poetics

Charles Bernstein’s reflections on populism, democracy, and authority in the turbulent waters of web discussion groups and other new Internet sites.

(Source: EBR)

In this Artist Talk, Jody Zellen introduces her new work News Wheel as well as showing some of her other works in which she uses 'the news', namely All The News That's Fit to Print, Without a Trace, and Time Jitters.

In December of 2013, I mailed blank journals to thirty poets and asked them to record their dreams for two months and return the journals to me. I asked that they record the dreams themselves rather than their interpretations, relying on language, voice, and syntactical rhythm to emerge as distinctive markers. From the dream journals I compiled the dreams into a spreadsheet database, setting the linear retelling of the dream along the horizontal axis (rows) in chronological order, color-coded by poet. Ciphering the dreams into single cells was the true editorial work of the matrix. Even as poets were creating their own patterns, I was reorganizing dialogue, bisecting idioms, segmenting narrative apparitions. Phrases and snippets of these dreams were now decontextualized into raw form, phrases and words shaken out of their former constellations to become single pure poetic units. After the dream journals had been reorganized into the matrix, they could be used to generate new poetic material.

The purpose of soliciting dreams for this project was in the cognitive dissonance of the language and motif of the dream experience. To record a dream as faithfully as possible is already a blended act: remembering and inventing. The hyperreal poetics of dreaming both undermine and reify the narrative construct of the telling. The filtering of dreams through a collaborative matrix is a social act. Poets have an opportunity to take a solitary – the most profoundly solitary – act and become part of a collective generative functional form. The dreams belong to the poets. The database belongs to the making of poems, to all of us. As soon as the database is finished, it generates poems based on the application of a rule, any rule. For example, to create a title that generates a poem based on the order of its letters (the first S, for example, refers to the numbered row, column S position). By making poems in this way, poets wake into a unified dream. This generative model based on a simple matrix is significant to Poetics as a networked social application of poetic units. If poetry can be said to be made up of poetic units, then those units can make up a larger poetic compilation that is a shared source poem from which other poems can be made. The investment in the project database is therefore in its work as a flexible form that is at once collaborative and generative.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper will explore subversive practices of electronic literature as contexts for the experience of agency within various systems of control. Through close readings of covert communication practices in prison narratives alongside the works like Rob Wittig’s Netprovs, Richard Holeton’s slideshow narratives, Nick Montfort’s !#, and Darius Kazemi’s “Tiny Subversions,” this essay will consider poetic interventions against media culture, professionalization, and cybernetic systems in relation to the codes, mnemonic devices, and flights of fancy used by political prisoners and POWs to maintain identity against isolation, torture, and manipulation. In particular, this paper will touch down on the question of “the ends of electronic literature” by exploring the interrelational aspect of writing as a process that is primarily concerned with the creator imagining an other (an “author” reaching out to a “reader,” in the conventional literary sense) and the user finding meaning in the text (the reader having an encounter with the work of literature).

In addition to the mediation of relationships via the text, this paper will also consider various boundaries constructed to restrict communication (imposed by social, technical, and penal systems that attempt to discipline subjects and restrict communication to official channels and approved topics). Further, this paper will consider the micro-practices of resistance, the absurd logics of creativity, eccentricity, and interpretation that generate pleasure for the individual reader while guarding subjective practices from what Lyotard has called “the inhuman.” The goal of this paper is to consider (via electronic literature) “the human” as that which is not only essentially without essence (to paraphrase Stiegler), but which actively strives to maintain individuation against control.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Remarks on Poetics of Mad Affect, Militancy, Feminism, Demotic Rhythms, Emptying, Intervention, Reluctance, Indigeneity, Immediacy, Lyric Conceptualism, Commons, Pastoral Margins, Desire, Ambivalence, Disability, The Digital, and Other Practices Edited by Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah Toward. Some. Air. is a landmark collection of profiles of contemporary poets, statements, essays, conversations about contemporary poetry and poetic practice, and a few exemplary poems selected by up-and-coming poet and scholar Amy De’Ath and Governor General’s Award-winning, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah. The over 40 contributors to this anthology are renowned poets and academics from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Toward. Some. Air. is an open invitation to consider the various contours and meanings of Anglophone poetic practice, as a way of interpreting the world around us. An invaluable critical resource with unprecedented scope, this is a book that speaks to the future of contemporary poetics and writing poetry. Contributors: Caroline Bergvall, Anne Boyer, Sean Bonney & Steve Collis, Andrea Brady, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Louis Cabri, JR Carpenter, cris cheek, CA Conrad, Maria Damon, Amy De'Ath, Jeff Derksen, Liz Howard, Peter Jaeger, Reg Johanson, Justin Katko & Jow Lindsay, Larissa Lai, Peter Manson, Roy Miki, Nicole Markotic & Michael Davidson, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Steven Ross Smith, Kaia Sand, Dale Smith, Christine Stewart, Keston Sutherland, Keith Tuma, Catherine Wagner, Fred Wah, Darren Wershler, Rita Wong & Kateri Akiwenxie-Damm, Rachel Zolf

Integrating story with games in a flexible way that gives interactors meaningful choices within a narrative experience has long been a goal of both game developers and digital storytellers. The "micronarrative" is an unexplored avenue of narrative structure that can be a useful tool in analysis and design of such experiences. A micronarrative is a smaller moment of plot coherence and miniature arc that is nested within a larger narrative structure. The concept was first labeled by Jenkins in 2004 in the context of a game's "meaningful moments" and expanded upon in Bizzocchi's 2007 analytical framework for videogame storytelling. It has its roots in earlier examinations of arc and scale, such as Propp's concept of "Functions" or McKee's "Beats" in literature, as well as in Barthes’ classification of a “hierarchy of levels or strata” which incorporates “micro-sequences” as described in his structural analysis of narrative (1975).

Identification and analysis of the micronarrative allows us to examine how small events build in a fractal-like pattern to form larger nested narrative arcs. The presentation argues that micronarrative units exhibit a recognizable level of coherent yet flexible granularity that is at once modular, hierarchical, and cumulative. This presentation will address the application of micronarrative as an analytical tool to three works: the commercial console videogame Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Square Enix, 2011); the art game Samorost (Amanita Design, 2003); and the interactive drama, Façade (Mateas and Stern, 2006). The presentation examines the role of micronarratives in structuring flexible narrative arcs in three artifacts that incorporate differing modalities of interaction and story design. In conclusion, this project will show that micronarrative is an essential tool for understanding the poetics of a diverse and evolving medium.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This presentation considers the rhetoric and poetics of meme culture and social media
platforms.

Internet memes, in their essence, are methods of expression born from the attention
economy of networked culture. At times they can be epistolary, aphoristic, polemic,
satirical, or parodic; and they may take the form of performative actions and photo fads
such as planking, teapotting and batmanning or iterative processes such as image macros
and advice animals including lolcats, Bad Luck Brian and Condescending Wonka. In either
case they are conditioned by rhetorical formulas with strict grammars and styles.
In the case of image macros, the rhetoric is sustained through correlations between the
image and its caption. If we line-up the thousands of Condescending Wonka memes side
by side, we will find very little difference between them aesthetically – the same image is
repeated, along with captions at the top and bottom of the image. In the captions we find
a specific tone that is also repeated one image to the next.

For the Condescending Wonka meme this tone is sarcastic and snarky, which is a reflection
upon Gene Wilder’s portrayal of the title character in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory. The top caption presents what might be a sincere question, and in the
bottom caption we get a snarky response. The completion of a truncated mock-dialogue
circuit… To understand the context of the Condescending Wonka meme, one must have
a generalized understanding of Wilder’s portrayal of the character to allow for the
attitude of the character to operate as a sublimated vehicle for humorously couched
insolence. In this regard, the meme is not simply an artifact, but a conduit through
which cultural references are conducted.

It could be said that memes are not artifacts at all. As Dawkins defined memes, they can
be "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."
Though we can see how these operate in the Condescending Wonka example – the idea,
style, and rhetorical behavior are clear, where we locate the meme as differentiated from
the artifact is not so plainly defined. If we disregard the meme as any given individual artifact and
start to examine their dialogistic function -- memes as sets of
social relations, they begin to take on the additional aspect of
social gesture, or what Brecht has dubbed the gestic. They
present a framework for attitudes that must be shared, expressed,
distributed, and put into circulation. For, as Brecht has stated,
“…it is what happens between people that provides them with
all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter.”

Though we maybe tempted to think of meme culture as frivolous and disposable (and
certainly meme constructions can lead rather short lives); that its content is
fundamentally banal, puerile, or adolescent, it is important to consider their function as
frameworks for the communication of human ideas and attitudes, along with their
methods of persuasion.

(Source: Author's introduction)

There are numerous essays and reviews on German-language electronic literature, which run from the mid nineties to the present day. Most of these texts, however, are written in German – a language that is no longer accepted and common as an universal language for science.

In order to present the overview of German language electronic literature, we filtered out some historical lines that may explain better how the development of individual genres came about. A good starting point may be the very first experiments of authors with computers to generate electronic poetry, a subject the international community mostly agrees upon.

The following model of historical lines of development is suggested:

• Concrete Experiments
• Collaborative Writing and Authoring Environments
• Hypertext: From Hyperfiction to Net Literature
• Code Works
• Blogging and more  

A historical analysis shows that these  five lines of net literature are based upon two prior German strands going back to philosophical, poetical and artistic experiments in the 1960s: On the one hand, the Stuttgart School by Max Bense with exponents Reinhard Döhl and Theo Lutz, the latter producing a first example of digital poetry in 1959. On the other hand, the computer graphics experiments of 1960 and the punched-card linker projects by artists Kurd Alsleben and Antje Eske in Hamburg.

• Stuttgart School or Group (Bense/Döhl/Lutz etc.) > Stochastic Texts
• Hypertext/ Mutuality (Alsleben, Eske) > Computer Graphics, Linker

 The presentation for ELO Paris 2013 introduces this model of lineage for the development of German-language electronic literature. Taking time- and textspace constraints in consideration, the foucus is set on the strand „I Stuttgart School“ and the line „1. Concrete Experiments“. For all other lines the sympathetic reader finds  descriptions and historical examples in the essay „From Theo Lutz to Netzliteratur“ in Cybertext Yearbook 2012.

 The presenter has been part of the net literature community that spans Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a researcher, publisher and artist for twenty years.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2013 ELO Conference: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/lineages-german-lang…)