Nine Billion Branches: A Digital Poem by Jason Nelson—the Home of Objects

Katarzyna Ostalska

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.14.12

Authors

Katarzyna Ostalska University of Lodz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8553-7517

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.14.12

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Keywords:

digital poetry, digital hermeneutics, digital objects, Object-Oriented Ontology, Jason Nelson

Abstract

In his digital poem Nine Billion Branches, Jason Nelson explores various modes of belonging, which could be realized multifacetedly on corporeal, social, political, aesthetic and ecological levels. These locations range from the domestic (i.e. the bedroom, garage or living room) to the more abstract, such as the human body and language. The intricate network of relations between digital objects (rendered in the poem via a map of hypertextual links and limited interactivity) is expressed by means of kaleidoscopic, co-ordinate and not causal-effect connections. The article studies the notion of digital objects in Nelson’s poem, showing how the online milieu affects the reading and interpretation processes. In this context, digital hermeneutics comes into focus, especially as regards visualizations. When discussing the selected poetic titles (their total number is 40), the article explores Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, linking it to digitality. The article aims to analyze how following the digital paths in Nine Billion Branches, belonging to the world, to language, one’s body and locations can be perceived as a shifting web of interactions between the digital objects and readers/players, in the everchanging text that has no beginning or end.

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Author Biography

Katarzyna Ostalska, University of Lodz

Katarzyna Ostalska is Associate Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland. She is the head of the Posthumanities Research Centre at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz. She holds a PhD and a postdoctoral degree (habilitation) in literature. In 2015, she published Towards Female Empowerment: The New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue. She co-edited two volumes of articles, recently she was a guest co-editor of a special issue of a journal devoted to the speculative genre (2020). Her new collection, co-edited with Tomasz Fisiak, The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21^st-Century Speculative Literature and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2021.

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