The paired qualities of contingency and dispersion inform the theoretical inflections of this page and shape the delivery of its content. The materials featured here extend a presentation given at the Approaching the Poetry Series Conference held at Concordia University on April 5, 2013. Over the course of the following essay, I consider two online collections that are likely to be well known to Amodern’s readers (PennSound and UbuWeb) alongside two sites that are likely to be lesser known (Mutant Sounds and SpokenWeb). This route is plotted to address SpokenWeb, but will only arrive at its destination by way of conclusion. Following this trajectory, I argue, a user might come to an understanding of SpokenWeb from within a wider culture of online collections. Along the way, the page gathers a compendium of already circulating objects via text, image, sound, and movie files. Just as someone might “read” a magazine exclusively for the pictures, I imagine someone might read this page exclusively for the downloads. [1] My aim is to chart the passage of a specific constellation of materials through several little databases as a scenario for objects hosted by online collections in general. This page is constructed on the principles of selection, navigation, description, and distribution. The corresponding acts of interpretation, analysis, or critique may arise within the reader of these paragraphs and the objects embedded within them.
JPG: bill bissett, detail from the lost angel mining co. (Vancouver: Blewointmentpress, 1969) MP3: bill bissett & th mandan massacre, “2 awake in th red desert!!,” Awake in th Red Desert (Vancouver: See/Hear Records, 1968) Download: bissett, “2 awake in th red desert,” Awake in th Red Desert (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1968) [JPG] To address the sites featured here, this essay follows the thread of a particular poet’s output in an attempt to tease out a description of each online collection, how they mediate the recordings they host, and how we might begin to understand contemporary iterations of the audio database through this network. For the moment, it does not particularly matter who the poet is, nor what the character of their output might be. I have chosen bill bissett for a number of incidental, autobiographical, and medial reasons that will be made clear throughout the essay. However, from the onset, I must insist that this essay could have just as easily followed any of a dozen other poets presented on a dozen alternate platforms. Simply put, it is useful to follow a thread. Not a special thread, as a symptomatic reading or work of cultural critique might have it, but any thread whatsoever. Ravelling a path through the database is perhaps all that a narrative format like the essay might attempt: in other words, the essay can be understood as a kind of test for trajectories through these networks. Alongside the essay, we might add archival downloads, edited compilations, a related scroll of images, sources, or hyperlinks. If there is anything to be learned from the sites I examine, it is that any webpage may also contain a collection. This page offers one such alternative to the little databases it samples. |
Peer-reviewed publication in Amodern 4, ed. Scott Pound and Darren Wershler. Montréal: Concordia University. Revised edition forthcoming in The Little Database, 2025.
|
