Joe Milutis is a media artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work includes experimental sound and radio; video works; new media; experimental narrative and poetics; theoretical writings; and various media/literature hybrids. Since the early 90s, after having produced a number of radio art broadcasts, his work has focused on new genres and media that have uncertain status and value. He was an early proponent of digital multimedia essays, and continues to work in the intersections between new media and contemporary writing. In recent years, he has been exploring experimental translation, in tandem with a creative project utilizing Michael Maier’s seventeenth-century alchemical emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens, as his source material. Current interests also include live video performance collaborations; internet poetry and related image-text experiments; nineteenth-century French poetry; and new Gothic writing.
“You could say that my failure is that I am virtually a poet, or virtually a video artist, or virtually a philosopher, or whatever you want to say. Because I am not really, but just as well. I’m engaging with poetry and video and theory and the variety of the things that I deal with, but yet I’m constantly resisting the idea of being a poet or being an artist or being. . . even the role of professor is something that I play with the boundaries of what it can be. And for all of these categories, if they are treated as identities and treated as forms that you pretend to know what they mean then you close down what they could actually be.”