Digital

The possibility of machines making works of art has fascinated mankind for centuries. Men have dreamed not only of machines equipped with a powerful artificial memory, capable of reproducing patterns and structures from previous texts; they have also devised machines capable of working on their own, producing beautiful works without any human input. That leads us to the startling hypothesis posed by Calvino (2009): “will there be a machine capable of replacing the poet and the writer?”. The fact that written verbal language consists of nothing but visual symbols rearranged into meaningful structures makes this system (and Literature, as well) a field where experimentations with automated creation tend to be prolific. The interactive computer system Library of Babel, created by the American writer John Basile, based on the central metaphor of the short story “The Library of Babel”, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, is a remarkable techno-artistic product in this area. The system works on the mathematical principle of Combinatorics, so that any click on the refresh button triggers a different combination of 29 graphic symbols (the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the space, the full stop and the comma) among all possible rearrangements, filling in a page with 3200 characters. As if in a lottery in which one wins by buying tickets for all possible rearrangements (which would evidently cost more than the prize), the system Library of Babel encompasses, under massive layers of linguistic chaos, all texts (literary or not) that could be written with these 29 graphic symbols. With that in view, this paper discusses the ontological and aesthetic consequences of a “total writing”, the logical premise of a project like the Library of Babel, which lies somewhere between a machine that subsumes all possible writers, but also all possible archives. As to the theoretical bases for our analysis, we will analyze Basile’s system from the perspectives defended by Umberto Eco (2016), Italo Calvino (2009), Barthes (2004), Deleuze (1979) and Raymond Quenau (1961).

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/609/A+poe…

The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across different forms of representation. The outcomes of this experimentation could illuminate our knowledge of creative processes. As part of our research on glitch pedagogy and transmediation over the last two years (Peña, James & DLC, 2016), we have experimented with the functionalities of raw data by comparing patterns of mis/representation between textual, aural and visual data. Our inquiries have allowed us to engage in the intervention and purposeful disruption of these patterns while shedding light on the underlying processes behind these disruptive practices. Delivered as a performance, this paper will demonstrate a few such practices. In our role as noise-musicians, we will improvisualize a transmediatic piece while describing the process behind it. This performance/presentation will start with the production of a natively visual digital artifact (i.e., a digital photograph). This artifact, produced during the session involving attendees, will be then translated into while modifying the sound with analog synthesizers. Simultaneously poetry will be performed, recorded and interpolated with the raw data of the pictures' sound file. This step will effectively involve passing digital data through an analog channel before its re-digitization in real-time. Finally, the intervened artifact will then be re-presented in its visual form. Our presentation will not only contrast between performance as a process and performance as a product, it will allow participants to compare the aesthetic properties of an artifact when presented both in a native and in a non-native format, and will reveal the patterns-in-common between these different media by merit of disrupting them.

Sources: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/854/Trans…; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327163262_Transmedia_an_improv…

Starting from the problematic gap between the unicity of the human voice and the socio-cultural variables that are unavoidably attached to her expressions, this presentation proposes the phenomenon of ‘sound poetry’ as paradigmatic bridge between a biological reality and its posthuman condition. The underlying reasoning harks back to media artist and philosopher Norie Neumark’s remark that sound poetry like no other mode of artistic expression “stimulates reflection on the uncanny and complicated relation between embodiment, alterity, and signification” (2010). Most notably the appropriation and – literal – embodiment of electronic technologies in digital sound poetry has recently yielded a new dynamic to the performativity of poetic composition. With today’s technical possibility to sample and mediate minimal acoustic nuances in the here-and-now we are allowed a glimpse into the supplement of meaning generated by the meeting between text/script and voice/sound. Such post-human amplification of an intrinsically arch-human act accordingly finds its broader relevance broadside conventional aesthetic standards. 

The ‘meta-pop’ of Japanese musician/sound poet Cornelius (°1969) marks a case in point by weaving together digital samples and loopings of ‘live’ vocalisations into a musical-seeming texture from which nonetheless no melodies seem discernable – or at least no recognizable ones. The result however is not entirely estranging, and this not in the least because the artist putatively plays on a continual cognitive oscillation between the referential frames ‘music,’ ‘performance,’ ‘text,’ and ‘technology.’ Bearing in mind Neumark’s aforementioned relational model, Cornelius’s sound poetry with its idiosyncratic explorations of digital signification arguably generates a genuine soundtrack for a posthuman condition.

The Convergence between Print and Digital Literature in Blackout Poetry study the phenomenon of the “blackout poetry” both in the digital and the physical world. According to Ralph Heibutzki, on Demand Media, “Blackout Poetry focuses on reordering words to create a different meaning. Also known as the newspaper blackout poetry, in it, the author uses a permanent marker to cross out or delete words or images that he sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he is trying to create. The central idea is to design a new text from the words and images published previously, but finally, the reader is free to interpret as he wants.”

In the conclusion of *Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English* (1965), Northrop Frye asserts that there “is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference” (821). This paper will partly push against this tendency in Canadian literary criticism and will consider a select instance of Canadian electronic literature. In Frye’s terms, “Canadian sensibility” is “profoundly disturbed” not only by “our famous problem of identity,” which can be, in part, summarized by the question of “[w]ho am I?,” but by the question of “[w]here is here?” (826). I claim that *here* in the question of “where is here?” has become digital; i.e., “we” (as in Canadian writers and critics) are now online and not in the prairies or the lakes or the cityscapes and we live lives in which our identities (along with the potentiality of a national identity) have been outsourced to an indefinite electronic space. Identity is experienced through the mirrors of technological avatars and doubles in a mise en abyme of electronic spacelessness. I call it “spacelessness” because the ontology of this “space”—the space of the digital—is indiscrete and indefinite; it remains, to put it in the terms of Alan Liu (when applying Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified to “data pours” [“59]), “transcendent” (62). Extrapolating from Liu, the space of electronic literature should be conceived as being “transcendent” as opposed to “immanent”—to use a Deleuzoguattarian term—but this notion of transcendence is unique in that a materiality of space is nonetheless configured through the complicated interplay of technological and subjective doubling, which renders materiality in very new terms and in a very new place. To put this argument differently, I would say that the emergence of Canadian electronic literature is still concerned with the question of “where is here,” but now the orientation of here is situated in a very different notion of “environment.” This new notion of environment is no longer a directly “Canadian” environment—an environment of mountains, trees, fields, prairies, lakes, and rivers that is inhabited by moose, geese, humans, and various other non-humans—but rather an environment that features an extreme plurality and a profound lack of both subjectivity and space. The electronic environment that is presented by Canadian electronic literature is not a void-space of subjective inexistence, but a material space of sociocultural heterogeneity; in other words, it is a space that is constituted as a vague, expansive, and indefinite commons. This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).