avant-garde

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )

This article discusses issues arising from the relationship between practitioners in Electronic Literature and researchers in the field of Human Experimental Psychology, including the possible emergence of new communities that cross over this boundary. The introduction (1) considers the possible drivers of this process, including technology, interdisciplinarity and research funding policy, after first explaining the source of the article in an interdisciplinary project, Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition (2009-11). This project involved literary critics, psychologists and creative artists and studied works that combine (poetic) text with images, including digital poetry, concrete poetry, artists’ books, visual poetry and poetry-photographic works. In section 2 we discuss the concept of the “experimental” in aesthetic and scientific contexts, identifying the relatively universal model of the subject constructed through experimental procedure in Psychology and contrasting it with the radical idea of the subject implied by avant-garde aesthetic practice. We then discuss several examples of parallels between the methods of Electronic Literature and Experimental Psychology. Section 3 compares the flash works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and the psychological experimental technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Section 4 compares the visual poetics of digital poetry in the tradition of concrete / visual poetry (including John Cayley’s Translation and Jim Andrews’s Stir Fry Texts) with the manipulations of font and layout in psycholinguistic method. Section 5 compares John Cayley’s Lens, created in the virtual reality CAVE at Brown University, with the Mental Rotation test used in Experimental Psychology, referring to Cayley’s concept of the “phenomenology of the object”. Section 6 discusses in more detail a digital literary-visual artwork created for a single-screen 3D simulator, and commissioned as part of Poetry Beyond Text. Tower, by Simon Biggs and Mark Shovman, explores perceptual and cognitive processes in reading and is described as an “immersive 3D textual environment combining visualisation, speech recognition and predictive text algorithms”. It is here used as a case study for the interaction of digital poets / artists with psychologists and psychological findings, drawing on material from interviews and discussions with the artist and programmer involved, in particular Biggs’s interest in third-order cybernetics. The discussion deals with the construction of value around the concept of “interactivity” and the construction of the reader / viewer / subject. The conclusion (7) considers possible models for the relationship between creative practice in digital media and Human Experimental Psychology, addressing the conflict or convergence of ideological and epistemological values and assumptions. 

(Source: Authors' abstract)

In the work with my thesis on digital poetry I aim to highlight the following three axes

1) A theoretical reflection considering language in interaction with the visual and auditory modalities as well as an investigation of the relation between language and technical media, using theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Friedrich A. Kittler.

2) An analytical, methodical approach, which investigates digital works of poetry and their intermedial relations and effects of meaning.

3) Putting into perspective the historical concrete poetry and avant-garde movements – primarily from Scandinavia.

With these axes in mind, I aim to present a close reading of the Swedish artist Johannes Heldén and his two digital-poetic works “Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive” and “Väljarna” "The Voters/The Choosers" The works of Johannes Heldén are interactive, as you activate the words in a random order on the computer screen. There is a background of pictures with depth and minimal animations that create rather impressive surroundings: a foggy forest and a single spruce with black, naked branches, silently moving. Or a factory with tunnels, smoke, and roads with a single moving truck. The ambience is increased by electronic sounds – drone-like and heavy. In my analysis of the works I will emphasize the figuration of space on several different levels: The interactivity accentuates the paratactic character of the sentences. The text thereby establishes a kind of cubistic space. In “Valjärna”, there are parts of the language, which, in connection with picture and sound, come to constitute an imaginary universe, with words such as “branches”, “storm”, “green water”, “clay soil”, “shadows” and “darkness”. But some linguistic sequences break free from the universe and create their own, surreal pictures, “a laughing monkey”, “spider made of teeth”. There are also aphoristic sentences like “The Alphabet is an instruction” and other sequences that comment on the reception of the work itself on a subtle meta-level. “Väljarna” contains concretistic effects, where, for instance, sentences are shaped like the spruce – and this figuration is redoubled by the sentence “The tree is built by signs”. The language is in interplay with - but also contrasts - the auditory and visual modalities. I intend to investigate the effects of these relations and constitutions of space through a concrete cross-medial approach. Here I use the notion of The modalities of media elaborated by Lars Elleström, which consist of: the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality and the semiotic modality. I employ these distinctions in order to analyse and differentiate the intermedial relations in Heldéns works.

As a seemingly limitless and comprehensive resource, UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) has put together a map of the past hundred or so years of ‘experimental’ writing, film, video, and sound art. It resembles the archive in its breadth and depth, in its relentless collecting, in its inherent totalizing tendencies. My argument is that UbuWeb, while not an ‘archive’ per se, does have a cataloging logic, though it is not apparent, and that its specific logic is based on the commodification of the artwork and the effects of that commodification on its exhibition. To understand that logic, I want to situate UbuWeb at the latest point in a series of discontinuous institutions and discourses that have all taken the ‘artwork’ as their object. By understanding the how artwork’s relationship to power is mediated by a historically developing series of institutions (royal art collection, national patrimony, public museum, commodified gallery), we can understand how these institutions function based on a legitimating logic that is shifting from sovereign power to disciplinary power to securitizing power and how each institution deploys a certain concept of the artwork specific to each regime of power. By contextualizing UbuWeb in the genealogy of the exhibition of artworks, it will be possible to reconceptualize the ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ works of the last century (those represented by UbuWeb) beyond the inside/outside binary that justifies the current discourse surrounding them. The archive, while undergoing many crises not unrelated to the conceptualist crises of the postmodern gallery, can provide an interesting alternative to the aesthetic-driven, galley-like organization principle that keeps UbuWeb from making good on its promise to be a space for utopian politics free from market constraints.

Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

Jhave's wide-ranging history and prospectus alerts us to cognitive, material, and mythic dimensions of the nexus of image and text. By showing how text evolved into image, the essay traces a new malleability, dimensionality, and embodiment of writing. The contemporary image-text is a quasi-object with experimental literary qualities as well as an almost organic media dynamism. (Source: ebr Electronic Book Review)

This essay attempts to answer a simple question: why did Francis Picabia stop publishing 391? By October 1924, when the final issue was published, 391 was the longest running magazine related to dada and the burgeoning surrealist movement, and Picabia was well established as one of the premiere avant-gardists in Paris and beyond, with literary, artistic and personal connections to all the major players in the movements that had turned the art world upside down for almost a decade. What caused him to suddenly cease publication of his provocative (but well respected) journal?

(Source: author's abstract.)

A recent essay by Jessica Pressman explores Bob Brown's The Readies (1929) as an important predecessor of electronic literature. Pressman argues that Brown's reading machine, which was designed to automatically unfurl scrolls of magnified text before the reader’s eyes in a way similar to a film projector, exemplifies a “machine poetics” that emphasizes the mediation of reading itself, much in the way that electronic literature often does. Brown’s description of his reading machine does indeed seem to offer an uncanny prophesy for subsequent developments in visual poetry and in reading technologies, as Pressman and other critics, including Jerome McGann and Craig Saper, have pointed out. In emphasizing the futurist possibilities of Brown’s machine, however, critics have tended to ignore or downplay the willfully comic aspects of the manifesto in which he proposes it. The tone of Brown’s writing suggests that we ought to count Rube Goldberg, as much as Thomas Edison, among the inspirations for the machine. Brown may well have desired that his invention would bring about a new era of mechanical reading, but he also uses his proposed machine to satirize both the mechanization of culture and the ostensible seriousness of the modernist avant-garde. In readings of Brown’smanifesto The Readies and the follow-up collection Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931), this talk argues that Brown both embraces and parodies the inherently comic experience of technological novelty that Michael North describes in his recent Machine-Age Comedy (2009). By proposing his fanciful machine and imagining hypothetical readers’ simultaneous wonder and amusement at its novelty, Brown situates himself at an ambivalent middle ground between those who would enthusiastically embrace new reading technologies and those who would treat them as a threat to the printed word. By ignoring the comic aspects of Brown’s proposal and the “readies” that various experimental modernists wrote for it, critics have read as straightforwardly futurist a project that is actually ambivalent about the literary possibilities of technological novelty. The final section of my paper turns to the relationship of Brown’s comic impulse to subsequent developments in reading and writing technologies, including electronic literature. The field would do well, I argue, to further explore the comic possibilities of technological and formal novelty that Brown engages and North describes. As the field seeks to build a larger readership and secure deeper institutional support, understanding potential readers’ comic experience of such novelty becomes increasingly important.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)