Digital poetry emerged in tandem with advances in the computer sciences in the mid-twentieth century, although we can trace its experimental impulses to earlier literary traditions. As Dani Spinosa argues, “digital poetry has its roots in a history of print-based avant-garde” (x). The recombinant and nonlinear conditions of electronic literature, broadly conceived, have led some scholars to attend to modernist works by writers and media visionaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Bob Brown in a search for the origins of the procedural play in contemporary innovative writing. “Early digital poems,” as Christopher Funkhouser notes, “can be conceptually interpreted as searching for their essence or as striving to make their essence apparent, as did modernist endeavors” (3). Media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich understood the innovations of early media as cornerstones in the development of the digital revolution. The modernist transition to new communication and media technologies, such as cinema, radio, and the gramophone, fostered faster transmissions of information that in turn influenced novel approaches to structuring narrative time, visual language, and reading practices. Bob Brown’s 1930 proposal for a mechanized reading machine offers an intriguing example of this collision between media and literature. Invoking the “talkies” or sound films, Brown’s reading device proposed to deliver “readies” or a ticker-tape stream of prose or poetry to a viewer, thereby efficiently transmitting a visual spectacle of information. For Brown, the machine would “revitalize” an “interest in the Optical Art of Writing” and thus merge the act of reading with the technological innovations that were already modernizing society (27). With this background in mind, it remains a useful exercise to apprehend the radical experimentation of contemporary electronic literature alongside the visual, technological, and formal innovations of earlier avant-garde movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, as well as later literary groups, such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and language writing.