Andrew Klobucar publishes literary and narrative theory for the digital era while also specializing in new technologies and practices in sound art. His research explores how experimental media art, digital technologies, and, most currently, GenAI and spatial computing continue to transform culture in every form. His books, articles, and presentations have focused for over two decades on how digital production tools continue to challenge and change teaching and learning in the humanities by the ongoing introduction of increasingly sophisticated software that encourage strategic interactivity as part of all reading, viewing, and playing exerpiences.
He has worked on discovering and even developing software to bring programmable media more easily into classroom instruction. Produced for digital creative writing, the online platform “Global Telelanguage Resources Workbench” is available for use online via any browser. It provides students with an easy drag-and-drop interface to construct different text transformations simply by “dropping” various available linguistic processors from a set menu over any number of texts to create new textual combinations as poems. This tool was developed working with a professional programmer, David Ayre, over 20 years ago and can still be used to help students understand how more sophisticated GenAI software currently functions.
Published in 1999, Klobucar and Michael Barnholden released an important anthology of poetry, Writing Class, developed specifically as the first critical collection of works produced by a Vancouver-based school of experimental writing. The Kootenay School of Writing first opened in the early 1980s as an independent artist-run gallery for writing workshops, readings, and discussion groups centered around innovative poetry practices. Many of the writers featured in the anthology drew heavily upon leftist politics and social struggles, expressing them through linguistic and semantic structural experiments.
His most recent book available, an anthology entitled The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics (Vernon Press, 2021), explores new modes of collaborative, online communication thanks to the ongoing development of internet technologies that allow near-instaneous, synchronous multimedia interaction across the globe through multimedia networks.
His next book, The Art of Digital Storytelling: Narrative Play and Interactivity, is forthcoming via Intellect Press for publication in Fall 2024. It offers a second critical anthology exploring a broader history of both synchronous and asynchronous creative writing practices that begins with the early postwar poetics of Black Mountain School and progresses straight to the current era. Contributors to the book provide an inclusive and provocative mix of both historical and contemporary versions of Role-Play Gaming, Interactive Fiction, and network-based improvised performances.
His new work, currently under development, will be a monograph centered on the development of experimental sound and site-specific artworks during the 1960s and early 1970s. The book will offer a new look at these movements as important cornerstones for building a more comprehensive understanding of current innovations in immersive art practices and spatial computing.