Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition.
Engagement with public databases has become a leading way for scholars, artists, and readers alike to encounter works of electronic literature as well as get an overview of the field. Although acknowledged as an important and difficult process, database construction is, in practice, too often underestimated as merely a preparatory task in Digital Humanities. Through the conception of database criticism, I provide a critical apparatus to approach databases in terms of qualitative and aesthetic characteristics.
Considering public databases as media texts, I take a digital hermeneutic approach to the reading strategies involved in engaging with databases. What follows is the presence of databases as cultural artifacts that are themselves studied in humanities and social science frameworks. It is in the interest of both the quality and esteem of the databases to develop ways to study and evaluate them parallel to academic reviews of monographs and edited collections.
I offer a media-specific framework of four core vectors for database criticism: data and scope, experience, aesthetics, and labor. Building on Critical Data Studies, database criticism needs to identify the means and objectives of the database and thing along with those in reviewing the data. But a database is so much more than its data. A good database incites the pleasure of anticipation and this is determined by both the user and browsing experience. This is linked to the aesthetics of the database, which includes the accessibility of the database at its core. Finally, the explicit evaluation of labor addresses which value is placed on various tasks of developing and maintaining an academic database.
My call for database criticism opens up ways to revalue the databases as dissemination of research and provide the opportunity to highlight all elements that we wish to be part of the field going forward.
Literary studies have a long history of developing theories and methodologies around reading and understanding texts, but how can we make use of this research when reading databases?
Electronic literature databases are in the fortunate position to be both digital and public humanities projects and as such, the field has the opportunity and the responsibility to scrutinize the academic and cultural objects that the databases are.
Database criticism takes into account at least these core vectors: data and scope, browsing experience, aesthetics, and representation of labor.
This paper will explore artistic experiments that critically engage with the aesthetics and technics of speech synthesis, subverting and blending the binaries of the supposedly polarized categories organic and mechanical. Ian Hatcher’s (https://ianhatcher.net/) virtuosic vocal performances— "Prosthesis" (2011), "Drone Pilot" (2015), and "Colony" (2017), in which he simulates the cadence and syntax of machine speech with the very analogue instrument of his own (human) voice— a practice I propose to call reversed posthuman ventriloquism, will serve as cases for study. In my analysis of Hatcher’s performances, I will be examining them within the context of the history of the art and technology of speech synthesis, as well as in relation to the tradition of experimental music performed by vocalists who use extended vocal techniques.
In 1985, Italo Calvino wrote a series of lectures (later published as ‘memos’) in which he proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Though never a writer of electronic literature, Calvino has frequently been associated or referenced in relation to digital works. J.R. Carpenter’s web-based work The Gathering Cloud (2016) (hereafter TGC) exhibits Calvino’s values. TGC is informed by Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. Howard’s ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’ are used in Carpenter’s web-based work. Poetry is then superimposed on these repurposed illustrations. Situated ‘within’ the poetry, animated gif collages play. Where Calvino in his memos writes that he considers the virtues of the binary opposites of his values (i.e., weight, lingering, ‘flame’ exactitude, ambiguity, singularity, and inconsistency) no less compelling, Carpenter’s work suggests that Calvino’s values (or rather the absence or removal of their binary opposites) are not only preferable in terms of contemporary literary challenges, but an ethical imperative in relation to environmental impact as it relates to contemporary media, dissemination, and indeed everyday life. In this analysis of TGC, Calvino’s values will be discussed in relation to each of the work’s six sections (i.e., the ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’).
Linköping University
Linköping
Sweden
The research project REP+REC+digit – Representations and Reconfigurations of the Digital in Swedish Literature and Art 1950–2010 – and Linköping University, Sweden, invite scholars in media archaeology, digital culture, artistic practice, media history, electronic texts, comparative literature and adjacent fields to the conference THINKING THROUGH THE DIGITAL IN LITERATURE – REPRESENTATIONS+POETICS+SITES+PUBLICATIONS, to be held at Linköping University, Sweden, 29 November to 1 December, 2017.
REP+REC+DIGIT explores different aspects of how digital technology and digital culture have influenced aesthetic and literary expressions since 1950, including digital artifacts, the digitization as motif, post-digital aesthetics and digital epistemology.
The topics of this event are derived from the questions that have been asked and explored throughout the project. The conference subtitle suggests four aspects of these explorations: The actual representation in art and literature; Aesthetic forms and critical reflections; The material sites for writing and reading texts; and New interfaces for dissemination.
(Blog description)
“E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it.” Stephanie Strickland outlines 11 rules of electronic poetry.
Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times, redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics.Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, the volume features works by a team of distinguished contributors. These essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, are organized into three interrelated groups: “Aesthetics” engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, “Technology” offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and “Society” opens up language describing the systems that allow a medium to function.
(Source: University of Chicago Press catalog copy)
This is the first interview of a series called Electronic Literature Review Promotion. These interviews are published one month before the event takes place.
This is the first interview of a series called Electronic Literature Review Featuring. I re-publish interviews of other web pages with the permission of the interviewer or the interviewee.
This is the second interview of Rui Torres for the ELR. He answered some questions about the event that he chaired.