Exhibition

On December 31, 2020 Adobe dropped support of Flash software, a premier platform for net art popular in the late 20th century to first decade of the 21st. Within weeks, born-digital literature created with the software was no longer accessible to the public––including the 447 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) had collected for its repository. By the end of January 2021 the Electronic Literature Lab’s efforts to restore ELO’s Flash archives began in earnest with a variety of methods: Ruffle.rs, Conifer, Webrecorder, and video recordings attained with the Pale Moon browser and the Wayback Machine.This exhibition, featuring 48 works the lab selected from the online journals and anthologies held in the ELO’s archives, lays bare both the importance of Flash as a platform for conveying highly experimental and compelling literary art and the challenges artists and preservationists face in keeping the art produced with it accessible to the public.

List of Artists and Works:

Annie Abrahams, "Séparation" / "Separation"Ingrid Ankerson & Megan Sapnar, "Cruising"Adriana de Barros, "Blinding Lights"Giselle Beiguelman and Helga Stein, "Code Movie 1"Alan Bigelow, "Brainstrips"Serge Bouchardon, "Toucher" / "Touch"Mez Breeze, "_Clo[h!]neing God N Ange-Ls_"Oni Buchanan, "The Mandrake Vehicles"David Clark, "88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand)"Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer, "Public Secrets"Juliet Davis, "Pieces of Herself"Claire Dinsmore, "The Dazzle as Question"Tina Escaja, "Pinzas de metal"Caitlin Fisher, "These Waves of Girls"Muriel Frega, "Alice in the 'Wonderbalcony'"Peter Howard, "Xylo"Yael Kanarek, Evann Siebens, Meeyoung Kim & Yoav Gal, "Portal"Aya Karpinksa, "mar puro"Rob Kendall, "Faith"David Knoebel, "Thoughts Go"John Kusch, "Red Lily"Deena Larsen, "Firefly"Donna Leishman, "Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw"Jason Edward Lewis, "Nine"Mark Marino, "Stravinsky's Muse"María Mencia, "Birds Singing Other Birds's Songs"Judd Morrissey, "The Jew's Daughter"Stuart Moulthrop, "Under Language"Jason Nelson, "i made this. you play this. we are enemies."Millie Niss, "The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh"Santiago Ortiz, "Bacterias Argentinas"Regina Pinto, "Café de Pao"Joerg Piringer, "Soundpoems I and II"William Poundstone, "3 Proposals for Bottle Imps"Kate Pullinger and babel, "Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China"Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, "Flight Paths"Brian Kim Stefans, "The Dreamlife of Letters"Reiner Strasser and M. D. Coverley, "ii — in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory"Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim, "Tao"Stephanie Strickland, "slipping glimpse"Thom Swiss, "Shy Boy"Rui Torres, "Amor de Clarice"Ana Maria Uribe, "Anipoemas"Dan Waber, "Strings"Christine Wilks, "Fitting the Pattern"Jody Zellen, "Disembodied Voices"Natalie Zeriff, "Meditation on a Barstool"John Zuern, "Ask Me for the Moon"

As part of a series of language art exhibitions in 2017, the year of documenta 14 (kasselkultur2017.de), Kunsttempel, Kassel, presented „p0es1s – postdigital“. The international exhibition featured artists from eight countries who present 16 current positions of language art in a rendition of the Post-Digital Publishing Archive. Following the opening, there was a closed artists’ round table as well as a performance open to the public with contributions by Mara Genschel, Jörg Piringer and Rui Torres on Sep 14, at 7 p.m. The show has opened a series on „Publishing as Art“ in the Kunsttempel.

The exhibition curated by Friedrich W. Block is part of the „p0es1s“ project which has organized exhibitions and research projects since 1992. The exhibition in the Kunsttempel has focused on current positions of language art labeled ‚post-digital‚ („a term that sucks but is useful“ – Florian Cramer)

Posthuman features digital art and electronic literature that engages with the posthuman condition: enactments of complex human-technical assemblages in which cognition and decision-making powers are distributed in both aesthetic and literary systems – what Hayles describes as “cognitive assemblages” and what Laura Shackelford and Louise Economides call “surreal entanglements.” 

This virtual exhibition was originally part of ACM Hypertext and Social Media 2020, a conference originally intended to be hosted at the University of Central Florida in July 2020. The exhibition was designed to be colocated with the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Arts Show, happening the same week, and was thus distributed to artists in both communities for submissions.

Given the global state of crisis, this year’s exhibition was migrated, and a new call was distributed for online works designed to use hypertext to drive engagement with the current challenges. The curators distributed a call for works responding to the overwhelming “climates of change,” with a particular emphasis on the ongoing environmental crisis. Thinking globally can be overwhelming: thus, this exhibition asks artists and viewers to engage with these global concerns through the lens of local and the personal. The exhibit features works that are brief and poetic; works that engage with moments and personal challenges; works that respond to local challenges and warnings for the future that is already here. The curators welcomed works positioned through the lens of the current moment; works that challenge and inspire us; and works that call out for reflection and change.

The curators particularly encouraged those submitting to draw on personal experiences or connections or understandings about climate change, the impacts, causes and effects. Pieces might also engage with how that understanding is changing every day under our growing collective challenges.

(Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/ClimatesOfChange/about.h…)

The appearance of new technologies and their exponential growth for several decades has changed our way of understanding knowledge. Although it is already a topic that is part of the contemporary background, it is worth remembering that digital culture and the possibilities of the internet have meant a radical change, only comparable, according to Alejandro Baricco, to the printing revolution.

The incorporation of the network and transmedia resources into the literary environment is fostering new poetics; new forms of textuality that, according to Joan-Elies Adell, go beyond the book and turn the computer or any mobile device into the natural space of the work. Hypertext, interaction, video game ... The very essence of literature is changing. Writers who think of the word in conjunction with HTML code, geolocation, processing or other programming tools. With their creations they come to expel us from our areas of literary comfort.

We are talking about jobs designed for the network, that new agora. We are talking about hypermedia works that, in contrast to orality or printed tradition, investigate within what Ernesto Zapata defines as electronality. We are talking simply about literature in the post-Gutenberg era.