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Silva som metapoetisk och mediemateriell trop i några av Johannes Heldéns verk

Abstract

”Enter the woods and you are in the poet’s workshop”, writes Shane Butler on the importance of the page to the ancient poets.  Naturally, it’s Virgil’s forest that is at the center of his analysis – Johannes Heldén’s entire work can be situated in this ancient  metapoetical tradition. The aim of this article is to analyze Heldén’s digital aesthetic through the concept of silva (lat. forest). All the  features of silva are found in his work, the randomly arranged texts (an elaborated digital, algorithmic aesthetic), the mixture of long and short poems, texts, code, and the metapoetic reversibility between poem and thing. The analyzes are inspired by media  archaeological perspectives where the traditionally progressive and evolutionary tendencies of media history are broken up by side positions or unexpected combinations. But while parts of media archeology primarily have focused on highlighting neglected or  forgotten technical devices or media, the present study focuses on a concept – silva.