obsolescence

This presentation seeks to examine issues around the practice of porting electronic literature,particularly E-poetry by examining the case of First Screening by bpNichol, a Canadian poet whoprogrammed a suite of e-poems in Apple BASIC in 1984. This work was preserved, documented, ported, curated, and published in Vispo.com in 2007 by a collaborative group of poets and programmers: Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber. This publication consists of a curated collection of four different versions of First Screening which I will analyze in my presentation:1. The original DSK file of the 1984 edition, which can be opened with an Apple IIe emulator, along with the Apple BASIC source code as a text file, and scanned images of the printed matterpublished with the 51/4 inch floppy disks it was distributed in.2. A video captured documentation of the emulated version in Quicktime format.3. The 1993 HyperCard version, ported by J. B. Hohm, along with the printed matter of thatpublished edition.4. A JavaScript version of First Screening ported by Marko Niemi and Jim Andrews.I will make the case that these ported versions are ontologically different by performing media-specific analysis of each text, and critical code readings of their programming and source codes. Through close readings of the presentation (screen) and logical (source code) layers of each version I can point out what is gained and what is lost every time this suite of electronic poems is ported. For example, when the code poem embedded in lines 3900 – 3935 of the original Apple BASIC program is ported into another programming language, such as Hypercard or Javascript, it ceases to be a code poem because it is generated by different code to be displayed on the screen.

In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print. (Source: Publisher's website.)

Electronic literature produced in programmable media – such as kinetic or randomly recombined and generated texts, interactive narratives, hyperfictions or poems that appear as moving letters – require a reconceptualization of the reading process and the development of new concepts for evaluating works of (electronic) literature. This accomplishment is essential for undertaking preservation and requires sustainable review mechanisms. What follows is not a transcription into electronic media of established work from the print canon; rather, the initiatives under way at the Electronic Literature Organization have to do with born-digital works, and works in many media that may have anticipated the full-blown emergence of a native, „electronic literature“, „net literature“, or „new media writing“ (to name just three designations for the emergent field), whose profile is coming into being even as the works are being created and designated as a part of the literary tradition. With this media-specific task in mind, in 2007 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was entrusted by the Library of Congress with archiving 300 URLs in collaboration with the web-based archiving service „Archive-It“.

This paper will first discuss the ELO’s review model in the light of the aesthetically complex composition of literary texts that mix media. It will then consider the complexity of works on a technical level by reporting on difficulties with harvesting electronic literature that have been produced with flash or JavaScript: technical concerns about archiving need to be considered when describing and tagging works. Finally, this paper will provide an example for reviewing, evaluating, and archiving variable media art works like electronic literature.

In an essay that responds to Alice Bell's book The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a "niche" - and why, despite Bell's concern, that's not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to "thee," "implicitly dragging her into the niche with me," this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.