Speaking with Machines & Machines that Speak: Spoken Word & Digital Performance Poetry

This chapter serves as a survey and introduction to digital spoken word in the UK. As such the focus of the chapter is not the use of digital media for recording spoken word performances, but spoken word performances that actually use live digital media as a constituent part of the performance. The first part of the chapter provides a detailed typology and survey of digital and digitally-augmented spoken word in the UK. It considers the different ways that digital media have been used, and are being used, in and alongside spoken word performances and performance poetry. This includes canonical figures such as John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, Simon Biggs and JR Carpenter, and new and emerging practitioners, as well as general observations on the inter-medial practices that are set alongside spoken word such as projection art and live coding. The second section discusses the poetics of reading, hearing and participating in digitally augmented spoken word poetries. This section consists of a semiotic analysis of the staging of digitally-augmented spoken word. It critically analyses the interpretative significance of both the physical and virtual arrangement of performance poet, screen, projector and electronic devices alongside their network of inter-relation. It also considers Spoken Word studies as a useful critical lens for interpreting digital poetries in performance. Inter-media digital performance poetries are often critically analysed in media-studies and fine-art contexts, but as live durational performances that feature speaking with machines and machines that speak, there is a strong case to be made for utilising the critical contexts of performativity, affect and spoken word studies