This is an outdated version published on 2024-11-28. Read the most recent version.

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

Authors

DOI:

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

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.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

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 21st-Century Speculative Literature and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2021.

References

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. A Harvest HBJ, 1970.

Bell, Alice. “Digital Fictionality: Possible Worlds Theory, Ontology, and Hyperlinks.” Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, edited by Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, U of Nebraska P, pp. 249–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xng0c.15 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xng0c.15

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. U of Minnesota P, 2012. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678976.001.0001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678976.001.0001

Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities P, 2011. https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.9750134.0001.001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.9750134.0001.001

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poems. Edited by William Keach, Penguin Classics, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. Translation and foreword by Brian Massumi, U of Minneapolis P, 2005.

Drucker, Johanna. Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display. MIT P, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12523.001.0001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12523.001.0001

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. 1922. Edited by Michael North, Norton, 2001.

Fickers, Andreas, et al. “Digital History and Hermeneutics: Between Theory and Practice: Introduction.” Digital History and Hermeneutics: Between Theory and Practice. Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics. Volume 2, edited by Andreas Fickers and Juliane Tatarinov, De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110723991 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110723991-001

Funkhouser, C. T. New Directions in Digital Poetry. Continuum, 2012.

Groth, Simon. “Still Defining Digital Literature.” The Writing Platform, 20 May 2018, https://thewritingplatform.com/2018/05/still-defining-digital-literature/ accessed 18 Nov. 2023.

Harman, Graham. Art and Objects. Polity, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315270562-4 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315270562-4

Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Random, 2017.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, SUNY P, 2010.

Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism. Oxford UP, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195104264.003.0007 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195104264.001.0001

Hui, Yuk. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Foreword by Bernard Stiegler, U of Minnesota P, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816698905.001.0001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816698905.001.0001

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Introduction by Declan Kiberd, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.

Kleymann, Rabea, and Jan-Erik Stange. “Towards Hermeneutic Visualization in Digital Literary Studies.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021. https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/2/000547/000547.html accessed 16 Jan. 2024.

Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard UP, 2004.

Nelson, Jason. Nine Billion Branches. http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz17/gallery/nelson/index.html

Nelson, Jason. “Poetic Playlands: Poetry, Interface and Video Games Engines.” Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms and Practice, edited by Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 335–49. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501363474.ch-030 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501363474.ch-030

Nine Billion Branches. ELMCIP, https://elmcip.net/creative-work/nine-billion-branches accessed 18 Nov. 2023.

Nolan, Jonathan, and Lisa Joy, creators. Westworld. Based on a book by Michael Crichton. HBO Entertainment, 2016–22.

Ong, Walter, J. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Edited by with commentaries by Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara van den Berg, Cornell UP, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501714504 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501714504

O’Sullivan, James. Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature & Literary Games. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11310-0 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11310-0_6

Punday, Daniel. “Rereading Manovich’s Algorithm: Genre and Use in Possible Worlds Theory.” Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, edited by Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, U of Nebraska P, pp. 296–314. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xng0c.17 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xng0c.17

Romele, Alberto. Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429331893 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429331893

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. E-book.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by John Dover Wilson, Cambridge UP, 1969.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Edited by Colin Burrow, Oxford UP, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198184317.book.1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198184317.book.1

Simanowski, Roberto. Digital Art and Meaning. U of Minnesota P, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816667376.001.0001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816667376.001.0001

Sterne, Lawrence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. 1768. Introduction and notes by Paul Goring, Penguin, 2005. E-book. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00167815

Stiegler, Bernard. Foreword. Translated by Daniel Ross. On the Existence of Digital Objects, by Yuk Hui, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. i–xiiii.

Tabbi, Joseph. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. Bloomsbury, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474230285

Downloads

Published

2024-11-28

Versions

Issue

No. 14 (2024): Dwelling and Belonging

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Ostalska, Katarzyna. 2024. “Nine Billion Branches: A Digital Poem by Jason Nelson—the Home of Objects”. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, no. 14 (November): 186-214. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.14.12.
Crossref
Scopus
Google Scholar
Europe PMC