Windows 85

Author: Chris Campanioni

Publisher: Roof Books (2024)

If this is a book about the body, it is about what happens when the body disappears—dispersed across a range of formats and mediated through multiple screens. If this is a book of poems about want, it is an ode to desire that necessarily exceeds the physical. Windows 85 explores self-commodification, networked intimacy, and epistolary affect within our tenuous media infrastructures in pursuit of a migratory ecopoetics, channeling both the generative frictions of today and an adolescence prior to our contemporary obligations wrought by always-on media.

Steeped in digital cultures and multimedia and multilingual teaching and learning as so much of the poet's research and publications are, alongside his work with students—a corpus of Chris Campanioni's artistic practice, pedagogy, and scholarship that has been christened by other writers as "post internet"—Windows 85 is less a collection than a cyberspace opera, admitting not autobiography but the traffic of immediacy and distance, attachment and dispersal, the serendipitous or systematized encounters that emerge between bodies, not all of which are human. Memory, proximity, and imminence entangle in these liminal exchanges as languages adjoin and subject(s)/positions commingle in polyphonic rhapsody.

Rather than understand what follows as a narrative in the conventional sense, readers are invited to enter into this book—a portal, a window—as an experience, and the experience as immersion. Continuous and discontinuous, a relation of our everyday that is not linear but synchronous, layered, looped, cut, copied, dragged . . . and recorded.