Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body

This chapter investigates how twenty-first-century digital technologies work to radicalise and renegotiate main features of concrete poetry. Carbone highlights a connection between the poetic text – seen both as a “constellation” of codes of communication and an “invitation” to actively participate in the aesthetic practice –, the algorithm that defines the reading process and the poetics of the literary work, and the body of the viewer/reader. The chapter argues that twenty-first-century electronic literature and digital concrete poetry can foster better awareness of the relationship between human beings, software culture, and machine code.