infinite

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has been styled as one of the precursors of electronic literature, and his influence has been explored in a multitude of projects, especially when referring to the development of hypertextual structures (Manovich) or posthumanist theories (Herbretcher, Callus). Rather than tracing Borges’s overall influence in electronic literature, this talk presents a series of recent works of e-lit that that engage with Borges's particular figures of infinity as described in The Library of Babel (1941), The Aleph (1949), and The Book of Sand (1975). In each of these works, Borges’s figures of the infinite can be conceptualized as their own media object/process, inasmuch as they shape the limits (or lack thereof) and the form of their own particular “infinite”--very much in the same way that the media configurations of a work of electronic literature. Within this framework, Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge and Dan Waber’s Sestinas are presented as generativist works with the potential to run forever. Matt Schneider’s Babelling Borges is read as a looping Twitter bot whose loops signal infinity as a conceptual motif, in a similar manner to the multilingual looping translations we see in Luis Sarmiento’s Babel’s Monkeys. Laura McGee’s Infinite Notebook opens up the reading canvas to a rhetoric of zooming in and out as a way of navigating infinity in spatial terms. Finally, David Hirmes’s Infinite Wonder, Infinite Pity, and Jim Andrews’s Globebop take these explorations into the vastness of social media mining as apps that serve as windows into the universal--like the original Aleph. Although all these e-lit examples are different in terms of computation, interface and interactivity, they all engage directly and indirectly in a dialogue with Borges’s figures of infinity by enacting them structurally, but also conceptually—that is by the process they unfold and the output they produce, either computationally by means of non-stop algorithms or other mechanisms, or collectively and socially by drawing on our ever growing electronic output. Further, the impossibility of ever reading them completely highlights both the instantiation of Borges's media figures and the enactment of our reading, determined not by the bounds of the literary work, but by our own human-machinic condition: human exhaustion as well as the material conditions of the machine (electricity, connectivity, obsolescence, etc.). Borges sustains that literature embodied in the library will endure illuminated and infinite, independent to--and extending beyond--human life. But he also gives back a certain degree of agency to the reader, however, offering her the capacity to stop, forget, and begin to read again. Thus, it is reading what draws the boundaries of the infinite, negotiates the possible, and in a way keeps it under control. At the same time, it is the infinity of these works of e-lit what suggest their potential long-term relevance beyond machine lifespan and hardware and software obsolescence. This talk is part of the larger No Legacy project that explores the use of computational and digital technologies in literary production in the networked world and its material connections with 20th-century Latin American and Spanish technologized approaches to literature like Futurism, Concretism, Creationism, Stridentism, Magical Realism, and others.

In 2009 Nick Montfort wrote a short program--first in Python and later in Javascript--that generated an infinite nature poem inspired by the stunning Taroko Gorge in Taiwan. While Montfort never explicitly released the code of “Taroko Gorge” under a free software license, it was readily available to anyone who viewed the HTML source of the poem’s web page. Lean and elegantly coded, with self-evident algorithms and a clearly demarcated word list, “Taroko Gorge” lends itself to reappropriation. Simply altering the word list (the paradigmatic axis) creates an entirely different randomly generated poem, while the underlying sentence structure (the syntagmatic axis) remains the same. Very quickly Scott Rettberg remixed the original poem, replacing its naturalistic vocabulary (“crags,” “basins,” “rocks,” “mist,” and so on) with words drawn from what Rettberg imagined to be a counterpoint to Montfort’s meditative nature scene--a garage in Toyko, cluttered with consumer objects. J.R. Carpenter followed up Rettberg’s “Tokyo Garage” in 2010 with “Gorge,” a remix that relentlessly depicts the act of devouring food, and “Whisper Wire,” a remix that haunts Montfort’s source code with strange sounds, disembodied voices and ghost whispers. In 2011 an uncoordinated series of other remixes of “Taroko Gorge” appeared: J.R. Carpenter’s “Along the Briny Beach”; Talan Memmott’s cynically nostalgic “Toy Garbage”; Eric Snodgrass’s fluxus influenced “Yoko Engorged”; Maria Engberg’s campus parody “Alone Engaged”; Mark Sample’s Star Trek tribute “Takei, George”; Flourish Klink’s erotic fanfic “Fred & George”; and Andrew Plotkin’s meta-remix “Argot Ogre, OK!”Aside from a common DNA in Montfort’s original Javascript code, these remixes share other similarities, such as the title wordplay, often referencing the original title either homonymously or alliteratively; the list of crossed-out names of previous appropriators that appears on the upper right side of the screen; and of course, the dizzying repetition with a difference of a poem that will never stand still nor ever end. Yet despite these similarities, the various remixes are palpably distinct from one another, both stylistically and thematically. This dynamic between appropriation and individuation suggests that there is much to learn from the example of “Taroko Gorge” and its remixes. To this end, this roundtable will bring together many of the authors of the “Taroko Gorge” remixes. While each author will introduce his or her work with a 1-2 minute artist’s statement, the goal of this roundtable is not to dwell on any specific variation, but to discuss the implications of this work upon the broader spheres of text generation, electronic literature, and remix culture. After a series of prompts by the session organizer (Mark Sample), the audience will be invited to join the discussion. Note that two of the participants (Carpenter and Engberg) will be presenting their artist statements via teleconferencing.