Digital Oral Poetry: Voice and Subjectivity in Algorithmic Culture

Online book launch by Vadim Keylin (Hamburg, DE), Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies.

Abstract

This new book, "Digital Oral Poetry: Voice and Subjectivity in Algorithmic Culture" (De Gruyter 2026) investigates digital oral poetry and the new forms of individual, collective and posthuman subjectivities that it manifests.

The term “digital oral poetry” refers to a range of creative practices that explore the modes of oral speech facilitated and conditioned by digital culture, particularly foregrounding the selves that are performed and constructed in the speaking act. Practices of digital oral poetry run across the boundaries between institutionally recognised forms of art and poetry, pop culture and participatory culture online. They may include poetry performed in synthesised or deep-faked voices, AI-generated performance poetry, intersections of poetry and ASMR videos or audioliterary memes such as Autotune stories to name a few examples. The voice and speech technologies of the digital age make everything speak – from voice assistants and GPS navigators to streaming media – the situation that cultural theorist Steven Connor dubs the “panophonic” condition. The dissociation of voice and speech from the speaker and the situation of speaking engendered by this condition imbues the ages-old question of lyric theory “Who speaks?” with renewed salience.

The book thus offers a (post-)phenomenological examination of the contemporary digitally-inflected forms of subjectivity as they manifest in digital oral poetry, focusing on two connected phenomena: voice and authorship. The first part of the book investigates the transformations that the speaking voice undergoes under the digital condition and the ways they challenge the entrenched idea of the voice as the most direct embodied expression of the human self. It considers the use of both digital technologies of the voice, such as text-to-speech software (Chapter 1), and the techniques of the voice stemming from digital culture, such as the characteristic whisper of ASMR (Chapter 2) in poetry performances. The second part examines the poetic performances of authorship. Here the focus lies on how performances of AI-generated poetry and rap foreground the contradictory paradigms of posthuman authorship (Chapter 3) and the musico-literary practices of participatory culture online as a kind of digital folklore blending pre- and post-individual forms of authorship (Chapter 4).