Daniel Snelson
Poetry and Poetics; Cinema Studies; Contemporary Art; Media/Technology; Bibliographic Studies; Editorial Theory
Dissertation Advisor(s): Charles Bernstein, Jean-Michel Rabaté
"Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database "
Assistant Professor of English, UCLA
Office Hours
All appointments made by email.
Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. His online editorial work can be found on UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and Jacket2. He is the publisher of Edit Publications and runs the Edit Series at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. In 2014, he served as exhibition advisor and program coordinator for the exhibition Poetry will be made by all! at LUMA/Westbau in Zürich, Switzerland. His work has been variously screened, published, performed or hosted internationally in a variety of solo and collaborative formations. Recent books include Epic Lyric Poem (forthcoming, Troll Thread), Radios (forthcoming, Make Now Press), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectual Association, 2011).
His dissertation, “Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database," explores artifacts of twentieth-century art and literature in the process of becoming digital. In contrast to currents of big dataanalysis, the dissertation focuses on four relatively small online collections—Textz.com, Eclipse, PennSound, and UbuWeb—offering materially invested readings of works of print, sound, and cinema from within a new media context. Inhabiting the vexed space between preservation and distribution, between memory and practice, these sites dramatically rematerialize historical artifacts for the use and reuse of millions of contemporary users. With bibliographic attention to the avant-garde legacy of media specificity and the little magazine, “Variable Format” contends that popularly accessed “films,” “readings,” “magazines,” and “books” on the internet are marked by meaningful transformations that continue to shape the present through a radical reconfiguration of the past.