digital art

Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects. Farmville is just one example of plethora experiences made possible by digital platforms that everyday people inhabit—and increasingly rely on for work and social connection during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—that demand constant attention. While it may not be a matter of your digital crops dying or your digital cows going unmilked, the gamification of real life has other, more tangible consequences. With questions circulating for years now on the extent of digital surveillance and abusive, intrusive advertisements disguised as entertainment, contemporary artforms must engage. To what degree can electronic literature exist in the same spaces (platforms) as applications that profit from artificial as well as human limits? And if new social platforms are needed to improve access to electronic literature, to what extent can they or should they resemble the status quo? Germane to this line of questioning is the advancements in computing power that have made imagining virtually limitless, uncompletable digital experiences possible. When a work is untethered from meaningful material limitations, new possibilities arise and—as is the case with impositions on an audience like FarmVillian microtransactions that reveal a naked pecuniary interest—certain possibilities are foreclosed upon; in other words, what form does a genre take when it can be “bottomless”? Asynchronicity is another element that must be better grappled with as individuals and institutions become more adapted to remote work and play. In what ways future platforms can address the breakneck kairos of art, either by accommodating or deviating from recent mass cultural reprogramming and the by-now prosaic ever-splintering, ever-accelerating pace of media consumption will be explored.

The contemporary digital environment is made possible through a matrix of behemoth infrastructures that traverse the orbital, atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial domains. These infrastructures manifest not only in the narrowly technical sense, but encompass the manufacturing chains, regulatory interfaces, and geopolitical contexts that enable (or forestall) the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital systems at a global scale.

Underpinning all these aspects are the flows of energy and materials constituting the liveable Earthly ecology. The latter comprises the ultimate baseline ‘platform’ on which specific digital platforms, as more commonly expressed, are enabled—but which, being so defined, can obscure these far larger structures and processes in which they are embedded.

Coming out of all this, we can note that the global scale of digital infrastructure is now foundational to the charting and modelling of a rapidly deteriorating planetary ecology, but this comes with the recognition that the former is both the product, and a critical facilitator, of economic processes that are driving the very pollution, wastage, and largely unhindered exploitation behind our present environmental calamities.

It is in these contexts that we are encouraged to evaluate how works of digital art and electronic literature are responding to this uncomfortable paradox. We might recall here how early digital art sought to demonstrate (with admittedly varying success) different possibilities for computing beyond militarised technoscience, and the creative and critical challenge today is to rework and reframe digital platforms so they might perform and inspire substantive ecological critique and expression, rather than be relegated only as perpetuators of extractive, accelerationist, technocentric paradigms. Contemporary electronic literature, in its very particular fusions of data, writing, and the algorithmic, affords rich experimental pathways for just this kind of work—as deftly illustrated by the recent outputs of artists such as J.R. Carpenter and Eugenio Tisselli.

This paper will contextualise and document the author’s latest experiments with creating electronic literary works that bring together a diverse, unconventional assemblage of platforms as a key aspect of their creation and expression. Cameras, satellites, drones, canvas graphics, esoteric code, and printed outputs are combined to establish elaborate, contingent exchanges, with the ‘work’ itself being enacted across these different platforms—each contributing to an always provisional outcome—and drawing its creative and critical force as much by examining and reflecting on these aspects and processes, as the varied marks they leave behind. In particular, the author will discuss his newly emerging work, “Landform”, in which satellite and drone image data of terrestrial landscapes are parsed into esoteric visual algorithms, that, once interpreted, are compiled into code poems that draw on a vocabulary derived from scientific, scholarly, and poetic texts discussing present ecological concerns. The aim is to actualise a set of speculative, experimental relations between the platforms, materials, and concepts involved, investigating their potential for enacting novel modes of environmental computational practice, and, thus, suggest another vector for articulating the entanglements and contingencies that are driving the present situation.

Rather than taking a lit-crit approach to a single piece of e-literature, we used this session to collect and discuss “e-lit in the wild”: works that we have found that often don’t have ties to the academic or artistic circles we traditionally look to for electronic literature. We created a Google Doc list of works we have come across that make interesting artistic and narrative uses of digital spaces, including customer reviews of products, interactive web comics, online bulletin boards, Reddit users, indie games and more.

We began with Lyle discussing the items on the list so far, and why, to her, they qualified as “e-lit”. The discussion quickly branched into topics such as: defining e-lit, finding e-lit, the evanescence of art, the use of “1st/2nd/3rd generation e-lit” as classification, and what the digital medium means for linguistic arts. We found common ground in the notion that some work cannot be separated from its medium of origin without loss of coherence, and that various media shape their texts in a myriad of meaningful ways.

In some ways, the COVID-19 pandemic brought us closer to the mission of The New River, even as it pushed our meetings apart. Since the beginning, The New River has dedicated a platform to emerging and established artists working at the intersection of digital art and literature. Excellent execution has always been one of our top priorities, along with innovative ideas and user-friendly engagement. We aim to challenge passive readership—a symptom of overindulgent screen time and existential Googling. The artists we have selected for the Spring 2020 issue of The New River compliment this vision and complicate the questions “what is art?” and “who is it for?”