‘In our time,’ Fredric Jameson wrote in a 2015 essay, ‘all politics is about real estate.’ Jameson’s clear-eyed conclusion makes immediate sense, read from within the embassy – a patch handed to the Australian state, then back to the GDR, then to the Federal Republic of Germany (via the Treuhand, as explained below), then to private owners, real estate developers and jobbing artists. Jameson goes on to list the varieties of this politics of real estate, which reaches ‘from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of … Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land … at stake.’ Within capitalism, he continues, ‘the land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them. Capitalism began with enclosure and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires; and it is ending with foreclosure and dispossession, with homelessness on the individual as well as the collective level, and with the unemployment dictated by austerity and outsourcing, the abandonment of factories and rustbelts.’

Clementine Ford’s memoir/manifesto hybrid, Fight Like a Girl, was hailed as a significant contribution to feminist debate in Australia when it was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016. The book is one stage in Ford’s considerable media career, developed across traditional journalism, public speaking, and social media. It can be situated in the context of a recent Anglophone publishing trend of similar hybrids between feminist manifesto and memoir, as well as—as evidenced by its cover quote from Anne Summers—being part of a much longer history of Australian feminist publishing. This article positions Fight Like a Girl as a networked text, exploring its close and constitutive relationship to Ford’s social media presence and its online reception. Both book and reception tap into online feminist conversations and mainstream public debates about feminism in the wake of identity politics, trolling and shaming, and the gendered nature of contemporary online spaces. Analysing conversations on Facebook and Twitter and reviews across Goodreads and more traditional media outlets, this article explores the extent to which the book reconfigures, intensifies or enters into existing conversations as it moves through the networked space of post-digital Australian literature.

Research Background: Penteract Press in the UK is a recently created publisher, founded by the poet Anthony Etherin in order to showcase the work of avant-garde poets from around the world, and the publisher hosts a podcast that discusses the “poetics” of such writers, interviewing them about their research. The publisher offers prolonged dialogues with poets, who discuss their experimental contribution to the most innovative of all advancements in the field. Research Contribution: My podcast for Penteract Press constitutes my return to this series of broadcasts in response to the success of my inaugural interview. I discuss, in detail, my research on the topic of procedural constraint in poetry (with emphasis upon the social issues of both license and freedom in poetics). I again address my attitudes about the role of writing in the era of the Internet, expanding my ideas about the modern issues of concern in the field. Research Significance: Episode 16 of the Penteract Poetry Podcast has provided me with a forum to discuss my research, while addressing an audience that numbers in the thousands. The value of this contribution finds itself validated by the following indicators of significance: 1) The podcast appears alongside a pantheon of avant-garde poets from around the world, including the likes of Nasser Hussain, Samuel Andreyev, and Ken Hunt (among others). 2) The podcast has resulted in me securing a contract with Penteract Press to publish my next book of poetry, due to appear, as a deluxe volume in a limited edition, during June 2021. 3) The podcast has also resulted in a lengthy excerpt of my poetry, likewise, appearing in the anthology, entitled “Science Poems,” published by Penteract Press, late in 2020.

Research Background: Penteract Press in the UK is a recently created publisher, founded by the poet Anthony Etherin in order to showcase the work of avant-garde poets from around the world, and the publisher hosts a podcast that discusses the “poetics” of such writers, interviewing them about their research. The publisher offers prolonged dialogues with poets, who discuss their experimental contribution to the most innovative of all advancements in the field. Research Contribution: My podcast for Penteract Press constitutes the inaugural interview for this series of broadcasts, and I discuss, in detail, my research for “The Xenotext” (a project that requires me to engineer a bacterium so that its genome might become not only an archive for storing a poem, but also a machine for writing a poem). I also discuss, in detail, my attitudes about the role of writing in the era of digital poetics, addressing modern issues of concern in the field. Research Significance: Episode 01 of the Penteract Poetry Podcast has provided me with a forum to discuss my research, while addressing an audience that numbers in the thousands. The value of this contribution finds itself validated by the following indicators of significance: 1) The podcast represents the first of all broadcasts in this series, and I have, in effect, “kickstarted” the audience for these interviews, all of which have proven popular. 2) The podcast has resulted in me securing a contract with Penteract Press to publish my next book of poetry, due to appear, as a deluxe volume in a limited edition, during June 2021. 3) The podcast has also resulted in a lengthy excerpt of my poetry, likewise, appearing in the anthology, entitled “Science Poems,” published by Penteract Press, late in 2020.

'The Xenotext' is an artistic exercise currently being undertaken by the poet Christian Bök, who proposes to create an example of 'living poetry..' Bök plans to generate a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon he intends to use a 'chemical alphabet' to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans — an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). Bök plans to compose this poem in such a way that, when translated into the gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets 'expressed' by the organism, which, in response to the inserted, genetic material, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein — a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. Bök is, in effect, striving to engineer a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem — a poem that might conceivably survive forever.

In the ‘Bard Code Project,’ Gregory Betts has analysed and mapped the rhyme patterns within William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Shakespeare has built his famous sonnets through a unique pattern of rhymes in the final syllable of each line. Betts asks the question: What is Shakespeare doing in the rest of the sonnet? ‘The Bard Code Project’ maps out the full pattern of rhymes in all ten columns across all of Shakespeare's sonnets, thereby revealing a kind of ‘visual poetry,’ rich with the sonic patterns of the poems. Suddenly, for the first time, you can see the Bard Code. The project grounds itself in an ethos of open access, and Betts has encouraged others to create their own work from his — he writes: ‘And to be clear, I fully and completely support anybody using the data in my project to develop their own responses. No reservations, no copyright, no hesitation. Let the words be yours, I am done with mine.’ The richness of the project (and this invitation to make with it and from it) has already led to a series of new works that appear here for the first time.

'Post Hoc' is an artshow put together with generous contributions from eight writers and a baker’s dozen of artists.. There is no preset theme for 'Post Hoc,' which is prompted by the inability to secure IRL galleries and museums. Artists have simply supplied digital imagery that they have considered artistic. (Several works in the show do have other manifestations.) The work in the show all originates from 2020 (during the lockdowns), and the curator has solicited a creative response from a selection of artists and critics, each of whom comments upon the aesthetics of a submission.

‘Off The Walls’ is a VR-exhibition, curated by Rita Macarounas an Lukas Bendel at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin. Artwork made through the use of VR has the uniqueness to be able, not only to express the precise moment of the subject matter after its creation, but also the entire journey of its composition. Our viewers can immerse themselve in a moving story! The curators of this show hope to engage our audience in a novel experience using high-tech creatively. Virtual reality can generate artwork, presented to our senses in such a way that we experience it as if we are actually there in its midst, even though it remains, otherwise invisible, to other visitors. Seven local artists (Bill Davies, Benita Mills, Christian Bok, Jimmy Bamble, Jonathon Saunders, Kaye Strange, and Kelly Vains) have created artworks with the use of VR technology. For the majority of the artists, this experience represents an inaugural encounter with this medium.

“Science Poems” presents a collection of poems inspired by various scientific disciplines and employing an array of poetic techniques. The first section is ‘Hypothesis’: a sequence of textual poems — varied meditations on physics and mathematics. The second section is ‘Experiment’: a selection of visual poems, many of which involve transformations of found scientific texts. The book is completed by the long poem, “The Extremophile” by Christian Bök, illustrated here by Clara Daneri.

Shandy Hall has invited 102 artists to respond to the idea of ‘Liberty,' as seen expressed in 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne. ‘Trim’s Squiggle’ or ‘The Flourish of Liberty’ in Volume IX of this novel represents an exuberant declaration in the form of visual poetry. Laurence Sterne invites the reader to join him in an exercise of imagination and interpretation, all intended to bring his novel to life. On page 17, the reader learns that Uncle Toby and Trim are marching up to the house of Widow Wadman so that Uncle Toby can propose marriage: 'Nothing, continued the Corporal, can be so sad as confinement for life – or so sweet, an’ please your honour, as liberty. Nothing, Trim – said my Uncle Toby, musing – Whil’st a man is free – cried the corporal, giving a flourish with his stick thus – And suddenly the story receives a visual jolt – a writhing squiggle that represents the pathway of Trim’s cane through the air. How this flourish hatches in the mind of the reader depends upon each individual. Is the flourish a languid and stately passage? A rapier swish? Is it from top to bottom, or bottom to top? The exhibition features the work of globally renowned artists and writers, all of whom have responded to this flourish of ‘Liberty,’ so as to showcase their 'license' under this instruction.

The Future of Text Book : A 2020 Vision Growing out of the annual Symposium, we have put together a book published by Future Text Publishing on the possible futures of text which has turned out to be the largest survey of the future of text ever undertaken, with a wide range of different perspectives and inspirations. The book is intended to be a collection of dreams for how we want text to evolve as well as how we understand our current textual infrastructures, how we view the history of writing and much more. The aim is to make it inspire a powerfully rich future of text in a multitude of ways today and to still have value in a thousand years and beyond*. It should serve as a record for how we saw the medium of text and how it relates to our world, our problems and each other in the early twenty first century.

The Frankfurt Book Fair, or in its native German, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, restarted in the aftermath of the Second World War as a symbol of post-war reconstruction, an engine of book industry capitalism, and a celebration of bookish cosmopolitanism.