ephemera

On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014). Porpentine’s work, built using the hypertext platform Twine, is a reminder both of how easy it is to delete an electronic file but also how difficult, as the ghosts of “Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone echo across the internet. Likewise, it asks us to engage with the aftermath of the “deletion” of a human life in a manner that makes use of the particular affordance of Twine, which Jane Friedhoff has noted as particularly suited to experimental works at the margins (2014).

The poetics of Twine embrace the uneasy boundary between the ephemeral and fixed text, as each traversal of a Twine text marks a path visible only as it is traversed. They question the assumptions of game systems, recalling Espen Aarseth’s question “what player…would actually commit suicide, even virtually?” (2004). That question, posed ten years ago, as part of a discussion of the contradictions and possibilities of “interactive narrativism,” is one Twine games are well on their way to answering by crafting literary contexts in which an apparent choice is no choice at all. In Twine game, there is often no way to win in the conventional sense, and certainly the outcome of Everything you swallow is pre-determined. Such works also recall the structures and mechanisms of hypertext novels and similar choice-driven interactive fiction. I will examine the engagement with suicide and the destruction of self and text through several Twine works: Porpentine’s aforementioned Everything you swallow, collective Tsukerata’s You Were Made For Loneliness (2014), Gaming Pixie’s The Choice (2013), Pierre Chevalier’s Destroy / Wait (2013), and Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013). In each, the reader-player is invited to consider the mechanisms and social pressures surrounding the “choice” of suicide, and in doing so to confront the consequences of the erasure of self and text.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This half-day workshop will be focused on the preservation and archiving of Electronic Literature Organization events and conferences. Scott Rettberg has been asked by the ELO board to establish a standing committee of ELO members that will be focused on documenting and archiving current and past ELO events. This workshop will be focused both on the future scope and projects of that committee and on the hands-on documentation of ELO conferences in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. We will consider questions including:

What are the best practices related to archiving for ELO conference organizers?
Should relationships be established with one or more libraries or archives to preserve data and ephemera from ELO conferences?
How should we best go about gathering ELO archives materials and preserving them?
How can we archive events using the platform of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base?

The session will include a discussion of these issues followed by hands-on work in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Participants will learn how to document their presentations, papers, creative works, and events in order to preserve them and make them available to other international researchers.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

How will electronic literature look 100 years from now? This question is two-fold: 1) How will literary projects of 2014 that are written/performed in social media and short-lived web platforms greet the eyes of future readers? 2) what will theelectronic literature in current use by the people of the future look like to them?
In this talk I will focus on consideration of the first question and speculate briefly on some clues about the second.
“You should make it look as much like Twitter as possible!” I have already heard this admonition several times in the course of beginning to create archives for some 2013 netprov projects — Center for Twitzease Control, Tournament of la Poéstry, SpeidiShow. As a graphic designer something makes me uneasy about this. Why? Because Twitter’s graphic designers are . . . how to say this diplomatically? . . . doing their best under a lot of pressure. From a historicalgraphic design point of view, the look of those hugely popular digital applications is adequate, but definitely not optimum, not nearly as aesthetically or functionally strong as it could be.
The problems of simply ‘making netprov look like Twitter’ in an archive are manifold. Twitter’s design highlights information useful for readers in real time, but unnecessary and distracting for later readers. Twitter repeats user avatar images with each post, an effect that becomes like a heavy and distracting visual drumbeat for readers experiencing a longer narrative. Most importantly, Twitter formats texts in descending chronological order, necessitating a cumbersome, stair-stepping reading behavior — clawing one’s way up from the bottom — if one is to read in a sustained way.
On a deeper level, privileging the original format is problematic. By analogy, wouldn’t we always need to read Jane Austen only in autograph manuscript to get the “real experience?” Or would a facsimile of the first typeset version qualify? As is so often the case, there is an almost willful denial of the materiality of visible language, and therefore of the crucial role of the graphic designer.
I will argue that we should not let Twitter’s, Facebook’s, Google’s, even Apple’s graphic designers dictate how we archive electronic literature.
I will present case studies from my own, students’ and professional graphic designers’ work as I wrestle with how to capture the liveliness of netprov performance in archive form in hopes that it can be of broad use to electronic literature creators and scholars wishing to create archives.
I will conclude by extrapolating briefly from the current scene to look ahead to possible visible language formats of the future.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

“The Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit includes objects and artifacts, books, computers and software, posters and ephemera documenting the rise of the field of electronic literature over the past four decades. Electronic literature includes literary works that take advantage of the context of the computer and the contemporary networked environment. This broad category of digital work includes genres such as hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, computer art installations with literary aspects, interactive fiction, novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs, poems and stories that are generated by computers, network-based collaborative writing projects, and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. The field is essentially focused on potentially transformative uses of the computer to develop new literary genres, and the experiments that contemporary writers and artists are conducting within the new communications paradigm.

(Source: Introduction to the exhbition catalogue)