Reading Kinetic Poetry and Text Machines: Exploring Digital Art and Meaning

Roberto Simanowski intervenes in the critical response to digital art, which often ranges from hype to counterhype, by offering a new approach in his book Digital Art and Meaning. In this work, Simanowski provides close readings of various genres of digital art, including kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. Rather than simply promoting specific artworks, he delves into their complex meanings and demonstrates how to interpret and evaluate them.

Simanowski's analyses include deciphering the meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer's behavior, examining images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze, and exploring text machines that generate nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story. He also discusses a light show above Mexico City's historic square, which was created by Internet users from around the world. By combining these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion drawing from art philosophy and history, Simanowski aims to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art, and ultimately of the genre as a whole. Popular writing about digital art often falls short, but Simanowski's work provides a much-needed framework for interpreting and evaluating this evolving art form.

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