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.
While the world was coping with one of the century’s most serious crises to date—a pandemic that kept people from engaging in active, face-to-face interactions —social media companies experienced one of their most prosperous periods. Communication around the world continued virtually via the robust social media networks that were and continue to grow in use today. It also gave social media platforms an paralleled opportunity to learn how to fit communities and interactive groups into algorithmic structures that gave these same networks new political and economic power while COVID-19 spread. Klobucar’s anthology entitled The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics (Vernon Press, 2021), explores these new modes of collaborative, online communication and what they might mean to how political economies function in the new century.
Even the novel and the birth of a new narrative form had their playful moments. In his latest anthology, Klobucar discusses the importance of “Play” as a concept and practice that has long remained a cornerstone of narrativity, but is likely still best evident in environmental narratives of many interactive story-games. His most recent book will be available for purchase in the Fall of 2025. Click on the image to learn more.
His new work, currently under development, will be a monograph centred 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.