How Dada is Digital Poetry?
Networked Computers Offer Chance and Change to Word Artists
Did fewer than a hundred renegade artists in the First World War period determine the shape of modern electronic poetry?
The Dada movement which burst onto the European and New York art scenes during the First World War had a significant influence on subsequent art styles such as surrealism and literary forms such as concrete poetry. But are the similarities between Dada and modern digital poetry as significant as they seem?
Approach to Language and the Creative Process
According to Scott Rettberg in his essay Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature, Dada artist Hugo Ball invented sound poetry “to create an authentic form of expression”, with sounds (not words) adapted for the purpose of the artist rather than as the language of broader society.
All poetry has its basis in music, and poetry based on sounds rather than words (for example, using tape recorders) preceded the digital era. However, the advent of computers has offered huge opportunity to break sound down into its tiniest electronic pieces and manipulate it. The “sound” section of the avant-garde and outsider art website UbuWeb offers a comprehensive selection of historical and modern sound poetry.
Dada writer Tristan Tzara in his Note on Poetry described poetry this way: “Streaming in all colors and bleeding among the leaves of all trees. Vigor and thirst, emotion before the formation unseen and unexplained…” Because poetry was seen as having a magical existence, it could be created in haphazard ways, such as using random words rearranged from another source. This element of chance or surprise is also important to modern digital poets, as is the ability to sample and remix from other sources.
“Motivation” for Digital Poetry
Despite the many characteristics shared by the Dada movement and modern digital poetry, it may be that one attribute is not common: the reason behind the creation.
According to Rettberg, Dada began as “a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois attitudes the Dada felt were at the root of the conflict.” Many modern digital works do offer social or political commentary (for example, some of the works on poet and webmaster M.D. Friedman’s DigitalDada site, and Regime Change by Wardrip-Fruin, Durand, Moss and Froehlich).
In addition, digital poetry shares in what has been described as the anarchistic or democratic nature of the internet: it is a type of creativity available to all, not only the literary establishment, and in that sense shares some of the radicalism of Dada.
Dada, however, was a time- and people-limited phenomenon. Rettberg estimates a few dozen active artists influential between 1916 and 1920. The sheer comparative size of the community that engages in modern digital art suggests that these artists probably have a variety of motivations. These may include the opportunity to engage in social commentary, but are also likely to feature the sheer joy of working in unusual and liberating media.
It may be, therefore, that the links between Dada and digital poetry are not as close as they would appear. For comparison, it would be interesting to examine other possible historical origins of digital poetry—a possible topic for a future article.
