Jim Rosenberg's Aesthetics
As an author of hypertext poetry, Jim Rosenberg is interested in questions rather than answers. He is an experimental artist whose work playfully manipulates a variety of compositional styles. Rosenberg attributes a great deal of his artistic influence to John Cage and the work of the Concrete Poets in their explorations into the visual nature of language and the printed word. As an artist working in a radical new age of technology Rosenberg is attracted to the possibilities he sees as inherent in the expansive art form of hypertext poetry.
Rosenberg's aspirations for the future of technological art echo those of earlier Twentieth Century aesthetic movements. As a dynamic participant in the creation of innovative technological art Rosenberg cautions artists away from simply replacing currently existing aesthetic notions with a new version just for the sake of difference. He advises his audience, and fellow artists, that "A sincere and conscientious avant garde must have as its goal expanding the field of possibilities for making art." His advice for the inventive artist echoes the voice of the 1924 Surrealists as they declared their "exaltation of mystics, inventors and prophets." Rosenberg sees authors of hypertext poetry and art as inventors and prophets in a new age of technology with dynamic possibilities for artistic expansion. As an active contributer to the evolution of technological arts Rosenberg demonstrates an informed interest in the influences of past aesthetic movements simultaneous with a creative interest in radically new poetic experiments.
The integration of the visual with the semantic in hypertext poetry allows Rosenberg to create his own unique language of symbols in his poetry. Some of his works expose an interest in collage, and the presentation of layered language. In his "Interactive Works" Rosenberg places one word upon another word to illustrate the simultaneity of multiple, often contrasting, meanings emitted through language. These layered words also emerge, move, and disappear as time passes thereby placing each word in the text in a specific moment. His visual poems reveal an interest in the momentary, impressionistic qualities of language and meaning. These playful orchestrations of words in time and space emerge out of his attraction to the "structural relationships" between clusters of words placed on the page / screen. Similar to John Cage's experiments with "tone clusters" in music, Rosenberg delves into this unique symbolic concept through his own experiments with "word clusters" in poetry.
The interpenetration of one word-meaning as it merges with another word-meaning exposes the relational aspects of language and meaning. Rosenberg's focus on meaning as emergent from the structural relation between two separate entities is similar to the aesthetic theory of the Futurist's. The aesthetic philosophy of the Futurist movement borrowed a great deal from the work of Henri Bergson. In his 1910 text, Matter and Memory, Bergson asserted that an "object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole" (Rye 37). Like Bergson, the Futurist aesthetic judged the image of the isolated object an absurdity because objects in the world are necessarily interactive. It is out of this condition of relation that objects, words, colors, lines, textures... in essence symbols generate meaning.
Rosenberg's poems, from his linear works to his highly complex "Intergrams" and his "Diagrams Series 4", are experiments in the creation and use of symbols and their corresponding structural relationships. The style of his work depends upon the integration of the visual and the semantic. Through these experiments Rosenberg both realizes a new possibility for the art of hypertext poetry and opens up yet another pathway for artistic expansion.