New Lit on the Block :: re•mediate
Pro AI? Anti AI? Undecided? No matter where you are on the AI fence, re•mediate is making its own contribution to the conversation, publishing creative writing, criticism, and interviews, as well as a limited amount of visual/interactive work, all of which centers on what is traditionally called human-computer collaboration.
“At re•mediate,” explains Founding Editor P.D. Edgar, “we call it computer-assisted creative writing, which is to acknowledge, in broad strokes, that the practice of being a writer is computer-mediated at many more stages than the compositional. In Issue•1, we published a poem that was human-written but addressed, using three different fonts, how writers are expected to maintain an online audience or presence as a part of their brand and the frustration with that expectation. On the other hand, we also seriously consider work that’s made with AI or written computationally, such as with functional code that prints text. We’re not the first to do this (Taper), and luckily, we’re in a little cohort of fresh new literary magazines who are interested in serious experiments with AI (Ensemble Park, AI Literary Review).”
Leveraging Tools
re•mediate publishes triannual (Summer, Fall, Spring) online, on a single page, using the site builder ReadyMag. “If anyone’s interested in taking on the challenge,” says Edgar, “they can look at the kinds of animations and affordances of ReadyMag and submit work that leverages some of those tools. There’s a chance in the future that we will print some kind of anthology, but I’d need to talk to our contributors and make sure they’re on board with that.”
Edgar says re•mediate was started after thinking about the work of media theorist Jay David Bolter, who published the books Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print and Remediation: Understanding New Media (with Richard Grusin) at the turn of the 21st Century. “Both books speak to the way that our practices and experiences of reading and writing were being transformed at that time, when digital writing technologies and personal computing were shaking up writing. A lot of the concerns and fears of that time are reiterating today as we think about how AI is shaking up what it means to write. The title of our magazine hearkens back to the history of transformations in writing technologies that began when someone pressed a river reed into a lump of clay.”
Removing Barriers
Edgar has previous editorial experience with an undergraduate literary magazine and as Art & Design Editor for Black Warrior Review. “Near the end of my time at BWR,” Edgar shared, “I worked on Kenyon Review‘s archive project as an associate, digitizing poems, plays and prose. I got all my print design experience as a Multimedia Journalism major in college, which came in handy when I was doing my MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Journalism and Media Studies at Alabama. Now, I’m a Ph.D. student in Texts and Technology at the University of Central Florida, where I study poetry culture in print and online.
“As much as I love computers, I was brought up in print, and a lot of my writing, as well as my favorite pieces in BWR, has to do with how I can leverage design tools to represent writing concretely. I especially wanted to contribute to the small subset of literary magazines for whom format is not a barrier-to-entry, where if a writer has a vision for concrete work, or image-text, or computational work, that there’s a place for that work to live.”
Experimentation & Exploration Welcome
For writers looking to submit works, Edgar encourages, “The submissions process is pretty loose. We have a Google form that streamlines the submissions process, but we welcome submissions over email as well since, sometimes, a project just doesn’t fit inside the parameters that the form provides. We welcome pitches for interviews, and I try to get back to contributors within two weeks. We invite contributors to give us as much context as necessary for the piece, so we can discern the work well — a positionality statement, a cover letter/bio, whatever. Especially with the controversial nature of experimental work, and AI-inflected work, that helps us give pieces a fair shake.”
re•mediate readers will find poems, essays, and interviews, and a mix of perspectives and approaches to AI. With every piece, readers can also access a process note that explains the nature of computer-assistance in the work. “Outside of our general issues,” Edgar adds, “I’ve created a living compilation of work in the oeuvre that we’re looking for, so readers who are interested in submitting or just to being more informed about computer-assisted art and AI have somewhere to go to learn more.”
A good place to start would be the re•mediate “manifesto” issue, Issue•0, featuring both a skeptical kind of lyric essay by Autumn Fourkiller, as well as an interview with Nick Montfort, one of the editors of OUTPUT, a new anthology of computer-generated writing. Edgar says, “It’s also been really fun, since we opened up to general submissions with Issue•1, to feature writers of various ages, since the digital reference points and applications of computer programs vary between younger writers (Gibson Bartlett, Emilio Loew Muscarolas) and older ones (Andy Oram). I’d be remiss not to shoutout all the collaborative writing, from between two humans (John Winfield Hoppin/Joe Imwalle), to between a human and their phone (Sarah [Ember] Bricault), to between a writer, ChatGPT, and Python scripts (Brian Le Lay). I’m just proud in general of the range re•mediate already represents, and I’m really looking forward to how we’ll keep pushing that envelope, hopefully, in coming years.”
Why ‘Computer-Assisted’
For anyone wondering, “Why ‘computer-assisted’ and not strictly ‘AI’ or ‘computer-generated’?” Edgar explains, “Mainly because we see creative writing’s ‘computer-assistance’ as going much further than just the level of the text. The writer today is so intertwined with the digital, as Gillian Rose would suggest in her textbook Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, or as Dr. André Brock would ask from a critical technocultural discourse analysis in Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, the text both is and is legible at the level of (1) the image/text, (2) its site of production, (3) its site of audiencing, and (4) its site of circulation — with social, compositional, and technological dimensions. I think about poetry at all of these levels. It’s kind of the premise of my interest in poetry as a researcher. How and where and why do we as writers/communities/readers/fans interact with poetry? What affordances can be responsibly leveraged to poetic ends? That’s where criticism comes in.”
What’s Next
Through this start-up process, Edgar comments the greatest lesson learned so far: “Be flexible, and to do as much planning for promotion in advance.” And looking to the future, Edgar wants to keep publishing computer-assisted writing, “I hope more folks will submit criticism around AI-writing and the like. I also really want to publish more visual work, and I hope folks will submit unconventional nonfiction and fiction and take more risks! If we get a regular production schedule, build a discourse community around this, and hopefully make a foray into public and academic discourse, I’ll be really happy with the sorts of provocations we can make at this exact moment and make a home for what may be a huge explosion of interest in these kinds of themes.”
At its core, re•mediate invites readers to explore and perhaps walk away saying, “I learned something new from the latest issue, and it really made me think!” and perhaps be further motivated to actively engage with and see what they can do with some of the tools. Even for those who may not accept AI entirely, re•mediate might be the crack that lets a little light shine in.
