obsolescence

Since the 1960s, several Peruvian poets, insular and heirs to an experimental poetic tradition, created works with visual and verbal elements that advanced the presence of poetry in electronic media and platforms. Works such as those by Jorge Eielson, Raquel Jodorowsky, Ricardo Falla, Enrique Verástegui, César Toro Montalvo or Juan Ramirez Ruiz already showed in Peruvian creators an awareness of the existence and assimilation of electronic media to their productions based on references to circuits electronic (1964), computers (1973-1988) and formal and experimental games with the algorithm (1977). Works like these are used in key antecedents to reimagine the Peruvian poetic tradition, but, at the same time, they raise the need for an approach that analyzes and discusses the adoption of the media as part of poetic experimentation to understand, in all its dimensions, at the time of the internet boom and its platformization, the work carried out in later decades by José Aburto with interactive poems using Flash (2000); Oswaldo Chanove through the possibilities of the hyperlink in a web platform (2001); Enrique Beó with hypertext poems in binary language through Wix and Issuu (2010); and Rafael García Godos with MVX0 a video game poem programmed in Unity (2017). Therefore, the objective of this panel is to show how, since the 2000s, Peruvian poets have inhabited digital platforms with works that used different technologies in trend, as practices related to what was previously developed by their peers in the materiality of paper. For this, our research will focus on this problem from a media archeology with two areas that must necessarily dialogue: discursive and digital. In the first case, to trace the insularity of these authors, we start from Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy as the study of a non-linear and heterogeneous history of knowledge, contextualized by power relations. In the second case, to show the jobs that were hosted on the Internet, we will use various rescue platforms such as wayback machine, for old websites; Ruffle, for work done in flash; and videos of the experience in the case of wix. The result of this work will be exposed in a data visualization on what we have called the origins of electronic poetry in Peru. In this way, we consider that a genealogical work must combine the apparatus of symbolic evaluation and the consequent use of platforms to counteract the absence of a critical and theoretical approach to this complex field, but also the obsolescence of technology.

Visual artists, writers, and other cultural producers have long leveraged networked technologies to establish platforms that circulate cultural products in participatory contexts intentionally distinct from cultural institutions. As technologies change over time—including deprecated plug-ins, changes to HTML, and linkrot—these platforms fall into various states of decay. In this paper, I examine an example of a platform, the Net Art Latino Database (1999-2004), an effort to document net-based artworks vulnerable to obsolescence that overall stands as a precarious monument to an earlier era of digital culture. As the platform slowly falls out of joint with current web technologies, the Database illustrates practices of cultural production that respond to the decay of the very technologies being used.

The Net Art Latino Database was initiated by the Uruguayan digital artist Brian Mackern to compile examples of net art activity by Latinx artists, working at the periphery of English-language dominant net art communities. The Database functions as an art platform in the sense offered by Olga Goriunova: a dynamic configuration of people and technologies amplifying new kinds of creative activities that push beyond the boundaries of existing categories of cultural production. As Goriunova’s theorization of art platforms suggests, the lines between categories like ‘net art’ and ‘electronic literature’ are often blurry, as artists and writers deploy the same technologies and pursue similar aesthetic strategies to circulate digital cultural production online.

While the Database catalogs principally digital visual artworks, it is instructive to think about this platform in the context of electronic literature specifically. First, the Database documents works that function expressly as electronic literature, including listings for e-zines. More fundamentally, though, the Database can be read as a work of electronic literature. Coded by hand in HTML, Mackern’s work exemplifies the scribal practices that were the foundation of early Web culture. The text-based work consists entirely of descriptions of other artworks and links to other projects. These sites are frequently located under the top-level domains of Central or South American countries, though many are no longer active, and these defunct sites are rarely captured in public web archives. As such, the Database serves an ekphrastic function, evoking multimedia artworks that no longer readily circulate online—and may no longer materially exist beyond this description.

I approach this analysis from the discipline of library and information science (LIS). A deeper understanding of Mackern’s artistic and curatorial practices can help to shape professional perspectives on the preservation of net art, electronic literature, and digital cultural production more generally. Unlike a traditional institutional repository, the diverse artworks included in the database are documented as part of a living, interconnected media ecology. Rather than adaptively preserving individual works through migration to new technological environments, Mackern’s Database enacts a poetics of obsolescence, carefully stewarding works on a platform built with the recognition of its own fragility.

TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.

TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.

What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.

(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Notes on the seminar given by Dene Grigar at the University of Coimbra:

Words were once untraceable. Before the invention of writing, they would disappear as soon as they were shared. Writing turned words into discernible shapes. Print, in turn, allowed a precise control over the surface of inscription and, by extension, over language. Books are often related to fixity and durability and they are seen as stable and self-contained objects built to last. However, Dene Grigar believes that all texts, regardless of the format being used, are prone to obsolescence or deterioration. Like words in oral tradition, texts can fall into oblivion if they are not preserved or remembered.

(Source: Author's Introduction)

This essay proposes a methodology for the analysis of poetic digital works, based on the procedural model. This methodology is here applied to Jean-Marie Dutey’s le mange-texte. The article will provide a reminder of the definition of some concepts and highlight the various effects on the work of the changes in technical contexts of execution. The program is also being studied in a rhetorical dimension. This paper demonstrates that a reading of the screen is not enough to reach all the aesthetic representations of the work and aims to complete it with an operation of meta-reading. We will then analyze the rhetorical level induced by the execution and show why the obsolescence of the work does not mean the death of the work.

Source: Author's Abstract

The lability of digital works, mainly due to the changes undergone by programs and operating systems, as well as to the increasing speed of computers, has been taken for granted by a certain number of critics over the last years. The artists, therefore, have four options when dealing with the potential instability of the electronic device which will display their work:
- In keeping with “the aesthetics of surface”, the artists simply ignore this instability.
- The “mimetic aesthetics” takes into account the instability of the electronic device, but it also tries to reduce its impact by providing the work with a stable experimentation frame.
- The most radical approach, the “aesthetics of the ephemeral”, consists of letting the work slowly decompose, accepting that, through its changing forms and updates, unexpected mutations may even, sooner or later, lead to the obsolescence of the artistic project.
- The fourth approach, called the “aesthetics of re-enchantment”, mystifies the relationships between the animated words and images, between the sounds and gestures of manipulation in a digital artwork, in order to advocate an “unrepresentable”, something that words can not describe and yet, that one can “feel” by experiencing the work.
The poems La Série des U and Passage by Philippe Bootz seem to perfectly fit in the aesthetics of the ephemeral: the author was among the first ones to theorize both about the lability of the digital device and the eventual obsolescence of digital creation, and also one of the first ones to experiment them in his poetic projects. Yet, in these digital poems, the mimetic aesthetics, the aesthetics of the ephemeral and of re-enchantment alternately intertwine, merge or mutually exclude one another, so that their conflicting relationships allow us to raise a certain number of fundamental questions about digital poetics.

Source: Author's Abstract

Twenty-six years after its original publication in French, I examine and propose to revisit a traditional literary theory bound to the book-as-object for the realm of literature in programmable media: paratext theory as envisioned by French narratologist Gérard Genette (translated into English by Jane E. Levin, 1997). To Genette, paratext is that which accompanies a text. He differentiates and distinguishes paratexts according to location of appearance and the sender of paratextual information. Two concepts are relavant: peri- and epitext. Genette speaks and identifies peritexts as those elements of the book dictated by a publisher devoted to the cover, typesetting, format etc. and epitexts which exist outside a book in the form of notes and interviews. Both elements merge into what Genette calls paratext theory, all of which carry out a functionality. Among others, Genette envisions paratexts to fulfill a “literary function“ which serve for guiding a readers reading; a claim under critical exploration in this presentation. Investigating the theme of this conference, I question how paratext theory may help to locate the literary in electronic literature. How do the paratextual elements, or, more specific in the here presented context: how do peritexts that surround and point to a texts existence in fact point to a work’s literary content? Given the very informational original nature and functionality of paratexts, it should be expected to locate a work’s text in these liminal devices that accompany works of electronic literature. Methodologically, I take into consideration, compare, and search for locating the literary in different peritexts to one and the same work. Among others, the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) that presents readers with encyclopedic articles on creative works is of particular interest to this study. The paper examines selected article contributions from the ELD, as well as work descriptions in the Electronic Literature Collection and asks how these locate the literary of a work. Text in an peritext is located if substantial engagement with a texts literary content is identified. This is true if a description relates to the themes and a work‘s motifs, if it presents a work’s characters, time, space, and setting of the imaginative writing. Optionally, the literary may also be located in a presentation of how a work’s material strategy and behavior relates to the content of a work. The paper intends to make the e-lit community attentive to locate text in paratexts to creative works. This is relevant if a works technical obsolesence is considered. Despite of archival work, if a paratext is all that is available should a work no longer be accessible, one should wish for a paratext that formally is as extensible as possible and as comprehensible as possible when it comes to a work’s literary content that is no longer readable. Such a proposal conceives paratexts as cultural heritage. It relates to Philppe Bootz’s and Alexandra Saemmer’s writing on the theory put forward in the discussion of the “lability of the device“ and builds on Saemmer who in an article states “I [thus] consider the paratext as an ultimate defence against the lability of our digital creations, as well as a part of my work“ (90).

Source: Author's Abstract

This dissertation offers a history of hypertext, and does not reference any creative works of electronic literature. It has many references to critical writing that is important in the study of electronic literature. The following is the author's abstract: ---

How does one write the history of a technical machine? Can we say that technical machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? The technical artefact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that technical machines come in generations - they adapt and adopt characteristics over time, one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete. It is argued that technics has its own evolutionary dynamic, and that this dynamic stems neither from biology nor from human societies. Yet 'it is impossible to deny the role of human thought in the creation of technical artefacts' (Guattari 1995, p. 37). Stones do not automatically rise up into a wall - humans 'invent' technical objects. This, then, raises the question of technical memory. Is it humans that remember previous generations of machines and transfer their characteristics to new machines? If so, how and where do they remember them? It is suggested that humans learn techniques from technical artefacts, and transfer these between machines. This theory of technical evolution is then used to understand the genealogy of hypertext. The historical differentiations of hypertext in different technical systems is traced. Hypertext is defined as both a technical artefact and also a set of techniques: both are a part of this third milieu, technics. The difference between technical artefact and technical vision is highlighted, and it is suggested that technique and vision change when they are externalised as material artefact. The primary technique traced is association, the organisational principle behind the hypertext systems explored in the manuscript. In conclusion, invention is shown to be an act of exhumation, the transfer and retroactiviation of techniques from the past. This thesis presents an argument for a new model of technical evolution, a model which claims that technics constitutes its own dynamic, and that this dynamic exceeds human evolution. It traces the genealogy of hypertext as a set of techniques and as series of material artefacts. To create this geneaology I draw on interviews conducted with Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam, as well as a wide variety of primary and secondary resources.

Source: author's abstract