contemporary electronic literature

The intensification of tactile/haptic research by academia and the digital technology industry, has given rise to several instrumentalizations of the adjective haptic, often contradicting an entire philosophical haptological tradition, going back to Aristotle and allowing us to think of the haptic from a multisensory perspective capable of destabilizing the idea of pure sensory modalities. On the one hand, such intensification is evidenced by the ubiquity of digital technological devices that call for interaction through touch and gesture as tactile/haptic functions necessary for experiencing digital content. On the other hand, it may be seen in the increasing demand for tangibility between human and machine, particularly through sensory experiences made possible by virtual/augmented reality, as well as, mixed reality/virtuality platforms. Such intense literalization of the haptic also, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing the existence and primacy of a visual culture inherent to an ocularcentric society. It is in line with this haptological tradition, as well as through the recovery of a multisensory perspective explored by a series of avant-garde artistic practices that permeate the history of twentieth-century art, that I propose to (re)think digital literary works via means of an alternative and operative redefinition of haptic drawn from the metamedial and intermedial specificities of current digital poetic practices. Based on the mapping and analysis of carefully selected digital literary works, this research intends to understand how digital poetic practices make use of certain processes of haptic reading enabled by current digital technology, in order to explore and question the processes of writing and reading in media. In order to validate an argument largely based on the examination of ambiguities and tensions highlighted by the literary exploration of interface functionalities in arts and literature, this thesis will attempt to analyze the referred ambiguity, by showing a parallel between an inherent circularity of (multi)sensory perception and the way certain circular, or rather, spiral-like, trajectories, are able to be identified across multiple arts, artists and movements. All of this, of course, is put together via a process of dialectic subversion/disruption that characterizes multiple variants of experimentalism across the centuries. Moreover, doing so is a way of finding possible answers, or perhaps, raising new questions, regarding longstanding problematics pertaining to the relationship between tradition and innovation, from which the digital era is not exempt.

For the past two years the author has been producing an experimental spoken word radio show that blends stories, sounds, and voices in an audio collage. The work is played on radio and also distributed as a podcast. The work evolves out of improvised recording sessions that are then processed and edited into episodes that have a thematic centre. The recording will include different modes of writing and performance. Often the texts are improvised but also written texts are used. This talk will argue for the idea of radio and podcasts as electronic literature in that the medium and reception of radio and podcasts influences the meaning and reception of the work. The author will talk about histories of radio and sound art paying particular attention to the rise of the podcast and the possibilities it has for literary texts that resist the formats of broadcast radio.  

The show can be found here https://soundcloud.com/nothing_to_see_here_radio

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/844/Nothi…

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. His 'If on a winter’s night a traveller…' and 'Castle of Crossed Destinies' are often referenced in relation to digital structures (the former’s ‘pumpkin vine’ structure in relation to early hypertext works, and the latter’s infinite-structures in relation to codex/programmable fiction), and his early hypotheses and fictions on computer writers and readers are referenced in relation to contemporary computer writer/reader projects. J.R. Carpenter’s web-based work 'The Gathering Cloud' (2016) (hereafter TGC) exhibits Calvino's values. TGC was commissioned by North East of North (NEoN) in Dundee, UK, in 2016. As well existing as a web-based work, it has also been performed as a poetic work with accompanying graphics and disseminated as a print book. The latter, Carpenter argues, ‘further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste’. 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, sometimes due to the reader’s actions or of their own accord. 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 (i.e. lightness, quickness, etc.) will be discussed in relation to each of the work’s six sections (i.e. the ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’). I argue that there exists a gap in the understanding of Calvino’s influence on contemporary digital literary aesthetics and approaches that is exemplified by TGC.

This is a two-part meditation on where electronic literature came from, some of the places it’s been, and how (and why) it might possibly go on.

Espen Aarseth will look at the roots of electronic literature in the period before 1997, discussing the origins of digital writing in terms of contemporary art and theory. Particular attention will be given to interactive fiction and what happened to it.

Stuart Moulthrop skips over the really important bits (1997-2010) and concentrates on the state of electronic literature in the current decade, especially the intersection of various text-generation schemes with latter-day conceptualism and “the new illegibility.”

Both keynote speakers will offer critical prospects on the very idea of electronic literature, the meaning of the name, and various present and future ontologies for our discourse.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

In his State of the Arts keynote, Coover offered a tour of a number of contemporary works of electronic literature, in the style of an adventure story following our hero "Mot" -- the word -- as it wrestles through the multimediated world of graphic networked technologies.