Complexity and Analytical-creative Approaches at Scale: Iconicity, Monstrosity, and #GraphPoem
Chris Tănăsescu, Raluca Tanasescu · 2023
By revisiting concepts such as monstrosity and iconicity, this chapter reconsiders digital writing from a complex system perspective involving multiscale architecture, performativity and intermedia. The case in point is the Graph Poem project-applying graph theory and natural language processing in poetry- particularly with its analytical-creative approaches informing certain computationally assembled anthologies coming out of the project. The algorithms deployed in those anthologies operate at different scales, expanding networked text corpora by adding poem-nodes based on both small-scale, poetry diction related, and largescale, network-topology-relevant criteria. Such methodology illustrates a politically updated data-focused relevance of monstrosity beyond the recent post-disciplinary theory, as well as a concept of iconicity drawing mainly on writing theory and performance studies. A complexity-informed notion of digital writing thus emerges foregrounding scale, monstrosity and iconicity as conjoined features of digital space and the digital in general.