Analog Fracture, Digital Illusion: Andrew Zawacki’s Videotape and the Poetics of the Human-Technology Relationship

Abstract

Poetry thrives on wistfulness, absence, tragedy; it loves quirks, irreconcilable tensions, fatal flaws. We, as readers, might harbor tender feelings toward the analog line-glitches of VHS tape or the auditory snow from an out-of-range radio station. But it’s undeniable that many of these same technologies have caused, and continue to cause, extensive suffering. Obsolete technologies therefore offer fertile ground to engage with all the above poetic attributes, an affordance on which Andrew Zawacki founds the poetics of his collection Videotape. Our fondness for outmoded technologies (as well as our attraction to cutting-edge novelties) creates an irreconcilable tension with the horrors they have caused. In Zawacki’s poetics of the human-technological relationship, this conflict is the driving force.