How a Picture No-Longer Held us Captive: Playful Logics and Creativity Across Media

Experimental creative texts can prompt audiences to re-evaluate their relationship to seemingly banal media and question the underpinning logics of communications and data-based technologies. This chapter explores such effects in two case studies created nearly fifty years apart: Eduardo Paolozzi's experimental artwork Moonstrips Empire News (1967) and J.R. Carpenter's digital poem The Gathering Cloud (2016). We show how these artist-poets engage with the computational and technological logics of their time, using visual experimentation, layered imagery and text, and playful engagement with audiences. Looking particularly at their response to Cold War satellite technologies and twenty-first century Cloud data storage, we argue that the techniques of these texts deliberately replicate, and expose, established structures and systems in a way that consistently invites their viewers to look again and move beyond the habitual and familiar.