modernism

The American poetry critic Marjorie Perloff undertook the task of rendering a solid theoretical framework to understand the evolution of the art of poetry after Modernism. Furthermore, she traced the evolution of “Postmodern” poetry, analyzing the most radical experiments including the digital poetry of the present. Based on Perloff’s perspective, this paper will observe the evolution of translation as part of the poetics of the American poet Ezra Pound and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. Following its transformation as a writing strategy, they understood translation as a process adjacent to poetry, though the incorporation of translation as part of their own work would be observed as unethical for many critics. Therefore, Haroldo de Campos coined the term “Transcreation” in order to refer his translations as an original work. Interestingly enough, the paradigm for this sort of writing is the Irish writer James Joyce, whose controversial piece Finnegans Wake introduced not only linguistic but also metaphorical and historical translation. Since then, translation would set a new style of writing, a style that relies on the verbal materiality and where the understanding of the puns and languages will not be as relevant as the comprehension of the poetics as a project. From this perspective, this paper aims to explore the processes involved in the making of e-poetry, and offering an approach to its translation. Branching from the modernist translation strategies, which were perceived as “radical” in their moment, the challenging questions posited by e-poetry conjure up a new kind of radicality towards translation.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Critics have understandably fetishized the electronic page or digital screen as a way to understand the relationship between the algorithmic logics that drive computation and the public rhetorics of display. At the same time an evolving set of practices within electronic literature continues to be in dialogue with contemporary digital media arts practice and its move to explore the meaning of incorporating autonomous sensing and new forms of human-computer interaction in dialogic works. Considering the rhetorical position of devices such as the iPad and considering them as more than viewing apparatuses or interfaces for reading it is possible to engage differently with a whole set of binaries around camera vs. scanner, optics vs. sensors, and representation vs. registration.

This presentation focuses on three writers who are utilizing augmented reality technologies to expand the repertoire of digital poetics. Judd Morrissey has collaborated with choreographer Mark Jeffery to stage The Operature (2014), combining live performance and augmented reality multimodal poetry to highlight anatomical science and voyeuristic erotic spectacle in which the temporary tattoos worn by the work’s dancers can be read by a surveillance apparatus. In contrast, a voice of intensely personal lyricism that speaks very intimately to the listener defines Caitlin Fisher’s Circle (2011), which is an “augmented reality tabletop theatre piece” that deploys the iPad or smart phone in a much more private setting. Amaranth Borsuk’s approach to augmented reality multimedia favors an aesthetic of sleek mid-century modernism and machined characters in Between Page and Screen (2012), which investigates “the place of books as objects in an era of increasingly screen-based reading.“ The actual pages of this artist’s book contain no legible text; the reader is presented with only abstract geometric patterns and a URL leading to the Between Page and Screen website, where the book may be read by using any browser and a webcam. With a new generation of reading machines that can perceive contrast relationships in a 2D visual environment, sensors can read the “ink” of tattoos, the grain of family artifacts, and the code of a numbered artist’s book or print-at-home emulation.

These works may also spur a new kind of criticism that may require that we rethink the theoretical framework of immediacy, hypermediation, and remediation proposed by Bolter and Grusin as we reconsider our own interchanges with the sensorium of the mechanical apparatus. In responding to Galloway, Thacker, and Wark’s theses about “excommunication” and the possibility that the relation between “objects and things” problematizes the standard narrative about media, mediation, and communication, Benjamin Bratton has suggested that this could more precisely be characterized as “incommunication” around the activities of “sensing, addressing, and pricing.” Borsuk, Morrissey, and Fisher create works that dramatize device-to-device relations and their associated modes of reading.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This essay that consists from a number of self-contained segments looks at the phenomenon of Flash graphics on the Web that attracted a lot of creative energy in the last few years. More than just a result of a particular software / hardware situation (low bandwidth leading to the use of vector graphics), Flash aesthetics exemplifies cultural sensibility of a new generation. This generation does not care if their work is called art or design. This generation is no longer is interested in "media critique" which preoccupied media artists of the last two decades; instead it is engaged in software critique. This generation writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media. The result is the new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows: Bauhaus design in the service of information design. Instead the Baroque assault of commercial media, Flash generation serves us the modernist aesthetics and rationality of software. Information design is used as tool to make sense of reality while programming becomes a tool of empowerment.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities, and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy. Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form, and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]" (2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. In sum, the study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and practices of that period.

Table of ContentsIntroduction

Chapter 1 - Close Reading: Marshall McLuhan, From Modernism to Media StudiesChapter 2 - Reading Machines: Machine Poetry and Excavatory Reading in William Poundstone's Electronic Literature and Bob Brown's ReadiesChapter 3 - Speed Reading: Super-Position and Simultaneity in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota and Ezra Pound's CantosChapter 4 - Reading the Database: Narrative, Database, and Stream of ConsciousnessChapter 5 - Reading Code: The Hallucination of Universal Language from Modernism to CyberspaceCoda - Rereading: Digital Modernism in Print, Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions

(Source: OUP catalog copy)

Taking recent writings-of-internet as test cases, Stuart Moulthrop demonstrates the folly of deploying modernist compositional models, even avant-garde theories of citational and conceptual poetry recently popularized by Kenneth Goldsmith and the Flarf poets, to read born-digital writing. Though it may be fun, it's ultimately futile to interpret the contingent output of an "interface in process" as a poem existing in a fixed, terminable state. Perhaps, then, interfacing with databases is becoming integral to not just electronic literature and digital poetics but all forms of literary study and practice? (Source: EBR)

Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.

The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.

These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.

‘The text’ is thus suspended somewhere in between each iteration as it appears to the user, and the overarching structure provided by the code. Niemi selects the program’s vocabulary, the rules which it must adhere to, the inputs which a user can make, and the probabilities which determine the text’s production, but remains one step removed from the text as it appears on screen. Some control, in the shape of the buttons at the bottom of the screen, is given over to the user- who plays the role of glamorous assistant to Niemi’s conjurer and follows his prompts as the poem/game progresses.

The only serious attempt to critique this relationship as it exists within Stud Poetry is available on C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Poetry website after it was omitted from the print version. Funkhouser’s reading is fundamentally flawed as he misreads the code and believes it impossible to learn from each hand. The value of the words is calculated only once, at the beginning of the game and not at the beginning of each hand as Funkhouser has it. Through experience of the text, the user gains increasing control of it as they understand the value of each word, and can predict with increasing accuracy the way the poem/game will proceed, while recognizing that an element of uncertainty is involved. The element of competition quickly creates a narrative.

With its random-generation and interactivity, Stud Poetry is authored by Niemi without being controlled by him. He uses internet poker as a form, as a print poet might use a sonnet, but his is the more radical utilisation as it challenges what can be conceived of as literature, and where ‘the text’ may be in a work of this kind. His poem/game embodies the challenge which electronic literature poses to print literature, and should be recognised with discussion at a major conference rather than becoming an anomaly or outlier of the Electronic Literature Collection.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013)

Urbanalities, by babel and escha, is described as a ‘short story-poem-comic strip-musical, with randomly generated text’ (ELC, Author Description). It is a relatively accessible, visually and aurally appealing digital work, with strong elements of humour and a dark undertone. Although its technical underpinnings and some of its formal influences (such as the ‘VJ stylings’ mentioned in the ELC introductory note) are contemporary, its themes and expressive use of form are strongly reminiscent of high modernism, notably that of T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922). These are the themes of urban alienation, ennui, neurotic constraint or paranoiac anxiety, sexual degeneration or sterility; and a fragmentary form which mimics an vision of a fragmented social realm. The authors themselves signal strong connections to another aspect of modernism, that of Dada, in their description of Urbanalities as ‘A mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings,’ and in their association with Dada-inspired websites such as www.391.org.

These links to the modernism of the early 20th-Century might signal a certain derivativeness or datedness, but are more likely to be read as an ironic postmodern appropriation. Elements of both critical postmodern parody and uncritical pastiche (Jameson’s ‘blank parody’) can be detected. The title of Urbanalities (containing the idea of ‘banality), while it clearly has a thematic relevance to the work’s evocation of banal existence and banal social interaction, strongly suggests an ironic, reflexive admission of the self-conscious use of cliché: the work is not just (in part) about banality but is also (in places) deliberately banal itself, in accord with the authors’ web personae and pronouncements. Of relevance here is Jessica Pressman’s interpretation of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota as a form of ‘digital modernism’, which she defines as ‘a sub-set of electronic literature that shares a common, conscious modus operandi … [using] central aspects of modernism to highlight their literariness, authorize their experiments, and …. [present] a conscious resistance to the central characteristics and expectations of mainstream electronic literature’ (Jessica Pressman, ‘The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota’ MFS, 54.2, 302-26, p. 303). While Urbanalities does not share the minimalist aesthetic of Dakota, and contains some of the features (such as graphics, multiple colours, photos and playful fonts) to which YHCHI have objected (Pressman, 303), it is equally non-interactive, and has elements of a ‘retro-aesthetic’ such as Pressman describes (306), and alludes to Eliot just as Dakota alludes to Pound’s Cantos.

This paper would start from a close reading of Urbanalities, exploring its relationship to modernism, postmodernism and Dada, in order to suggest how its aesthetic can be located in relation to these historical influences, as well as the characteristics of (an alleged) ‘mainstream electronic literature’. It would then go on to question the idea of ‘digital modernism’, which has gained some currency, but is marked by a certain instability (for example Pressman applies the terms ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘post-postmodernism’ to aspects of Dakota). Marjorie Perloff’s conception of ‘21st-century Modernism’ postulates a continuity from early 20th-century modernism to late 20th-century Language and ‘Linguistically Innovative’ poetry, a Modernist ‘tradition’ (with the paradox that implies) which digital literature might or might not wish to join. The paper would address more broadly the usefulness of applying such period / mode terms to digital work - is the idea of digital (post)modernism a regressive categorisation reflex or does it usefully contextualise the shifting terms of aesthetic development?

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.

What happens to literature, the literary, and the cultural value of both when text moves from page to screen? What can these shifts teach us about the traditions, practices, and discourses that shape the ways in which we read, study, and engage with print and electronic literature? Digital Modernism reads digital literature within a modernist tradition of making it new, a history that is both experimental and canonical. Across literary genres and programming platforms, I examine a shared strategy in some of the most innovative works of electronic literature online. These works adopt, adapt, and allude to the seminal aesthetic practices, principles, and texts of literary modernism. Digital Modernism analyzes these consciously crafted ties to modernism as part of a larger strategy and cultural situation. These works challenge common assumptions about digital literature, such as associations with hypertext and expectations of reader-controlled interactivity. They use modernism to construct immanent critiques about a culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The results are works of web-based literature that are text-based, aesthetically difficult, and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital Modernism examines how and why contemporary works of online literature employ this modernist modus operandi and what this trend exposes about the role of the "literary" in our digital culture and reading practices. Reading electronic literature through modernism also provides an opportunity to reread modernism through perspectives made visible and vital because of contemporary media and culture. Digital Modernism thus pursues a dual perspective: it illuminates the role of modernism in contemporary literature and, in so doing, reflects back on modernist literature. Addressing the question "What is new about new media?," Digital Modernism reads works of electronic literature that follow Ezra Pound's mantra and "MAKE IT NEW" by renovating a literary past.

(Source: Author's abstract)