Or Joe Emery, a contemporary Georgia artist who builds the same kind of object, only more interactive than Cornell's were. Part statuary, part mechanism. Those "constructions."
 

Those inviting objects that you can touch and open. You can ring the bell or put on the headphones. Or you can take out the contents--the pill box, the glove, the photograph, the razor--and hold them in your hand and rearrange them and put them in again. You can write your name in the book that lies open there. You can add a poem or a talisman of your own. You can stand back and look, and reach in again and move one thing over and stand back again. 
 

Gass reminds us that writing is "making." Making is forming something, bringing a form to what was formless. "Maker" is a good literal translation of the Greek word "poet." 
 
 

Electronics rewards a different kind of text and a different kind of performance. Or so it says here on the label. 
 
 
 
 

We get more of that sense of the readymade if, having thought of cubism, we now move toward Marcel Duchamp as Sirc reads him or toward Joseph Cornell as Janangelo reads him in the Feb 98 CCC. Those boxes Cornell made. Those objects that museums can only call "constructions." 

Cue Visual eight.
 
 

Can I do that, please?

That's what readers do with a "constructed" essay.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

So if we think about poetics and electronics in the delivery of academic essays, we are asking ourselves about the form/s of writing that electronics might suggest, prefer, or privilege.
 

We always get to this. You say the medium enables/rewards/prefers a certain style, an "electronic textuality," and I say no way. 

. 
Cue visual nine.