islands

This paper interrogates the ‘topic’ of islands displaced from print books into digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (Carpenter 2013) http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/ In this work a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by a background image of graph paper. Whereas horizontally lined loose leaf or foolscap offers a guide for linear hand writing, horizontally and vertically lined graph paper offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, along orthogonal axes such as latitude and longitude, and time and distance. In this graphic space the horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean computer-generated paragraphs. JavaScript continuously recomposes these fluid texts, calling upon variable strings containing words and fragments of phrases collected from a vast literary corpus of books about islands – Deleuze’s Desert Islands, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Bishop’s Crusoe in England, Coetzee’s Foe, Ballard’s Concrete Island, Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries, Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle, and many other lesser-known sources. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of ‘topical islands’ (Díaz), places only possible in literature. Called as statement-events into digital processes, fragments of print texts are reconstituted as events occurring in a digital present which is also a break from the present. A new regime of signification emerges, in which authorship is distributed and text is ‘eventilized’ (Hayles). Situated at the interface between an incoherent aesthetics, one which tends to unravel neat masses, including well-known works of print literature; and an incoherent politics, one which tends to dissolve existing institutional bonds, including bonds of authorship and of place; Galloway terms this regime of signification the ‘dirty regime of truth’.

Electronic Literature is a loaded and slippery category. It is rather dryly defined by the Electronic Literature Organization (what other art form needs a governing body?) as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” Does this mean everything or nothing?

If there’s one person who knows the ins and outs of e-Lit as a category and an institution, it’s J. R. Carpenter. The Canadian artist, writer, performer – and myriad other titles – first logged onto the internet in November 1993, and has been deeply invested in making work both online and off ever since. This work floats across all mediums: zines, novels, hypertext fictions and performances, all referencing and circling back on each other.

In February 2013, writer Elvia Wilk took part in a writing residency at the Banff Center called In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a yearly program where J. R. is a member of faculty. Banff is also an important place in the development of J. R.’s work; it was during a 1995 residency there that she made her first hypertext project. Recently Elvia and J. R. caught up with each other in London to re-hash many of the issues they talked about while together at Banff – dissecting various (misleading) terms in the e-Lit field, going over projects both new and old, discussing code as performance writing, and ending up on a chain of imaginary islands.

The broad aim of this paper is to contribute to a discussion on some aspects of the relationship between e-literature, spatiality and site-specificity. The context for this particular investigation is a major initiative for the establishment and development of an Academy of New Media and Digital Arts (see below) on the Italian island of Procida, one of the three islands that sit in the Bay of Naples. Within this initiative, e-literature as both practice and community plays a central role.

One question which inevitable arises from the Procida project concerns the discrepancy between the geographical situatedness of the Academy on the one hand, and the dispersed nature of networked e-lit communities and of e-literature as a practice on the other. How will the relationship between site and network play out?

The paper itself is designed to emphasise the spatiality of e-texts, in contrast to the more temporally structured nature of page-based narrative. It comprises a pattern of “insular” sections that are linked to each other, although this pattern is one among many possible patterns. In other words the “textual islands” are both isolated and inter-located at the same time.

(Source: Authors' abstract)