Chris Campanioni Goes on the Record at Tupelo Quarterly

A conversation with Chris Campanioni and William Lessard about internet poetics is up for your reading pleasure at Tupelo Quarterly. "With the publication of the Internet is for real (C&R Press), his sixth book," writes Lessard about Campanioni, "...along with an upcoming multimedia performance at the New York Academy of Art, I thought it was time for him to go on the record about his praxis." And so:

WL: ...If one hunts for a new artistic form, one could say the newsfeed is the sonnet of our day. Do you think it is possible to have this kind of writing without resorting to the hyper-individuated? True 21st-century digital poetics is one that is different for each person—just as you and I can both “have” Twitter yet experience it as two separate consciousnesses. It’s Warholian serialism updated for the age of distributed software: there are not only innumerable Marilyns, there might not even be a Marilyn. I can’t say I mind. I prefer displacement to the recursion that, at present, passes for innovative work.

CC: What does pass for innovation in the literary world today? I think this is where a return to troubling the notion of the origin/original takes on another shape. And this is also where my career in fashion has benefited my writing, or at least this book, because early on I understood intimately that the digitalization of all things didn’t necessarily mean reproduction in the Classical—or at least Benjaminian sense—but in fact the eternal return of the new. I’ll give you an example. Sometime between 2004 and 2009—what I like to call “the Zero Years”—Photoshop became not only an accessory to art teams but a necessity. The demand was so high for Photoshop specialists that the delimited role became rather lucrative. What photographers, art directors, brand managers, and all the rest—even us, the viewers—didn’t really understand was that they were pumping in all this money to get a flawless, definitive image that would be displayed indefinitely for every user. These definitive indefinite images show up infinitely, or at least every time we click on an image, place it on our viewfinder that “reads” things differently depending on the modifications of the machine, its battery life, the size of the screen, one’s Wi-Fi connection, our own user preferences—this is why there are in fact several dozen Marilyns, as you said; this is why there is an unwittingly rich diversity of images in a world that is no longer a simulacrum...

Read on at Tupelo Quarterly.