Door: Pip Thornton.
“How much does poetry cost? What is the worth of language in a digital age? Is quality measured on literary value or exchange value, the beauty of hand-crafted, hard-wrung words, or how many click-throughs those (key)words can attract and how much money they earn the company who sells them? But haven’t words always been sold? As soon as they became written down, moveable and transferable words entered the market place, and then necessarily the political sphere. But these words gained an exchange value as integral parts of a text – a story, a poem, a book, for example. Removing or reordering these individual words – or ranking them based on external influences would change the meaning and devalue the text as a whole, in both a literary and monetary way. Can language retain its integrity once it becomes part of the digital economy? Is there even such a thing as the ‘integrity of language’? Certainly the words Google auctions off have referential values unanchored to narrative context, and it is this new context and the politics surrounding it that I am attempting to examine and expose in my new project which I have called {poem}.py.”
Aldus Thornton.
