Humor — Technology — Gender, Digital Language Art and Diabolic Poetics

This essay argues that the poetic turn from nothing to form art tends to “diabolic”
strategies in present language allowing for a self-referential presentation of cultural distinctions.
This poetic deconstruction of symbolic forms such as man/machine, male/female,
or 0/1 is closely related to humor and gender in cultural and artistic performances.
This shall be illustrated by discussing two examples of language art in the fi eld of digital
electronics: the interactive installation Die Amme by Peter Dittmer and female extension, a
subversive net art project by Cornelia Sollfrank. These projects are interpreted as gendered
forms of the poetic as comic self-observation.

Source: author's abstract