Digital Oral Poetry: Voice and Subjectivity in Algorithmic Culture

The speech technologies of the digital age make everything speak – from voice assistants and GPS navigators to streaming media. The dissociation of voice and speech from the speaker and the situation of speaking engendered by this condition imbues the ages-old question of lyric theory “Who speaks?” with renewed salience. This book investigates digital oral poetry – an artform that explores the modes of oral speech facilitated and conditioned by digital technologies and digital culture, foregrounding the selves that are performed and constructed in the speaking act. Practices of digital oral poetry run across the boundaries between institutionally recognised forms of art and poetry, pop culture and participatory culture online. They may include poetry performed in synthesised or deep-faked voices, AI-generated performance poetry, intersections of poetry and ASMR videos or audioliterary memes such as Autotune stories to name a few examples. Through a series of case studies, the book offers a (post-)phenomenological examination of the contemporary digitally-inflected forms of subjectivity as they manifest in digital oral poetry.

Vadim Keylin, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany.