The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics

Edited by Andrew Klobucar, “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” arrives at an important historical moment. As the COVID-19 global pandemic reveals just how unstable our rules of interaction have become, this intelligent volume reveals the force of community in times of contingency. This community is of a special sort—digital and networked—and demands an active struggle for identity and meaning. Absent are notions of community based on surrender; present are aesthetics of harmony through engagement. Informed by his theoretical and pedagogical experiences, Klobucar has demanded a high quality of scholarship from his international colleagues, and each chapter illustrates that which can be achieved when quantification and poetics are understood in terms of each other. From the theoretical (forms of Wreading digital poetry described by Rui Torres and Daniela Côrtes Maduro) to the instructional (the Swarm Pedagogy of Maria Aladren), there is a rich range of topics and applications present throughout the volume. Simply put, Klobucar has provided readers with a landmark work of digital humanities.

Because the chapters are original and lively—this volume could easily have become a dry and technical catalogue of techniques—there are many audiences for this book. Individual scholars of digital humanities will want it on their bookshelves, and graduate instructors will order it for their students. And, of course, libraries will surely order it. Because the authors represent international programs of research—from Portugal, South Korea, and the US—the volume holds the potential to have a global reach.

Dr. Norbert Elliot

Research Professor

University of South Florida

The book has a cluster of brilliant and resonant through lines: the swarm and the individual, the sculptural sense and aural sense at once of text and textuality, pedagogy in the covid and post covid age and the need for emergent digital forms and the history of such forms. The Cicada emerges as the primary metaphor throughout, which is timely and potent. Text like these sentences is essentially bent lines in a pale field, sculptural codified forms that imply voice, both authorial and literal.

Moving from the Naturalist mores and the epochal Whole Earth catalog to concrete poetry, sound art, algorithms, digital forms and swarm intelligence back to the classroom, be it virtual or soonish back to brick and mortar, this book finds cohesion and the message that the digital freedom of form is as crucial and essential as individualism itself.

Jeremy Hight

Washington State University

A clear-headed anthology of field reports and field guides from the leading edges of collaborative digital poetics. This timely collection, seamlessly swerving from the lyrical to the practical to the speculative, will be of great value to both practitioners and educators (and everyone in between).

Allison Parrish

Arts Professor

ITP NYU

With its succession of captivating, intelligently written essays, “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” offers reflections on exploration and discovery, as well as documentation and speculation, pertaining to collaborative potentials held by digital media and networks. Here “the art of programming” (sometimes alternatively, inventively defined) is witnessed, illustrated, empowered, and effectively proven as an, “ongoing, perhaps even interminable process of trial and error driven by constant collaborative feedback” that its Introduction declares. The book establishes the authority and power (or “logic and control”) of the algorithm and illuminates areas within a range of disciplines that have been preliminarily attended to, and that would also benefit by further attention and investigative pursuit.

“The Community and the Algorithm”, addressing contemporary work being done in this transformative era, including some essays that are situated within the framework of the current global pandemic, succeeds in underscoring our need to build understandings as to how algorithmic application and thinking may function as a part of our networks, and have the ability capacity to conduct multiple inputs into meaningful communication. Presenting vital evidence— such as in-class collaborative exercises and other useful educational applications, as well as practical imaginative possibilities being enacted at present, and a sense of the types of digital media work that will be more common in the future—readers of this volume will build new regard for the value of now crucial online tools we use to create, communicate, and build insight.

This collection features a wide range of alternative all-star practitioners (not “big name” critics or theorists), who allure and entice readers to be drawn in—if not captivated—by its progression of variant essays, each of which addresses how we can (and do) work together with computers to create progressive settings in the arts and education spheres. As one essay declares, one might argue with some of the historical attributions that appear in the book or against the notion that poetic words are always indeterminate. Nevertheless, each essay in the book demonstrates the importance of collaborative, interactive networking in arts and education as both a process and practice.

“The Community and the Algorithm” informs its readers what an algorithm is and what its practical and conceptual potentials are as the twenty-first century moves forward. While several essays emphasize pedagogical application, others take us beyond the classroom or museum and into the world at large. In short, these essays dig fortified trenches that other professors, programmers, and artists will follow into the digital future. This volume takes a deep look into what algorithms do and how collaborative networking in the arts and humanities forcefully serves to create a progressive activity with thoughtful, unique processes applied in classrooms, artworks, communities, and “Everything”.

Dr. C.T. Funkhouser

Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Current debates about the coming impact of generative artificial intelligence have focused primarily on the role of these algorithmic systems in individual creative and professional activities. […]

By shifting attention towards the potential for algorithmic activities in creative communities, this collection makes clear how limited the terms of the debate have been. Klobucar’s collection intervenes into this widespread mixture of panic and celebration about algorithms by challenging three fundamental assumptions we see in popular conversations: the unstated premise that the algorithm is uniquely contemporary, a technology-driven phenomenon; the focus on individual professional or creative activity; and the assumption that algorithms ultimately are in conflict with human agency. […]

Klobucar offers a corrective to our current ChatGPT panic. But any collection like this is also making a claim to define a field or area of inquiry, and so I hope that this collection prompts us to pay more attention to the stakes of this kind of disciplinary reorientation, even if it doesn’t quite provide an answer. What happens when we frame a bunch of analog creative practices as algorithmic?

[Extract from book review appearing on 'Electronic Book Review': Punday, Daniel. “Expanding the Algorithm”, Electronic Book Review, January 7, 2024, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/expanding-the-algorithm/]