avant-garde

In 1956, the Brazilian avant-garde poet Wlademir Dias-Pino published one of his most famous books: A Ave. All copies of this conceptual work were produced in a craft press, and the content and form of the text (a process poem, as Dias-Pino called it) are inextricable from the materiality of the book, composed of superimposed perforated pages of different colors and transparency levels, with printed letters and polygonal lines. Scholars have considered A Ave an analog predecessor of new media poetry, reflecting on the affordances of paper, ink, punch hole, and bookbinding, and their creative use in a book of visual poetry centered on the imagery of birds in flight. Wlademir Dias-Pino also wrote theoretical texts and a manifest that point to the permutational and the procedural nature of poetic language as code. His contributions as an antecedent to Latin-American digital literature still require further investigation, especially because scholars interested in the history of new media poetry in the continent often pay more attention to the Brazilian concrete poets from São Paulo, such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Nonetheless, an important gesture of acknowledging Dias-Pino’s contribution to the field was made by the Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín, who created in 2003 the Flash piece Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino. In this animation, a bird graphically constructed as a calligram is seen in flight, and the animal’s body and wings are made of a combination of words that allude to the metadata of A Ave among apparently random ASCII symbols. Padín’s work is included in the Litelat Anthology, but it can no longer be accessed in its “original” format due to the obsolescence of Flash. Although this might initially seem just a setback, the limited temporality of Flash has more to say: as a technological platform with its own lifecycle, it highlights the historicity of Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino as a piece of electronic literature produced for specific software from a specific age. A Ave, on the other hand, is a piece of analog procedural literature meant to be read without any extraneous device, but also susceptible to the physical deterioration that all material culture is liable to. This poster presents some reflections on convergences and dissonances between Wlademir Dias-Pino’s A Ave and Clemente Padín’s Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino, considering both artists’ aesthetic projects, the poetic codes they used, and the affordances of the materialities in which they inscribed their images of birds in flight. We intend to point out how the work by a prominent predecessor of electronic literature is revisited by an established digital artist of our times in a dialogue that is of much interest to the community of Latin American e-lit and to that of electronic literature as a whole.

On Joseph McElroy’s Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract butevocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) asthose ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. (Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gaming)

The American poetry critic Marjorie Perloff undertook the task of rendering a solid theoretical framework to understand the evolution of the art of poetry after Modernism. Furthermore, she traced the evolution of “Postmodern” poetry, analyzing the most radical experiments including the digital poetry of the present. Based on Perloff’s perspective, this paper will observe the evolution of translation as part of the poetics of the American poet Ezra Pound and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. Following its transformation as a writing strategy, they understood translation as a process adjacent to poetry, though the incorporation of translation as part of their own work would be observed as unethical for many critics. Therefore, Haroldo de Campos coined the term “Transcreation” in order to refer his translations as an original work. Interestingly enough, the paradigm for this sort of writing is the Irish writer James Joyce, whose controversial piece Finnegans Wake introduced not only linguistic but also metaphorical and historical translation. Since then, translation would set a new style of writing, a style that relies on the verbal materiality and where the understanding of the puns and languages will not be as relevant as the comprehension of the poetics as a project. From this perspective, this paper aims to explore the processes involved in the making of e-poetry, and offering an approach to its translation. Branching from the modernist translation strategies, which were perceived as “radical” in their moment, the challenging questions posited by e-poetry conjure up a new kind of radicality towards translation.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Five minute lightning talks addressing the question: What comes after electronic literature?

Steven Wingate: eLit and the Borg: the challenges of mainstreaming and commercialization
Leonardo Flores: Time Capsules for True Digital Natives
Maya Zalbidea, Xiana Sotelo and Augustine Abila: The Feminist Ends of Electronic Literature
Mark Sample: Bad Data for a Broken World
José Molina: Translating E-poetry: Still Avant-Garde
Daria Petrova and Natalia Fedorova: 101 mediapoetry lab
Judd Morrissey: Turesias (Odds of Ends)
Jose Aburto: Post Digital Interactive Poetry: The End of Electronic Interfaces
Andrew Klobucar: Measure for Measure: Moving from Narratives to Timelines in Social Media Networking
David Clark: The End of Endings
Damon Baker: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!": New Developments in the CaveWriting Hypertext Editing System

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

An overview and explanation of glitch aesthetics.