The Battle of Poetry against Itself: On Jim Andrews's Digital Poetry

Abstract

Jim Andrews, a Canadian artist and programmer based in Victoria, British Columbia, has been developing new digital web-based forms and genres since 1995. His works investigate computer programming code as an expressive means for integrating image, sound, and word. In this article I look at the electronic poetry of Jim Andrews as a reflection upon the materiality of digital media and also as an exploration of the World Wide Web as writing and reading space. Jim Andrews’s digital poetics transforms interactive, kinetic and multimedia features of digital literacy into poetical tropes. Feedback loops between reader’s interventions and textual displays highlight the co-dependence between the poem as algorithmic machine and the interpretative operations of reading as part of the signifying field. The selected cybertexts are analysed as models for semiotic and interpretive processes.