De-automating the Web Environment: Blackout Poetry under Conditions of Mediatization and Digitalization

Abstract

Through the affordances of new media and web-based environments, contemporary poetry moves beyond the limits of traditional verbal forms. This article examines the strategies employed by one of the intermedial forms of contemporary literature—the blackout poem—to problematize user and reader experience in digital environments. Rooted in the practices of the historical avant-garde, the blackout poem constitutes a media hybrid produced through the technique of erasure. By obscuring parts of their own or another author’s pre-text using black marker or digital tools, the poet generates a post-text composed of textual fragments with reconfigured lexical relations. The article analyzes blackout works by Pavel Zarutsky, Alexander Frolov, and Ekaterina Zakharkiv, demonstrating how blackout poetry challenges user and reader experience in digital culture. These poetic practices critique several key features of the digital environment, including the capitalization of attention, the illusion of “eternal data storage” and screen culture, which standardizes sensory interaction with the surface of the artistic object—an aspect central to the avant-garde. The analysis shows that blackout poetry can function as a form of resistance to screen culture and the like economy by de-automating habitual perceptual and receptive patterns.