Aesthetic Animism

David Jhave Johnston's Aesthetic Animism is truly an original and visionary work. I cannot imagine anyone else in either the digital poetry world or the academic code studies, software studies, media archaeology, or digital literature communities being willing or able to make such a provocative and compelling argument. I love this book and appreciate the passion, conviction, and real knowledge at its core. It is one of a kind in its field—inventive, historical, and complicated in its mix of interdisciplinary discourses.

Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Perfect for the hooked and perplexed alike, Aesthetic Animism is an informative guide to the art-bending implications of digital poetry and poetics. Johnston's conceptual, historical, and technological sweep goes hand in hand with a cornucopia of detailed discussion of specific works. His advocacy of the wilderness of 'unsupervised learning' makes palpable the living life of letters.

Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry

David Jhave Johnston has animated the study of digital poetics by surveying a novel field of literature, at a time when texts have begun to speak for themselves, dancing on screens, taking on a kind of inchoate vitality never before seen in writing. Johnston speculates about the future of these texts that now have the capacity to react to readers, engaging with them, evolving autonomously in ways that might lead to literary cultures, capable of writing themselves into existence. Let this book guide you through the terrain of an embryonic ecosystem.

Christian Bök, author of Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science