiate from the magazine proper—I’ll loosely use the capitalized “Language” to modify a range of poetry, publishing, and writing practices associated with the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine.

10. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 81–82. Eric Bulson makes a similar point in “The Little Magazine, Remediated,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 200–225, tracing the time-delay history of 1960s Kraus reprints of the little magazines of modernism and the historical avant-gardes into the digital formats for little magazines that he terms “digittle archives.”

11. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 81.

12. Dworkin, 94.

13. Dworkin, 84.

14. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19.

15. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 85.

16. Dworkin, 85.

17. For the most concise articulation of Dworkin’s method of radical formalism, see Reading the Illegible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Its application can be tracked in the dozens of related works and articles linked through Dworkin’s Eclipse page (eclipsearchive.org/Editor/). Like EXE TXT or Bernstein’s collected online syllabi, this is another way in which the little database might house its own theorization.

18. Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, 4–5, xix–xx.

19. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 88–91.

20. Taking the digital as a ubiquitous and therefore banal component of the publishing landscape, this strand of “post-digital publishing” explores publications that blur the distinctions between digital and analog, online and offline. See Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012), 23–45; Florian Cramer, “What is ‘Post-Digital’?,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12–26; and especially Silvio Lorusso’s ongoing little database tracking these developments and accompanying scholarship, The Post-Digital Publishing Archive, http://p-dpa.net/.

21. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 14.

22. Ezra Pound as cited in Scholes and Wulfman, 16.

23. Scholes and Wulfman, 44–72.

24. Scholes and Wulfman, 44.

25. Scholes and Wulfman, 66.

26. Scholes and Wulfman, 71.

27. I inventory these works at length here both to offer an example of generic breadth to the reader and to signal the collecting impulse in periodical studies, which tend to sprawl. For examples of the form, see: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1930, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English: 1996); Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Al Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: the Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Gwen Allen, Artists Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley, Clip Stamp Fold the Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X (Barcelona: Actar, 2011); Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980: a Sourcebook of Information (New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998).

28. Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines, 72.

29. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 18.

30. See the conclusion to McGann’s Radiant Textuality, “Beginning Again and Again: ‘The Ivanhoe Game’” and its related gameplay appendix (209–48).

31. See Ben Fry, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces (2009), https://benfry.com/traces/. On Mukurtu CMS, managed by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University, see Kimberly Christen, “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation,” American Archivist vol. 74 (Spring–Summer, 2011): 185–210, and other works at mukurtu.org/. On SlaveVoyages, see David Elits, “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Origins, Development, Content,” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 2, no. 3 (2021): 1–8, slavevoyages.org/.

32. Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word, xiii.

33. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13.

34. McGann, 16.

35. Random Cloud (Randall McLeod), “Enter Reader,” in The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts, ed. Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey (New York: Garland, 1998), 23.

36. McGann, Textual Condition, 14–15.

37. Holly Melgard, The Making of the Americans (Buffalo, N.Y.: Troll Thread, 2012), 3.

38. Melgard, 24.

39. This editorial argument forms the core of a decade of events and publications that I grouped under the heading “Edit Publications” in response to dominant threads of poetry and poetics from the time. For an archive of this work and related arguments, see dss-edit.com/pub/.

40. For Bryant, the “fluid text” is a fact of textuality, given the signifying force of variant editions and ongoing processes of revising, editioning, and versioning (The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002], 1–6).

41. Bryant, 62.

42. Bryant, 12–13.

43. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Brooker and Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.

44. Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), x.

45. Saper, 11.

46. Saper, 3.

47. Saper, 152.

48. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), 346.

49. See the Black Bibliography Project, https://blackbibliog.org/.

50. Saper, Networked Art, 14.

51. Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines, 18.

52. Clay and Phillips, Secret Location, 14.

53. David J. Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 5.

54. Bolter and Grusin, 55.

55. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); xv–xxxvi; Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 117–21.

56. Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1997), 28–29.

57. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 149.

58. As this manuscript goes to print, even this archive is facing disappearance due to legal pressures. These pages attest to the incalculable value of the Internet Archive toward the study of the rapidly disappearing recent past of the internet. For one report among many on the precarity of the Internet Archive, see Luca Messara, Chris Freeland, and Juliya Ziskina, eds. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (San Francisco: Internet Archive, 2024): https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/30/vanishing-culture-a-report-on-our-fragile-cultural-record/.

59. Craig Dworkin, The Perverse Library (York, UK: Information as Material, 2010), 12.

60. Most notably, the site featured two components that have been entirely lost to time. The first is a three-dimensional interface for browsing the collection scripted in javascript for the first year of the site’s operation. As of this writing, I have found no image or record of the interface, aside from the structured data for its code. The second concerns a file format called “Multiresolution Seamless Image Database” (MrSID), which can still be found in the source code of many pages. See Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 85.

61. Brooker and Thacker, “General Introduction,” 6.

62. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 94.

63. Dworkin, 85.

64. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 115–16.

65. By contrast, the reader might also find the same L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine scanned in full-color high-resolution by the Reveal Digital “Independent Voices” collection, now hosted by JSTOR: jstor.org/site/reveal-digital/independent-voices/language-27953599/.

66. Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen (London: Sternberg, 2012), 32.

67. Steyerl, 32.

68. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 84.

69. Cory Arcangel, “On Compression,” self-published PDF (New York, 2007), 227. coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2007-007-on-c.

70. Silvio Lorusso, “In Defense of Poor Media,” in Printed Web 3, ed. Paul Soulellis (Providence, R.I.: Library of the Printed Web, 2015), 62.

71. Charles Bernstein, “Language Sampler,” The Paris Review, no. 86 (Winter 1982): 78; see facsimile on Eclipse at eclipsearchive.org/projects/SAMPLER/sampler.html.

72. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 85.

73. Dworkin, 91.

74. Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, 44.

75. Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” 85.

76. Boris Groys, “From Image to Image File—and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” in Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 85.

77. Groys, 91. I have limited the scope of this chapter to coterminous discourses on image files. Beyond this point on the originality of the copy, for more recent work on the complicated and complicating archaeologies, discorrelations, and operational logics of image objects, see, in particular: Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021); Shane Densen, Discorrelated Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020); and Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

78. It may be taking a step too far to remark on the choice of the small circular character that sports each link, a kind of celestial body that is both representational glyph and embedded hyperlink. The eclipsing processes of hypertext described by Aarseth, Landow, and others have gone out of vogue for a number of years, but remain pertinent, especially in the 1.0 web environment of these hand-coded little databases.

79. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 119.

80. See especially the promotional monograph by Pamela Pfiffner, Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story (Berkeley, Calif.: Adobe Press, 2003).

81. Introduced by Adobe as a propriety format in 1992, the PDF was released as an open standard in 2008, published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000. However, even then, the format retained some proprietary technologies until the release of ISO 32000–2 in 2020. The first fully nonproprietary specification for the standard was made available only recently, in April, 2023. For developments beyond this moment of writing, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF.

1. See note 3 in the preceding chapter on issues of screen-reader access with the title string of characters: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. In this interlude, all future instances of the magazine will be rendered as LANGUAGE in the body text. Facilitating this transformation to enable audio access is perhaps one more way to enact the negation of this interlude’s slashed equal sign—another reversal performed under the sign of networked access.

2. I discuss these first encounters with scanning the little magazine at length in “An Elegy for Jimmy & Lucy’s House of ‘K’ (1984–1989),” Post45, June, 2023, post45.org/2023/06/an-elegy-for-ijimmy-and-lucys-house-of-k-1984-1989/.

3. Charles Bernstein introduced me to Jed Rasula’s term for experimental forms of writing/reading in his “Wreading Experiments” writing exercise compendium: writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/wreading-experiments.html.

4. Common Crawl: commoncrawl.org/the-data/.

5. See Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen, and Nitasha Tiku, “Inside the Secret List of Websites That Make AI Like ChatGPT Sound Smart,” The Washington Post, April 19, 2023, washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/, and Allen Insitute for AI “C4 Search,” 2023, https://c4-search.apps.allenai.org/.

6. The Common Crawl corpus has been used as part of the training data for most major LLMs, including OpenAI’s Chat GPT, Google’s Bard AI, and Meta’s LLaMA. The open-source tenets of the project afford the opportunity to explore content nested deep within these LLMs, unsurprisingly encompassing the long-running little databases featured here, like Eclipse and Pennsound, as well as shadow libraries like UbuWeb that often reproduce full works without permission. Indeed, with the exception of Textz, all the sites discussed in this study have found their way into the dataset. For more on the makeup of the corpus, see Jesse Dodge, Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, and Matt Gardner, “Documenting the English Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus,” ArXiv, abs/2104.08758, April 18, 2021.

7. See Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, The Institute for Other Intelligences (Los Angeles: X Artists Book, 2022).

8. See Daniel Snelson, “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions: Structuralist Activity and Differential Reading,” in Mimeo Mimeo #3, ed. Kyle Schlesinger (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Cuneiform Press, 2009).

9. Benjamin Friedlander, Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 51.

10. Steve Kado, October Jr. (Los Angeles: Self-published, 2011).

1. On the many forms of “close listening,” see Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). In a gesture to compress more recent work presenting methods of close listening, I direct the reader to Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019); Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Alexander G. Weheliye, Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023); and the vast array of interventions made in the ongoing Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, ed. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Liana Silva, and Aaron Trammell, soundstudiesblog.com/.

2. Tracie Morris, reading at “Conceptual Poetry & Its Others,” University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, 2008, hosted by PennSound, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris-Tucson.php.

3. Here, I would like to note the audio-specific possibility of speaking with or alongside the performer, rather than speaking for them—to engage in a dialogue facilitated by digital artifacts rather than speaking from above—an opportunity foreclosed by the printed page (or afforded by its digital iteration). I return to this point in the conclusion to this chapter and more prominently in the interludes, but for now, I direct attention to the sound itself. The reader is encouraged, at this juncture, to linger with the sound file before proceeding. Morris both performs and best describes her own process in developing this poem in her recorded performance, which the reader might find on PennSound. Citations of this talk are drawn from the recordings hosted at writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris-Tucson.php.

4. To which, we might append the conclusion of this sentence from Moten’s In the Cut: “Say something whose phonic substance will be impossible to reduce, whose cuts and augmentations have to be recorded.”

5. On this mode of performance, see Weheliye, “‘Scream My Name Like a Protest’: R&B Music as BlackFem Technology of Humanity in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter,” in Feenin, 178–97. Beyond the scope of this study, in Feenin, Weheliye presents the most expansive approach to the “BlackFem singing voice as a technology, as a series of enfleshed forms of Black knowledge and archives” (19).

6. See, for example, Morris’s improvisational “Re-Sonate,” featured in handholding: 5 Kinds (Tucson: Kore, 2016).

7. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux, no. 49 (November 2013), e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.

8. Mónica Savirón, monicasaviron.com/films.

9. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2020), 88.

10. Mathieu Aubin, “Queering the Tape Recorder: Transforming Surveillance Technologies through bill bissett’s Queer Poetic Voice,” in DH2020 Book of Abstracts, ed. Laura Estill, Jennifer Guiliano, and Constance Crompton (Ottawa: DH2020, 2020).

11. Darren Wershler, “Vertical Excess: what fuckan theory and bill bissett’s Concrete Poetics,” Capilano Review 2, no. 23 (1997): 117.

12. See VIDA Count, https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/, (accessed via Internet Archive).

13. Jack Kerouac, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review Interviews, IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 82.

14. Tanya Clement, “Toward a Rationale of Audio Text,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 2 (2016), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000254/000254.html; see also hipstas.org/.

15. Kenneth Sherwood, “Distanced Sounding: ARLO as a Tool for the Analysis and Visualization of Versioning Phenomena within Poetry Audio,” Jacket2: Clipping, March 2, 2015, https://jacket2.org/commentary/distanced-sounding-arlo-tool-analysis-and-visualization-versioning-phenomena-within-poetr.

16. For these examples and more, see Mustazza’s “Clipping” commentary series on Jacket2, https://jacket2.org/commentary/clipping.

17. While the linked audio collection has been inaccessible for a long time, the post in question is still live at Mutant Sounds, ed. Eric Lumbleau and Matt Castille, mutant-sounds.blogspot.com.

18. The story of Megaupload and its tumultuous downfall is recapped in Ernesto Van der Star, “10 Years Ago the Feds Shut Down Megaupload,” TorrentFreak, January 20, 2022, https://torrentfreak.com/10-years-ago-the-feds-shut-down-megaupload-220120/.

19. See Bryan Gruley, David Fickling, and Cornelius Rahn, “Kim Dotcom, Pirate King,” bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-15/kim-dotcom-pirate-king.

20. For one example of these points, see footage embedded in Ghosh Pallab, “Google’s Vint Cerf Warns of ‘Digital Dark Age’” BBC News, February 13, 2015, bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389.

21. Mark Allen, Brian Turner, Eric Lumbleau, et al. “The Rise and Fall of the Obscure Music Blog: A Roundtable,” http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-obscure-music-blogs-a-roundtable, (accessed via Internet Archive).

22. Apart from the description, this reboot of Mutant Sounds is similarly defunct: Free Music Archive, freemusicarchive.org/curator/Mutant_Sounds/.

23. See TGK, “The Nurse With Wound List”: “To collectors of unusual music the Nurse With Wound List is legendary. . . . The NWW List covers the period from the late 1960s to 1980 when serious hybrids of avantgarde and popular music first became prevalent. It also covers a wide range of underground musical styles including krautrock, free jazz (improv), avantgarde classical, electronic, industrial, folk, anarcho-punk, proto-punk, no wave, library music, and many more uncategorizable” (http://nwwlist.org/, accessed via Internet Archive).

24. Alternatively, it should be noted that, in the more radical variant, this activity has migrated to private torrent and file-sharing communities like What.cd or the still-active Soulseek P2P platform.

25. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 836.

26. Email correspondence with bill bissett, May 22, 2008.

27. That is, create individual MP3 files for each poem recited in a full-length reading. For more on this process and its importance to the collection, see PennSound, “PennSound Manifesto,” https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/manifesto.php.

28. See PennSound, “bill bissett,” https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php.

29. ID3 is a metadata container for MP3 files, the kind of information that presents author, title, album, and provenance for display in playback software. In this instance, the ID3 tags also concretely relocate bissett’s experimental recording within the institutional protocols of PennSound.

30. Charles Bernstein, “Making Audio Visible: the Lessons of Visual Language for the Textualization of Sound,” Textual Practice 23, no. 6 (2009): 284.

31. Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, eds., Sound Poetry: A Catalogue for the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival, Toronto, Canada, October 14 to 21, 1978 (Toronto: Underwhich, 1979), 17.

32. Even among internet pirates in the 2000s, this was a substandard data rate. See comment streams on any peer-to-peer audio sharing site for complaints about anything released in less than 320kbps.

33. See, for example, the “PennSound Manifesto.”

34. For more on PennSound’s foundation and in relation to methods of audio scholarship, see Bernstein, “Making Audio Visible.” See also, PennSound, “about,” https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/about.php.

35. For all of the above and more, search ubu.com for “bissett.”

36. bill bissett, bpNichol, sean o huigin, Ann Southam, and uu David, Past Eroticism: Canadian Sound Poetry of the 1960s (Toronto: Underwhich Audiographics, 1986); grOnk final series, no. 6.

37. See the exceptional page hosting this reading at SpokenWeb, ed. Celyn Harding-Jones, montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/bill-bissett-at-sgwu-1969/.

38. Jonathan Sterne, “The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio,” in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 58.

39. Jason Camlot has demonstrated the value of these paratextual components of the reading, as well as of outlining the editorial principles of the SpokenWeb collection, in “The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, 1966–1974,” Journal of Canadian Studies 46 (2012): 26–59.

40. Wershler, “Vertical Excess,” 118.

41. SpokenWeb, “About SPOKENWEB,” spokenweb.ca/about-us/spokenweb/.

42. SpokenWeb, “About SPOKENWEB.”

43. See Annie Murray and Jared Wiercinski, “A Design Methodology for Web Based Sound Archives,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8 (2014), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/2/000173/000173.html; Murray and Wiercinski, “Looking at Archival Sound: Visual Features of a Spoken Word Archive’s Web Interface That Enhance the Listening Experience,” First Monday 17, no. 4 (2012).

44. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 66.

45. Bernstein, “Making Audio Visible,” 286.

46. See Jim Andrews, “Aleph Null 3.0,” 2018, vispo.com/aleph3/slideshow/info.htm.

47. Like many other digital artists, web designers, game makers, and code poets, the MUPS interface was lost once Flash was formally abandoned by Adobe in 2021. I return to Flash video in chapter 4. For now, a video capture and description of the project can be found at the URL of the original work. See David Jhave Johnson, “MUPS,” 2012, glia.ca/2012/mups/.

48. More precisely, there are 1,258 files, as a review of the actionscript reveals that one file address is a duplicate of a previous file (Kathy Acker) and another is an empty folder location (Harry Matthews). See the following note on inconsistencies in the PennSound collection.

49. Johnson, “MUPS.”

50. Johnson, “MUPS.”

51. Leonardo Flores, “‘MUPS’ by David Jhave Johnson,” I ❤ E-Poetry, January 1, 2013, http://iloveepoetry.org/ (accessed via Internet Archive).

52. Parsing the conventions of PennSound MP3 naming, each dash is retained, while underscores produce new lines. My over-underscoring errors in naming the Awake in th Red Desert files are amplified here: each word in the poem title reads on a new line: “01 / A / O / B / A / Awake-in-th-Red- / Desert / 1968.”

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the hand-written and student-based approach to archiving espoused by PennSound has real consequences. These errors and lapses, which are pervasive and unpredictable throughout PennSound, determine how files are processed by computational readings in a variety of unseen ways. This could be seen as a failing or one of the more beautiful resistances of PennSound.

53. See Judy Malloy, “Authoring Systems,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore, Md,: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), 32–36; Flores, “MUPS.”

54. Flores, “MUPS.”

55. See, for example, PoemTalk, jacket2.org/content/poem-talk; Close Listening, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Close-Listening.php; Jacket2, jacket2.org/; ModPo, modpo.org/.

1. These featured resources and the accompanying audio essay can be found at PennSound, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Featured-2008.html.

1. Video transcription is my own throughout. See Vito Acconci, Theme Song (1973) streaming at UbuWeb: ubu.com/film/acconci_theme.html.

2. Nick Kaye, Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance (London: Routledge, 2007), 73.

3. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 109–16.

4. See, for example, Jim Groom’s notes at bavatuesdays written just a year after the release of YouTube (November 14, 2007): “Now that millions of people can easily allow a complete stranger into their intimate, self-reflexive world vis-a-vis video sites like YouTube, Acconci’s work may prove quite fascinating as a way to think through the impact of an imagined self in the advent of relatively affordable technology that allows us to mediate our identities for unknown viewers around the world” bavatuesdays.com/vito-acconci-is-to-video/.

5. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), xxxi.

6. In the midst of this book’s production, UbuWeb announced the following on its homepage: “As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety” (ubu.com/). For a doubly potent reminder of the ephemerality of preservation, X (formerly Twitter) handle @uubuweb (“Fan account as the official one doesn’t exist anymore.”) advocates a little database approach to preservation: “Everything is downloadable on UbuWeb. Don’t trust the cloud, even UbuWeb’s cloud” (twitter.com/uubuweb/status/1752795178828530024).

7. Notably, Goldsmith’s disregard for copyright concerns extended to the creators who articulated objections to the hosting of their files on UbuWeb, whom Goldsmith identified in a short-lived “Hall of Shame.” In 2015, Goldsmith framed the autopsy report of Michael Brown as an “appropriated” work at Brown University. Widely and rightly denounced as a gesture that reproduced the racialized violence that it purported to critique, the conversation around Goldsmith’s appropriative act has contributed to a sea change in both experimental writing circles and studies of race and the avant-garde in American poetry. See Rin Johnson, “On Hearing a White Man Co-opt the Body of Michael Brown,” Hyperallergic, March 20, 2015, hyperallergic.com/192628/on-hearing-a-white-man-co-opt-the-body-of-michael-brown.

8. Kenneth Goldsmith, Letter to Bettina Funcke: 100 Notes—100 Thoughts, Documenta Series 017 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011). See also, Agnes Peller, Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb: An Artist’s Contribution to the Digital Humanities, trans. Francesca Simkin (Paris: University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2015). Goldsmith’s own anecdotal theorization of the site in Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020) extends this position to artistic production, presumably as a defense of Goldsmith’s appropriative conceptual poetics as a whole: “UbuWeb can be considered one enormous appropriative artwork, a giant collage, which appropriates not a single object but rather the entire history of the avant-garde” (74).

9. Tom Service, “Zen for Film Is Perfect Medicine for Hectic Lives,” The Guardian, July 11, 2008, theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2008/jul/11/namjunepaik.

10. Of course, this video has long since disappeared. However, the same upload was shared to Vimeo at vimeo.com/11271804 and can still be found on UbuWeb: ubu.com/film/fluxfilm01_paik.html.

11. Heike Helfert, “Nam June Paik: Zen for Film,” Media Art Net, medienkunstnetz.de/works/zen-for-film/.

12. From its inception, Zen for Film has never held a fixed length, and historical accounts of its screenings vary. Conceived and first screened in 1962 while Paik was working at the Studio fur elektronische Musik at the WDR in Cologne, Zen for Film was published as twenty-four feet of 16mm film in a Fluxus edition by George Maciunas in 1964. This strip of clear leader was scripted for an extended loop. However, the longer version of the film screened by Paik consisted of multiple reprints of an already damaged version of the shorter film projected in 1962. See Allen Weiss, “Some Notes on Conjuring Away Art: Radical Disruptions of Image and Text in Avant-Garde Film.” Esprit Createur 38, no. 4 (1998): 88.

13. Weiss, “Some Notes,” 88.

14. John Cage and Joan Retallack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 135.

15. Kaye, Multi-Media, 42.

16. Hana Hölling, Revisions—Zen for Film (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015), bgc.bard.edu/exhibitions/exhibitions/8/revisions-zen-for-film. Research for the exhibition also generated an exceptional long-form study of this single work in which Hölling answers these questions, and many others, related to the conservation and curation of Zen for Film. That work might serve as a parallel model to the supertemporal film discussed in this chapter.

17. Nicole Berenz outlines the speculative protocols of the supertemporal in “We Support Everything Since the Dawn of Time That Had Struggled and Still Struggles”: Introduction to Lettrist Cinema (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014): “Linked to the limitless possibilities offered by the apparatus’s constituent parts and their internal relationships, . . . the Lettrist movement came up with hundreds of protocols for creating films that were everything but the projected objects. . . . It was a matter of combining the cinematic apparatus with every speculative or living element” (14–15).

18. The UbuWeb version—as well as its subtitles, cited below—takes a bit of liberty in rendering the title as Ever the Avant-Guard of the Avant-Guard till Heaven and After. I have here retained the preferred translation given by Lemaître on his website: mauricelemaitre.org.

19. In retrospect, the reader might note that this film is one inspiration for the previous chapter, which similarly works by incidental connection to its source materials. Adjacent happenstance is the database’s preferred form of contingent storytelling.

20. Maurice Lemaître, Ever the Avant-Garde of the Avant-Garde till Heaven and After, ubu.com/film/lemaitre_avant.html.

21. Kaira Marie Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2014), 73.

22. Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 148.

23. To be precise, an argument concerning the relation of Zen for Film to Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record forms the conclusion of the essayistic chapters, preceding an extended annotated inventory of “blank” recordings presented as “Further Listening.” See Dworkin, No Medium, 127–40.

24. Dworkin, No Medium, 136.

25. Dworkin, 137–38.

26. Dworkin, 136.

27. These trends are most extensively documented by Monoskop’s Wiki page on “Shadow Libraries,” further demarcated as “independent, shadow, feminist, free/libre, self-hosted, pirate, autonomous, collective, community and artist digital libraries” (monoskop.org/Shadow_libraries). See, in particular, recent collections: Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder and Shusha Niederberger, eds., Aesthetics of the Commons (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2021); Memory of the World, ed., Guerrilla Open Access (Coventry: Post Office, Rope, and Memory of the World, 2018).

28. Erica Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 9. It should be noted that Balsom examines issues of use in relation to UbuWeb in the chapter “Bootlegging Experimental Film” in this volume, exploring “the ambivalence of the copy by examining the impact of low-quality, unauthorized digital bootlegs on the domain of experimental film” (21).

29. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 15.

30. Usernames and platform details have been redacted to protect the privacy of their users.

31. The specs listed for the file read: “Resolution : 720×576; Codec : DivX 5; FPS : 25,13; BitRate : 1710 Kbps; Quality Factor : 0,17 b/px.” The UbuWeb version vastly compresses this to a 320×240 Flash Video similar to the file hosted on YouTube.

32. See UbuWeb “Film & Video,” ubu.com/film/index.html.

33. I am grateful to Ken Friedman for clarifying earlier mistakes concerning the copyrights to Fluxus materials, as well as his extraordinary Fluxus and intermedia digital libraries, which remain an invaluable resource. Private correspondence, March 6, 2022.

34. Hana Hölling, “Post-Preservation: Paik’s Virtual Archive, Potentially,” in Nam June Paik Reader, ed. John G. Hanhardt, Gregory Zinman, and Edith Decker-Phillips (Seoul: Nam June Paik Art Center, 2022), 15.

35. Tate Liverpool. “Nam June Paik: Educators’ Pack,” 12, tate.org.uk/documents/202/nam-june-paik-education-pack.pdf.

36. Luca (LUNK) Leggaro, “F L UX L I N E S: About this Site,” January 1, 2007, http://fluxlines.blogspot.com/2007/01/about.html.

37. Michael Kontopoulos, Zen for YouTube, May 8, 2007, youtube.com/watch?v=GzLEIGli1UM.

38. Cory Arcangel, Structural Film (2007), coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2007-002-structural-film.

39. Mark Amerika, “Zen for Mobile Phone Video,” October 31, 2007, http://professorvj.blogspot.com/2007/10/zen-for-mobile-phone-video.html.

40. Mungo Thomson, The Varieties of Experience (Los Angeles: Self-Published, 2009), mungothomson.com/book/the-varieties-of-experience/.

41. For this work, and many others, the prolific audio and video remix artist Vicki Bennett operates under the moniker People Like Us. Out of respect for this recoded authorship, this paper will refer to the maker of We Edit Life as PLU throughout.

42. The anachronism of reading “found footage” within always-on ubiquitous networks of content is offered here as a counterpoint to estrange current practices, so pervasive as to become invisible. So much of vernacular internet practices, from memes to TikTok videos, relies on the compilation of circulating media, despecializing the practice of movie-making. Indeed, this argument may be extended to FanVids, digital moving-image essays, and a wealth of emergent motion-picture communication systems enabled by the ease of editing and dispersion of films and videos across networks.

43. Roger Luckhurst, “Found-Footage Science Fiction: Five Films by Craig Baldwin, Jonathan Weiss, Werner Herzog and Patrick Keiller,” Science Fiction Film and Television 1, no. 2 (2008): 195.

44. Luckhurst, 195.

45. Luckhurst, 198.

46. Beyond found footage film, the contours of this metacinematic approach may be seen to extend to internet culture through the coproductive practices of “database animals,” theorized by Hiroki Azumi as the “dissociative coexistence of the desire for a small narrative at the level of simulacra and the desire for a grand nonnarrative at the level of database” (Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 85–86).

47. All the more pressing in an era of the erasure of context brought about by generative AI.

48. See David J. Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 22–50.

49. The language of this paragraph and its relation of network to database follows on a few productive strands of actor-network theory (ANT), misused to address digital objects in circulation. Without belaboring the connections here, they mainly concern modes of demystifying networks via careful description. See: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and the excellent actor-network website Paris: Invisible City, bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html.

50. Beyond Latour, for the most concise (and expansive) description of ANT, see John Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 5, no. 4 (1992): 379–93. At a higher compression rate, Law outlines the essence of this approach as follows: “This, then, is the core of the actor-network approach: a concern with how actors and organisations mobilise, juxtapose and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed; how they are sometimes able to prevent those bits and pieces from following their own inclinations and making off; and how they manage, as a result, to conceal for a time the process of translation itself and so turn a network from a heterogeneous set of bits and pieces each with its own inclinations, into something that passes as a punctualised actor” (386).

51. “Lovebytes2002,” lovebytes.org.uk/2002/ongoing.html#nc6 (accessed via Internet Archive).

52. For background on these screenings, see “Lovebytes2002,” http://www.lovebytes.org.uk/2002/docs/pages/vicki.htm.

53. We Edit Life was first uploaded to The Prelinger Archive (archive.org/details/prelinger) in 2004: archive.org/details/WeEditLife. The work was then uploaded to UbuWeb in 2007: ubu.com/film/plu_edit.html. Around the same time in 2007, the work was uploaded by a third party to YouTube (since deleted), where it has been reposted multiple times since. Vicki Bennett herself uploaded the work to Vimeo on March 30, 2010: vimeo.com/10553139. From these various uploads, countless embeds have distributed the work on other sites.

54. See “Vicki Bennett at Lovebytes 2002,” youtube.com/watch?v=H9p3MfIaOsw.

55. Private correspondence with Vicki Bennet, 2011.

56. In the video, a remixed version We Edit Life is itself set to a remixed audio track derived from the Crystal Castles’s song “Vanished” (youtube.com/watch?v=AmABw-JaNes).

57. In the print edition of this book, the images that appear as a banner at the top of pages are drawn sequentially from We Edit Life.

58. In the “Trivia” section of Wikipedia’s page on film leader, we can note the particular resonance of this opening with PLU’s software: “The video editing software Adobe Premiere (as well as later versions, including Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Premiere Elements) features a computer-generated version of the SMPTE leader, entitled the ‘Adobe Universal Leader.’ It can be customized with different colors, and can be set to beep either at the beginning of each number or just at the two” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_leader; this statement was present on July 6, 2010, although it has since been edited out).

59. William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 25.

60. Stephen Mamber, “Marey, the Analytic, and the Digital,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Rome: J. Libbey, 2004), 88.

61. While Marey has been evoked to highlight the analytic slant of digital movies, we might also note that, until 2006, Adobe Premiere software packaging featured a galloping horse as an iconic homage to Muybridge (guidebookgallery.org/splashes/premiere).

62. This method of computer graphics was pioneered by Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton in 1967 when Knowlton’s proto-ASCII Seurat-styled “Nude,” sometimes titled “Studies in Perception I,” made headlines in the New York Times; see Henry Lieberman, “Art and Science Proclaim Alliance in Avant-Garde Loft,” New York Times, October 11, 1967, 49. For a fuller reflection on the project, see Kenneth C. Knowlton, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scientist,” YLEM 25 (2005): 8–11.

63. Technical details can be found in Kenneth Knowlton, “Computer-Produced Movies,” Science 150 (1965): 1116–20; Knowlton, “Computer-Generated Movies, Designs and Diagrams,” Design Quarterly 66/67 (1966): 58–63; Stan VanDerBeek, “New Talent—The Computer,” Art in America 58 (1970): 86–91.

64. Stan VanDerBeek, “Re: Look: Computerized Graphics ‘Light Brings Us News of the Universe,’” Film Culture, 1970, 48–49.

65. Adobe Premiere 6.5, released in August 2002, was the first consumer suite to feature real-time previews.

66. James Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 172. In a complementary reading of these scenes, the conclusion to Hodge’s excellent book, “Data Incomplete: The Web as Already There,” draws from my research on We Edit Life to discuss the opacity of “the historical experience of the digital age” (171–80).

67. Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006), 48. See the full film, hosted by AT&T Archives on Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=_iiQtdXMnBg.

68. Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 224.

69. Jagoda, 225.

70. Listed as “Amateur film: Medicus collection: New York World’s Fair, 1939–40] (Reel 3) (Part I) (1939)” on Archive.org (archive.org/details/Medicusc1939_3). The Medicus collection presents “detailed documentation of the ‘World of Tomorrow’ in beautiful Kodachrome.”

71. However, since Man and His World is featured as complete and colorized later in the sequence of Incredible Machine, it is unlikely to be the source of the conversation between VanDerBeek and Knowlton during the filming of Incredible Machine. Similar in form, it could be any of several poemfields made around this time.

72. This transcription varies from VanDerBeek’s own notation in an attempt to highlight certain textual features from the film that are elided in the script.

73. Law, “Notes,” 6.

74. All films not linked in this paragraph either have never been uploaded to the internet, have been taken down, or were perhaps not locatable by the author. All are mentioned in PLU’s source list, and thus may be presumed present in We Edit Life.

1. For further commentary and the work’s original appearance online, see the UbuWeb page for Flash Artifacts: ubu.com/film/snelson_flash.html.

2. Snelson and Enxuto, Flash Artifacts.

1. Glazier describes this moment in an interview with Michael Nardone. “There was a master PERL script that would take out the Gopher commands—because it was a Gopher system—and turn it into HTML to be able to put it on the Web. So, for a few seconds, I had the largest website in the world in 1994, and it was poetry.” For this and many other insights into the EPC, I am grateful to the interviews conducted in Nardone, “Of the Repository: Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018), 302.

2. EPC front page, accessed December 16, 2023 (writing.upenn.edu/epc/).

3. Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002) 3.

4. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Prepare for the Textpocalypse,” CITE, March 8, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/.

5. Among many lost links in the EPC is an animated version of Bernstein’s aphoristic essay-poem, which played its phrases out in three overlapping windows simulating the then-competing browsers Mozilla, Explorer, and Netscape. The text can be found published online as “Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies,” Electronic Book Review, August 1, 2003, electronicbookreview.com/essay/electronic-pies-in-the-poetry-skies/.

6. Peter Lunenfield contends—perhaps accurately, over a decade ago—that, despite the rise of social media, “a pyramid of production remains, with a small number of the members of a Web community uploading material, a slightly larger group commenting on or modifying that content, and a huge percentage remaining content to download without uploading” (The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011], 1). At the same time, as Rita Raley and others have demonstrated, intensifying regimes of dataveillance continue to “upload” users at all points (“Dataveillance and Counterveillance,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013], 121–45).

7. Or, for a comparative lens from any historical moment, a user might download the EPC as it once was at epc.buffalo.edu via services like Archivarix or open-source scripts like the “Wayback Machine Downloader” (github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader). Despite privileged access to the back-end of the site, in what follows, I oscillate between Wayback Machine and Penn downloads.

8. Glazier and Sherwood, “RIF/T: An Electronic Space for Poetry, Prose, and Poetics,” writing.upenn.edu/epc/rift/index.html.

9. See “Poetics List .txt file archive,” writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/archive/logs/txt/.

10. See the memorial mirror here: writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/tomraworth.com/.