Janky materiality works by not working. It is the spirit in the machine, the ghost in language, the provisional operation. It is a musicological poetics run through a patchwork apparatus.
Janky Materiality: Artifice & Interface is a transdisciplinary performative critical investigation of analog–digital interface and materiality, language-oriented poetry and digital language art, experimental electronic music and modular synths, and the technology of film, album, and book.
Janky Materiality explores blurry intersections and cracked interfaces between page, screen and speaker, analog and digital practice. With reference to avant-garde poetics, digital language art, experimental electronic music and modular synths, chance operations and oracular knowing, Johnson thinks about the ways digital material practice extends the post-structural field, as page-based practices are (further) destabilized by computer-based experiments. Language itself is a janky technology that works (at least temporarily) through its own failures, so that digital mediation serves to further break and rewire language operations. Meanwhile, the book also explores sonification and the study of waveforms: hybrid audio-visual objects that can be materially sculpted and analyzed.
Ultimately, Janky Materiality presents a theory of becoming-digital, where interface is a matter of thinking and acting between and among embodied and conceptual, analog and digital realms, whether we are thinking about a technology like language, audio-visual phenomena, or a tool at hand.
About the Author
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018) and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). They live in Philadelphia, where they co-edit the horror poetics circular Cul-de-sac of Blood.