born digital

“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.

“E-literature”, as defined by the ELO, is a fairly sweeping term. Any sort of “born digital” text can potentially be claimed as “e-lit”: video games, works of interactive fiction, fan fiction, et cetera. As a scholar, it is tempting to dragoon a favorite text, to bring it into an e-lit context. But to do this is to ignore the differences in the communities that supported these texts’ creation. Similarly, it is tempting to declare the “end of e-lit,” since so much e-lit can also be framed as fan fiction, video art, games, etc., but to do this is to ignore the impact of the e-lit community and its structure.

This paper explores how online fandom is a global community that supports the creation of “born-digital” texts just as the e-lit community does, but has very different strengths and weaknesses. Three texts focalize this exploration. The first two are Machine Libertine’s Whoever You Are and Imaginary Circus’s Please Let Me Get What I Want. Each could be considered either as works of e-literature or as fanvid, but they were created in very different contexts. The third is The Care and Feeding of Stiles Stilinski (or how Stiles goes on four accidental dates and still gets no make-outs), by Lunarwolfik. This work of fan fiction initially seems like a simple e-book presentation of a short story, potentially not classifiable as “e-literature”, but deeper examination of the context of its creation shows that it takes great advantage of the affordances of networked computing – not in its format, but with regard to the community and tools that helped shape it.

The contexts of these three works are not limited to the aesthetic concerns of their intended audiences. The fandom community excels at lobbying for expansion of legal protections around fair use and at creating informal discussion spaces; the e-literature community provides excellent education resources and databases of works of various types. Both communities hold large and regular meet-ups, though in fandom the focus is on celebratory conventions (sometimes featuring an academic track), whereas the e-literature community focuses on academic conferences (often featuring festivals or shows). This paper will offer recommendations about what each community can learn from the other.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

How reliable are archives and databases of born-digital works of electronic literature when their digitally driven platforms are endangered by digital obsolescence and technological challenges, hacks, and by a lack of long-term maintenance after a funding period’s end?

Some of the databases within the field of electronic literature are no longer accessible due to one of the reasons mentioned above: the Cyberfiction Database (directed by Beat Suter) that featured German works that were published between 1996-2003 is down after a move from one server to another; ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Region (directed by Jill Walker Rettberg, 2004-06) was terminated after the project’s funding ended, and the ELO’s wiki-based archive-it database that was set up in 2007 for allocating works for archiving was hacked. The risks are also there for the (still accessible) Drupal-based Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, no longer funded as part of the ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, 2010-2013).

On January 4th 2015, Matthew Kirschenbaum tweets “Seems The Iowa Review Web has gone away“ (@mkirschenbaum). After a round of speculations and discontentment (the archive was not valued to be preserved (Grigar)), there is certainty that the archive of the e-lit journal that was founded at the turn of the millennium will be resurrected by moving it to a new server (see https://twitter.com/mkirschenbaum/status/551852928265646081). In the meantime, the archive remains inaccessible for an undefined period of time.

Thus, on the list of seemingly archived, but inaccessible resources are not only databases and archives; web journals and their archives of published works, too, are at risk of appearing as objects no longer found on the Web. This is even true for resources that were – in collaboration with the Electronic Literature Organization – crawled and captured by using the web-archiving service Archive-It.

Seeking to provide a secure location for archiving and maintaining works of electronic literature, the department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies and the University of Bergen Library are collaborating to provide an “Archive of Nordic Electronic Literature”. In this presentation, UiB’s subject librarian Aud Gjersdal and PhD candidate Patricia Tomaszek (UiB) propose how academic libraries can serve to secure access to works of electronic literature on an institutional basis, and discuss the challenges they are facing in their work in progress.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation will link the trope of “digital ekphrasis” (as articulated by Cecilia Lindhé) and the developing of platforms for “augmented reality” to argue that one probable future for electronic literature lies in the interweaving of “born digital” and print texts in ubiquitous layers of mediation. It will examine three instances of “augmented” print – the multimodal performance of ekphrastic poetry, the AR comic book Modern Polaxis, and the AR epistolary romance Between Page and Screen – all of which demonstrate the power of “intermediation” (Hayles) and foster a critical perspective on it. Looking at these amalgamations of print and digital textuality through the lens of digital ekphrasis reveals that electronic literature will most likely always arouse ambivalence, just as the trope of ekphrasis in traditional media has, for better or worse, provoked a sense of the uncanny through its interweaving of visual, auditory, tactile, verbal, or haptic experiences.

I will first establish the aesthetic and rhetorical theories of ekphrasis that will frame my discussion of augmented reality and electronic literature. In writing of the centuries of ambivalence associated with intermedial “picture poems,” W.J.T. Mitchell has outlined the “dangerous promiscuity” of ekphrasis (155), how its “mutual interarticulation” (162) – with words helping to determine the significance of images and vice versa – threatens the stability assigned by audiences to each medium, at the same time that it provokes the “hope” that each medium’s limitations can be overcome. Lindhé has rehearsed and extended that discussion to highlight specifically “the interaction between visual, verbal, auditive and kinetic elements in digital literature and art” (Lindhé Par.13). She makes the case that the more comprehensive theory of ekphrasis in rhetoric allows us to understand and appreciate the intermedial functions of digital textuality in new ways: “digital literature and art align with this concept of ekphrasis, especially in the way that its rhetorical meaning is about effect, immediacy, aurality, and tactility. The multimodal patterns of performativity in the rhetorical situation stage a space-body-word-image-nexus with relevance for how we could interpret and discuss digital aesthetics.” Lindhé’s concept of digital ekphrasis has much to offer as we think about the power of electronic literature, but I will argue that the ambivalence the trope has always elicited is just as important to remember.

In the final section of the presentation, I will demonstrate how various AR texts court a sense of the uncanny and thereby serve as paradigmatic examples of the multi-layered future of electronic literature. After noting the precedent of Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda (Electronic Literature Collection, V.2), I will examine the remediation of print poetry through multimodal AR performances and locative poetry (Berry and Goodwin). Next, I will offer a close analysis of Sutu’s AR comic book Modern Polaxis, which employs both the palimpsest effects of AR and the tropes of science fiction (time travel, body snatchers, the automaton) to encourage us to “learn to taste the tea on both sides” of an uncanny reality. Finally, I will end with a discussion of Borsuk and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen, to my mind the most ambitious use yet of AR for literary expression. Like Lev Manovich’s thoughts on “the poetics of augmented space,” Borsuk’s work (both the book and her essay on “words in space and on the page”) shows us, it is more fruitful to think of AR as a cultural and aesthetic practice than as a technology. The platforms for AR may change from smartphones to wearables, and beyond, but AR itself will persist in, among other things, an uncanny electronic literature not just “born digital,” to use Strickland’s phrase, but cached in the world around us.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

Viewed next to print literature, e-lit appears as a poor copy, a replica(nt) lacking both the genius agency of modernism and the abject subjectivity of postmodernism. In this talk, I will use the concepts of re-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) and “the open” (Giorgio Agamben) to show how, like Hoffman’s automaton, the “born digital” is powerful precisely because it fails to deceive. Neither preserving nor directly opposing the conventions of print-lit, e-lit functions as a reflecting apparatus that unmasks language and meaning-making as machines through the revelation of its own machine-works. Using multifarious examples from the work of Alan Bigelow, Mez Breeze, Emily Short, Jason Nelson, and others, I will show how these re-inscribe obstruction, glitch, error, randomness and obsolescence as potentiality. In doing so, they repurpose the productive and reproductive functions of writing not for some finite end or product, but for play.

(Source: author's abstract)