The Poetics of Computation

This Special Issue of Humanities 6.3 (August 2017) was edited by  Andrew Klobucar and Burt Kimmelman. It focuses, in particular, upon the current appropriation of the term and concept of computation within arts and letters, in an effort not only to explore long established confluences between technology and humanist principles (keeping in mind historical notions of computation), but also to note how recent advances in coding have provided writers and artists with key insights into how linguistic structure may influence, and may even possibly determine, cognitive and emotional conditions in a work of art. To this end, the two terms, computation and poetics, is considered in relation to one another in order to show how a “computational” approach to writing and the arts can support a wide range of language-oriented experiments in philosophy, literature, and digital media in general. In doing so, the issue may shed light on how the term and idea of computation need not preclude certain aspects of what philosophers typically refer to as the life-world, such as doubt, perplexity, and open-ended reasoning, and thus may reveal a more sophisticated symbiosis between what are thought of as natural processes and newly emerging technological processes that need not dissolve the humanities as a category of inquiry.