HYPERMETRICS:

The co-evolution of voice and machine from typewriter to hypertext
by Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt

1. PREAMBLE
1.1 AI AS DEPENDENT CONSCIOUSNESS

You cannot have machine consciousness without a human to recognise it. By the terms of the Turing test, artificial intelligence has to fool 'an average interrogator' (Hodges: 417). So where mechanical mind is possible, it must be recognisable to a human, and to that extent dependent on human mind. The mechanical brains of the next millennium will not be of a different order from the human: the two must co-evolve, or how would we know that the machines are conscious? This has consequences for mechanical perception. Machines 'perceive', and we give them credit for perception, as expanded human sensoria, seeing, hearing, scenting, tasting, touching in environments where we cannot go, in wavelengths and scales that we can only intuit. But those perceptions are as nothing unless they can be rendered into a human scale, as maps of a cosmos which, like our planet, is too vast and too detailed for us to apprehend. Machine perception is dependent on human perception, and the two must co-evolve.

1.2 RECORDING AS MECHANICAL PERCEPTION

We have linked mechanical perception to recording technologies, to writing, and lately to audio and audio-visual recording. There is no fundamental discontinuity between the two, nor between analogue and digital recording: all require a certain capital, cultural or economic; each is manipulable; each decays. But there has been a kind of doubling of the relation between voice and recording media which is more a sociological than a technological trend (see on this issue the discussions in Essays in Sound: Dyson 1995, Sinnerbrink 1997). In the course of this century, the shift from handwriting to less gestural modes of recording has accompanied a drift from the primacy of the voice towards a primacy of the script. This essay proposes an interrogation of our technologies of recording, and asks whether there is co-evolution in the narrow domain of human-mechanical prosody.

2. THE SCRIPT
2.1 VOICELESSNESS

Derrida may be a better journalist than he is a philosopher. As the mechanisation of writing advances (typewriter, word processor, hypertext, web site), the 'presence' of the voice to orthograph composition, its gestural quality, has been de-linked. Extreme variants emerged promptly early in the century -- typewriter and typographic poetry -- and enter the mainstream as, for example, the Reuters gopher service and teletext. Apparently unauthored, and spoken of in some informal surveys as the most believed news source in the UK, teletext is archetypically voiceless.

2.2 THE IMITATION OF WRITING

At the same time, radio and TV interviewees now talk as if they had been scripted, denaturalising the simple forms of dialogue, attempting to structure sentences as if they were written. Ordinary parents, teachers, entrepreneurs and union officials struggle to use technical vocabularies. Politicians recite the clearly pre-scripted soundbites prepared for them by party spin doctors. Perhaps we have all become so used to the seemingly effortless fluency of movie stars reciting their lines that we no longer have an ear for ordinary dialogue in public fora, while sponsoring a parallel professionalisation of improvisation in shock jocks in the USA, Chris Evans, Danny Baker and the new laddism in the UK. In a movement opposite to that proposed by McLuhan, electronic speech has increasingly imitated writing. The scripted dominates over the improvised (in music the score dominates over the performance, and in improvisation, rather as Adorno complains, the formula dominates free, ad hoc composition).

2.3 SCRIPT DEPENDENCY

Movie budgeting, not creatives, demanded scripts. Now public figures emulate, however clumsily, the g;ibly homey, rhetorical and technical fluency of the movies, and while films are increasingly designed for multiple viewings, leading to a musicalisation of dialogue, politics and policy become scripts for repetition, not arguments for debate. Theatre actors breathe into the script, with the breath which animates creation, a mystical project key to the forms of drama, recitation and song. But recording deflates the divine afflatus, rendering performance as performance, not life (as there is irreparable and irreversible life in live drama). Speech has become, as a matter of practice rather than an effect of philosophy, dependent on its scripts, initially in the cultural industries, and now in their circumambient infotainment satellites, and to some extent at least in the changes in voice and vocabulary we all take on in interviews, meetings and committees.

2.4 NORMATIVE PROSODY

Prosody, the study of the relation between writing and voicing, has small place in the literary academy today. Formal analysis at its most persuasive has pursued narration, not scansion, and the vast majority of creative hypertext sites match this interest in the spatialisation of narrative, not the time of speaking. At its crudest, formalist narratology proposes a model, and traces deviations from it. Such too is the residual position of prosody, with the added difficulty that the only functioning models are for regular, not to say normative modes of metrical verse. The revolution in metrics brought about by generative-transformational linguistics (cf Levin 1962; Attridge 1982: 34-55) appears fundamentally to have altered neither the lack of interest in voicing among literary scholars, nor the normative approaches of earlier attempts at producing an English verse metric. Critically, such studies as I have been able to find seem averse to what in contemporary poetry is not verse, in the sense of stressed metres. Conversely, studies of contemporary poetry, alive to Empsonian ambiguities but deaf to music, tend to analyse discursively rather than materially the properties of poems.

2.5 NO RHYME, NO EXPECTATIONS

This cannot be solely the fault of those who study metrics. Something has altered, not only in the making, but in the reading of poetry, so that certain modes of verbal music now cloy that were once delightful, and some once lumpy lines, like Donne's, are now models of a novel euphony. The abandonment of rhyme removed the expectations that powered a certain mode of reading, the endstop where the wave of the voice crashed onto its beach. It was not the first time: the loss of the four-stress alliterative verse of Langland removed a certain vocal ruggedness and flexibility, replacing it with a more measured and artificial control of breath and metre. Losing that expectation of regularity (you can hear it happening in Yeats' 'Easter 1916' with its 'lost' fourth beat; cf Attridge 326-9) democratises the relationships between syllables, as Schšnberg democratises relations between the notes of the twelve-tone row, and it is retrospective (as in Olson's 'Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays', where 'the quantity of the syllables (how long it takes to say them) pulls down the accent to a progress of the line along the length of itself'[Olson 1966: 35-6])

2.6 DEMOCRACY AND THE VARIABLE FOOT

This democratisation of the line is political in its inspiration: in William Carlos Williams' variable foot, for an important instance, product of a lifetime's search for a metric accountable to the voices he had researched and recorded in his short stories and in earlier poems, vernacular, and a constant from the 1920 Prologue to Kora in Hell (Williams 1970: 6-28) to the 1967 'Autobiography of the Works' (Williams 1967), caught, in mimetic recitative, in 
                       For the last
      three nights

                   I have slept like a baby

                       without

      liquor or dope of any sort!
('Tribute to the Painters', 1955, in Williams 1962: 136; to read the cadence, include the pauses created by the eye looking for its enjambments, and equalise the durations of each line, so that 'without' becomes central). At this stage, the poem pursues the voice, a structural work with roots back into the Romantics' attempts to catch the common tongue; but where they sought capture in the nets of the quatrain, Williams is prepared to open the foot to relativity, not only in the abstract, but in the weight of the relations between people that are concretised in words. From here, poetry would flow in two directions,: the one via the beats and Black poetry towards performance, where the written poem is a subsidiary element except as critique of the purely print poem; and the other into Black Mountain college, where colloquial democratisation and the democratisation of syllables became most clearly a political dialectic -- democratisation of the means, but patricianisation of the mode of poetic production. Capital's social relations could not afford a resolution: the power of this poetry arises from its failure.

2.7 THE GRAPHIC FIELD OF VISUAL POETRY

The effort towards democracy takes a certain formal toll, caught in one key 'dogma' of Olson's 'Projective Verse' essay: FIELD COMPOSITION (Olson 1966c; a large chunk of which was reproduced in Williams' The Autobiography, 1951: 329-332). In the movement from words spoken in time to words marked in space, from scansion to graphics, written poetry enters an aesthetic of typography. The first inkling is the liberation, in the second decade of the century, not of words (pace Marinetti) but of graphemes: of letters in Apollinaires' calligrammes, and of typographic marks in e.e. cummings. The imitative qualities of verse forms seeking a manner of approximating speech continue, but the invention of the materials for a practice in which voicing is excluded, and with it the most familiar means for entering into the construction of poetry, becomes the grounds for a purely visual, mute poetry, a poetry of space.

2.8 GRAPHIC OPACITY

Earlier, Morgenstern's 'Fish's Night Song', a parodic account of Goethe's 'Night Wanderer's Song', used exclusively the graphic marks of the typewriter to produce a schematic illustration of a fish. For Friedrich Kittler, this typewritten form emblematises a departure from the phonocentric metaphysics of presence:

The signs on the page cannot be spoken by any voice -- regardless
of whether one reads them as fish scales or discrete elements of
the roman typeface. Man and soul, in any case, no longer apply.
With all the wanderers between day and night, Spirit and Nature,
male and female, Man simply died around 1900. It was a death to
which the much discussed death of God is a footnote.

(Kittler 1990: 258) The symptomatic year of 1900 marks for Kittler the breakdown of an earlier mutual transparency of the elementary forms of literate culture. 'In 1900, speaking and hearing, writing and reading were put to the test as isolated functions, without any subject or thought as their shadowy supports' (Kittler 1990: 214). Perhaps his diagnosis is premature. Certainly, the typewriter brings with it an awareness of letters and marks rather than words as the units of writing; and in its invention recapitulates thirty years of upheaval in office management, while facilitating the commodification of language as information in the form of keystrokes. In poetry, it enables a liberation from the speakable, from the voice, from time; reconstituting poetry as an occupation of space ('the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air' [Olson 1966d]). In losing its punctual address to the solitary reader's sensibility, it has erased the punctual origin of the author, despite Zukofsky's 'the reader becomes something of a poet himself: not because he "contributes" to the poem, but because he finds himself subject of its energy' (Zukofsky 1967: 30).

2.9 REFERENTIALITY
The cost is the perceived loss of an ability to refer, as reference ceases to be a quality of speech that points towards a world, to become referentiality, a property of language that points to other acts of language, to the act itself of pointing. If not poetry, then a certain mode of critical thought, abandoning the idiosyncratic materialisms of Williams and Olson, proposes as the central problem for cultural studies the question representation. Doomed: studying the sign's structure will tell you no more about reference than studying the sundial's gnomon will tell you about the sun. This fear of reference is written into the title of the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, at one with the graphical autonomy of the typewriter. It reaches a certain apogee in the unreadable poems of Charles Bernstein or Susan Howe, in the sense that reading aloud is almost pointless, so little music inhabits their rhetorical structures. Such mute reading is condemned to the semantic, but in the absence of reference, meaning itself is hyperreal, locked outside the circuits of the human. Sign equals sign equals sign.

2.10 THE AUSCHWITZ ERASURE

A third element combines with the democracy dialectic and the hegemony of the visual to erase the voice. It is best heard in a 1958 comment of Paul Celan's on the tasks of German postwar poetry:

No matter how alive its traditions, with most sinister events in
its memory, most questionable developments around it, it can no
longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to expect.
Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts
locate even its 'musicality' in such a way that it has nothing in
common with the 'euphony' which more or less blithely continued
to sound alongside the greatest horrors.

(Celan 1986: 15-16) What startles about Celan's poetry ('For a Jewish poet to compose in German after the Holocaust is an irony so dark as not merely to shadow but to inhabit the substance of Celan's poetry' [Ward 1991: 140-1]) is the necessity of poetry in the face of its impossibility. This demon he faces is put like this by Adorno: 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today' (Adorno 1967: 34). That corroded knowledge is what makes Celan a poet, and is implicated in the bare, grey vocabulary he shares with late Beckett. It is the lyric that is soured here, and makes it possible to comprehend the amusical patterning of repetitions in Celan as investigations of the savage ugliness beneath the harmony and GemŸtlichkeit. It is I think possible to comprehend Ian Hamilton Finlay's one word poems, alongside his meticulous unpicking of the strands of Nazi ideology, as voiceless evacuations of the dangerous euphonies.

2.11 THE POEM AS OBJECT

At the same time, Finlay's is a poetry, and one that depends upon reference, pun (and so on speech) and visual/verbal consonances. Poetry in the 20th century has taken on the task of investigating the conditions of communication, rather as painting took on the question of ontology, at the point at which philosophy abandoned both pursuits. Among the most committed poets, the most voiceable -- the Langston Hughes of 'Montage of a Dream Deferred', Ernesto Cardenal, Ed Dorn -- those conditions must include the possibility of speech, as destination of the poetic energy Zukofsky mentions, as the (a?) purpose of poetry understood as a relation between people. Here reading is not critical commentary but the voicing. But at the same time, the loss of expectation discovered in the rupture of the iamb c.1900, makes poems things. As thing, the poem does not lead through time, but exposes its matter as a series of facets, looking always inwards, and only as an effect of looking in to become aware of lights refracted from a source external to the poem. Where, as in Celan, that light is dark, the poem makes solid, objective, the void, not as absence but as plenum. Such poetry has become sculptural, and the role of the voice is like the movement your eyes or hands make around a solid object that resists them.

3. A HYPERTEXT POEM
3.1 KNOWLEDGE IN TIME

Originally conceived of as a knowledge architecture by Vannevar Bush and implemented as such by Ted Nelson , hypertext, as prosodic form, becomes a querying of the relations of knowledge, especially of the internal relations of its elements, for example of completeness. If then we are to work on questions of voicing hypertext, we have to find modes of redirecting the inflection of sentences, in the very process of reading. We have to enagage voicing as improvisation, a tentative shadowing of a fluid, albeit between structures established in the text. The text then subordinates itself not to voice as point of origin, but as destination, prepares itself for a mirroring and reintroduces the caesura as the punctuation formed by pointing and clicking. My example is a composition of my own, written first as a catalogue piece for Mnemosyne, a CD-ROM produced in the Liverpool Art School for the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology . A plain text version might read like this:

3.2 A MEME


but children are apt to forget to remember
and down they forget as up they grow


e.e.cummings

under altars where the mustered ghosts
of the holy dead are laid

in the unremitting toil of those whose love
must wipe the gouged slate clean

a moonstained river wider
and shallower by the silt of fifty years


*

of ritual memories set free from earth
spiritual sisters of the bone-locked mind

so earthen place records the frozen
drift of time

end to end amid the spindrift dust, a sisterhood,
implants of devotional innocence


*

that can't recall, amnesic love, as birds forget
the arcs of flight they trace

erasing under moist chamois the tracery
of condensation on the window's pane

a denial deeper than forgetting,
deep as the call of moisture to the thirsting throat


*

a mechanism of desire, it spills
an ocean down the rift between the lands

dead as the slate sky it deflects,
the necessary death the fisherman lands

as if only evolution matters, spilling free
as a fish in the white havens

The hypertext version can be entered from here.

3.2 GRAMMAR

The word 'deflects' in the penultimate couplet links back to the second couplet after the epigraph (which was misquoted from memory and cannot be returned to from the poem). It might be arrived at from the word 'erasing' in the eighth couplet, which in turn can be arrived at from the third couplet. This path would give something close to the following structure:


a moonstained river wider
and shallower by the silt of fifty years
erasing under moist chamois the tracery
of condensation on the window's pane
dead as the slate sky it deflects,
the necessary death the fisherman lands
in the unremitting toil of those whose love
must wipe the gouged slate clean

that is, a structure lacking the pineal consciousness of a main verb. Jumps within couplets also give quasi-grammatical (comprehensible but formally incorrect) sentence elements, again without, in the main, main verbs. Linked words are sometimes identical, sometimes formed from morphemes, and sometimes linked only semantically across themes of remembrance, forgetting and their mutual part in the evolution of the new. At no point does the reader have the whole of her chain of connections in front of her, as above: reading the poem is itself a process of remembering and forgetting. To voice it is to accomodate the twists of the syntax as it moves the stresses along unfixed lines.

3.3 AN AMULET

Ian Hamilton Finlay , in a letter of 17 September 1963:


'It comes back, after each poem, to a level of "being", to an almost
physical intuition of the time, or of a form . . . "concrete" began
for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense
that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me,
at a physical level, was no longer there'

(cited in Bann 1977 :9) Finlay's discovery of the loss of trajectory in his verse is a simultaneous discovery of a marvellous stillness. The word becomes a foot, extended into the duration of its ground -- glass, rock, wood, building, garden -- and weathering with it as 'physical intuition', things whose addition to the world reorders the possibilities of that world. In some of Finlay's work, especially in the garden at Stonypath, words are spoken not by voice but by trees, wind, water. It is important that these sounds are of a garden, not nature. Nature, an implication of the voice in the world, is past. The garden is a construct designed to amplify, in such instances, the sonic thought of the engraved word. 'A Meme', by contrast, constantly collapses over the native four-stress pattern on which it improvises, a technical defeat, but one also generated in the failure to address the corroded knowledge of Auschwitz' significance for the lyric. What, after all, is lyric but the verbal form of song, and if deprived of music, even the verbal musics of recitation, than mere declension of syllables. Finlay's answer, and one borrowed and mutated in A Meme, is to form a knot of interwoven phrases, like a Celtic design, its motion bound to pattern, making of movement a still thing.

3.4 MECHANICAL PASTORAL
The book is dead, as God died: the codex of lyric verse did not need to be killed. All lyric now is elegaic. Either what is written is a parody of scripted normalcy (as in


baa baa black sheep
have you any wool
yes sir yes sir
three bags full


one for thi master
n anuthir wan fur thi master
n wan fur thi fuckin church

[Tom Leonard, from 'Ghostie Men', Allnutt et al 1988: 192] ) or accelerated to the speed of the supplement; or it has abjured the voice as itself an indexed real from which a semantics tied to the logic of representation has debarred itself -- or at least from which referentiality has alienated poetry at the moment it engaged with its engines of democratisation. You begin to sense the need of a mechanical voice for hypermetrics, a vocalisation programme capable of a certain inflectional improvisation on the basis of the shifting quantities and durations in pseudo-sentences lacking the intonational magnetic north of the verb. We need to learn and internalise how machines listen to us. Technically, this demands what we do not have, a vocabulary circulating among poets of what a machine recognises of human voices: overtones, pitch, attack, level, range; not premised on Cartesian consciousness, but a purely descriptive account of a mechanical dialect in process (some such study of modulation can be heard in Bill Seaman's contribution to Artintact 1, which, moreover, attends carefully to the relations between voicing and hypertext in the presence of Quck Timeª micromovies, constituents of a hypermedia prosody). Hypertext, as narcissistic element of hypermedia, calls for its unrecorded echo.

3.5 TWO MECHANICAL AGENCIES

The European experience of genocide -- already visited on the populations of every other continent 1492-1942 -- shocks us, with Adorno and Celan, into withdrawal from the lyric's voicing. The electronic word has abjured knowledge of language's complicity in the terror which the rationalist/irrationalist binary has visited on the world and finally on itself. As if there were only the gradation between the muttered instruction and the shout of horror. We have proposed to ourselves as unique alternatives the machine as slave of a sociopolitical technics or the machine as engine of liberation: the production line of extinction or the paradisaical motive power of a new age, and our identifications of each with reason and unreason flicker with a dangerous ambivalence. What we have not thought is the relations between humans and machines as extensions of the relations between humans and humans.

3.6 RECOVERING TIME

Not for the first time this century, we have the opportunity to embrace our technologies. The first time, in Russian constructivism, at the Bauhaus, in L'Esprit nouveau, a deviant master-slave dialectic grew up, in which technique and artists oscillated between dominance and submission: it is hard to see whether Morgenstern is driving his typewriter, or the typewriter is driving him, an ambiguity fundmental to Marinetti's typographics or the concrete poetry of the Brazilian Noigandres group. At the same time, the same phenomena can be read as agonistic, as the play of tough competitors. Overshadowed by a conceptualisation of the mechanical regime as the type of a socio-political efficiency, a thought enforced onto machines in the death camps, the possibilities of learning from the mechanical was circumscribed or refused, beginning with the 30s' embrace of a nostalgic, humanist realism. The struggle to achieve equality among humans and technologies produces, among the concrete poets and the line moving through Black Mountain to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a spatialisation of prosody, as field composition and as the field of rhetorical intertextuality. The result is a static model of the relation, deprived, with voicing, of time. We have considered our period as one that is 'after', believing with Olson that we now inhabit space alone. That insight is only possible in the era of the deaf-mute typewriter: but the computer can both speak and listen, and the regeneration of our speech and hearing is codependent on those mechanical perceptions. First in the time of mutual perception, then in the time of mutual regeneration, you can hear resonances of how co-evolution is to occur, how time persists, as process, after the farewell to natural time.

3.7 LISTENING TO LANGUAGE MACHINES

After nature, the human evolves in conjunction with the machine, in a coevolution in which we recognise that natural selection is supplemented or supplanted by artifice. In the wrack of reference lies the communicative: the unavoidable relation between people constituted, among other media, in language, both as writing and as poetry. The trajectory of poetry towards object status has taken two forms; one in which, among the language poets, referentiality is supreme; the other in which the poem, as material object in the world, proposes that fragment of the world as mediation. The former, especially, makes the poem a commodity fetish -- the relation between people appearing in the fantastic guise of a relation between objects. Here language is considered as autonomous entity without author or voicing and so pure object. But the mechanical mediation will have to begin, in the spirit of the former, a dialogue not with the object language, but with language as a technology, to whit, an interrelational process of the co-evolution of human beings and their machines. At this point, both our devices and our languages demand a kind of parity, as subjects. If we are to ascribe consciousness to computers, we need also to recognise the potential for consciousness in the older technology, and to draw both digital media and languages into dialogue. We must commune with them as well as between ourselves, not as we did with nature, in nostalgic, remorseful and embittered tones, but as equals and partners. We must learn to listen and respond to what our languages, our devices, are saying. That is time. That will be poetry.

28 March 1997

REFERENCES

  • Adorno, Theodor W. (1967), 'Cultural Criticism and Society' in Prisms, trans Samuel and Shierry Weber, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp 19-34.
  • Allnutt, Gillian, Fred d'Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram (eds) (1988), The New British Poetry, Paladin, London.
  • Attridge, Derek (1982), The Rhythms of English Poetry, Longmans, London.
  • Bann, Stephen (1977b), 'Ian Hamilton Finlay -- An Imaginary Portrait' in Ian Hamilton Finlay, Serpentine Gallery/Arts Council of Great Britain, London.pp 7-28.
  • Celan, Paul (1986), Collected Poems, trans Rosemarie Waldrop, P.N. Review/ Carcanet Press, Manchester.
  • Dyson, Frances (1995), 'Nothing Here but the Recording: Derrida and Phonography' in Essays in Sound 2: Technophonia, Contemporary Sound Arts, Sydney, pp 40-46.
  • Hodges, Andrew (1985), Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence, Counterpoint/ Unwin, London.
  • Kittler, Friedrich A (1990), Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA.
  • Levin, Samuel R. (1962), Linguistic Structures in Poetry, (= Janua Linguarum; Series Minor 23), Mouton, The Hague.
  • Olson, Charles (1966a), Selected Writings, ed Robert Creeley, New Directions, New York.
  • Olson, Charles (1966b), 'Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays' in Olson 1966a, pp31-45.
  • Olson, Charles (1966c), 'Projective Verse' in Olson 1966a, pp 15-26.
  • Olson, Charles (1966d), 'Mayan Letters', in Olson 1966a, pp 69-130.
  • Sinnerbrink, Robert (1997), 'His Master's Voice: Derrida and Vocal-Writing' in Essays in Sound 3: Diffractions, Contemporary Sound Arts, Sydney, pp 74-80.
  • Ward, Geoffrey (1991), 'Nothing But Mortality: Prynne and Celan' in Easthope, Anthony and John O. Thompson (1991), Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp 139-152.
  • Williams, William Carlos (1951), The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, New Directions, New York.
  • Williams, William Carlos (1962), Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems, New Directions, New York.
  • Williams, William Carlos (1967), I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, reported and edited by Edith Heal, Cape Editions, London.
  • Williams, Willam Carlos (1970), Imaginations, New Directions, New York.
  • Zukofsky, Louis (1967), 'A Statement for Poetry' in Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky, Rapp and Carroll, London, pp 27-31.

Sean Cubitt lecures on Digital Cultures at Liverpool John Moores University. He has had essays published in FutureNatural (Routledge, London & New York, 1996) and Fractal Dreams:New Media in Social Context (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1996.)

See also:

http://www.livjm.ac.uk/Digital_Cultures