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POET PIRATE NETBOT Ruminations on the Undertaking of Excess Information by Kedrick James http://vispo.com/guests/kedrick/poetpiratebot An essay by the Vancouver poet, musician, scholar, and visual artist Kedrick James. With 13 of his intriguing visual collages (click these for bigger versions). POET PIRATE NETBOT is related to Kedrick's book-length "Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse". One of the things he looked at was spam as a literary phenomenon. In POET PIRATE NETBOT, he looks at that and related things: how writing and education are changing and will continue to change in light of the avalanches of writing and media occassioned by the net and the digital, not just by the wide access the world's population has to publishing tools, but by the presence of bots that write and process writings. It's quite a hopeful look, really, at what sometimes appears to be a devastating change to the literary, artistic, and educational landscapes. For although we see this continuing avalanche of writing and media changing the literary landscape, we also see people using the tools and bots to both sift through the deluge and create works of art that begin to sort through and synthesize what we have. The visual images in the essay relate to this topic via their being made from google image search images (they're not made with dbCinema). I visited Kedrick recently in Vancouver and saw the prints he and Olga Glukovska are making from these digital works. They're doing screen prints of them. About 18"x24" on thick archival paper and framed. These are not simply File>Print versions of the art, but are for the medium of print. There's more work on vispo.com by Kedrick : http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kedrick is something I did in dbCinema on Kedrick's thesis "Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse". Kedrick teaches English teachers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. ja