According to Amy Elias, Paul Maltby’s negation of the mystical Other forecloses ‘the most interesting conversation’: between a critic who does not believe in visionary moments and those writers and critics who do believe in them.
This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How 'radical' can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process- rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.
(Source: Publisher's abstract)
Electronic literature is a term that encompasses creative texts produced for printed media which are consumed in electronic format, as well as text produced for electronic media that could not be printed without losing essential qualities. In this paper we propose that works of electronic literature, understood as text (with possible inclusion of multimedia elements) designed to be consumed in bi or multi-directional electronic media, are evolving to become n-tier information systems. By "n-tier information system" we understand a configuration of components clearly separated in at least three independent layers: data (the textual content), process (computational interactions) and presentation (on-screen rendering of the narrative). In this paper, we build two basic arguments. On the one hand, we propose that the conception of electronic literature as an information system exploits the essence of electronic media, and we predict that this paradigm will become dominant in this field within the next few years. On the other hand, we propose that building information systems may also lead in a shift of emphasis from one-time artistic novelties to reusable systems. Finally, we show that this type of systems is impossible to archive with current approaches in the field, and offer a solution for the preservation of this type of works.
(Source: ELO 2008 site)
What if the post-literary also meant that which operates in a literary space (almost) devoid of
language as we know it: for instance, a space in which language simply frames the literary or
poetic rather than ‘containing’ it? What if the countertextual also meant the (en)countering of
literary text with non-textual elements, such as mathematical concepts, or with texts that we
would not normally think of as literary, such as computer code? This article addresses these
issues in relation to Nick Montfort’s #!, a 2014 print collection of poems that presents readers with the output of computer programs as well as the programs themselves, which are designed to operate on principles of text generation regulated by specific constraints. More specifically, it focuses on two works in the collection, ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’, which are read in relation to the notions of the ‘computational sublime’ and the ‘event’.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
This essay aims to discuss literary pleasure, new media literacy, and networked improv literature (netprov). In particular, the author will discuss the challenges of "close-reading" the Speidishow, a netprov enacted via Twitter (and a constellation of supplementary web-based media) over a period of several weeks. In the process of trying to understand the dynamics of reading on Twitter, the author of this essay created a Twitter account, @BrutusCorbin, and consulted with the writers about plot structure. Through active engagement with the fictional world, Corbin quickly became embroiled in a sub-plot. Seeking distance from the active plots which Corbin was involved in, his author created two new characters, @FelixMPastor and @FrannyCheshire, to explore different aspects of the fictional world. Pastor and Cheshire were subsequently dragged into the story, as well. This piece will dig into the concept of the "readerly" and "writerly" text as identified by Roland Barthes in S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text and settle on a third term: "the riderly text." Identifiying in social media consumption the culture of casual contribution (via the circulation of links, liking, sharing, retweeting, and commenting), I argue that Barthes' initial designation of popular, default practices as "readerly" can be applied to the "writerly" performances of such reading encapsulated in new media literacies as occasions for superficial forms of closure and public displays of consent or dissent for or against its determined content. In this milieu, the netprov arrives as "riderly" form, requiring "writerly" performance as an occasion for "readerly" engagement, but offering plurality, not in the text that precedes its current state of publication, but in the improvisational character of its progression. Thus, the critical reader must be at once read in the denotated world as it progresses (and its profusion of authority) and write the connotations into its atmosphere. The net result is a compromised criticism, of the sort you are reading, in which conventional critical distance collapses for the sake of interpretation. In its place, however, the riderly text opens a critical distance to process, platform, and the conditions of discursive authority in social media.
(Source: Author's abstract in Hyperrhiz)
A Certain Slant of Light, Typographically Speaking is a blog post that chronicles the process of creating a piece of electronic literature from prompt to product. The project took the Emily Dickinson poem “There’s a certain slant of light…” and rearranged the words into a drawing, inspired by the poem. What makes this piece of electronic literature especially interesting is that this is my first attempt at e-lit! I documented the discovery process on my blog Some Science in a nod to the digital humanities; to show how using electronic tools creatively can produce and inspire art. (Source: Gallery of E-Literature: First Encounters)
Although Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts” (2002) framework is widely used, even if not always acknowledged, as a migration function within the humanities, arts and architecture, there is still a prevalence of researching a unique and unchangeable object. Thus, even if Bal calls for a critical object, which ought to be analyzed, meaning that a “theoretical object” entails different views on what a text or a work of art might signify, these approaches do not accurately perform when dealing with digital artworks. In fact, if one undertakes a critical position towards generative, time-based or distributed media artworks, one needs to adopt a reading and analytical perspective that disregards objects, but considers data, process(es), instantiations and manifestations. As Philippe Bootz et al. (2009) assert, our reception of digital literary works cannot comply with an objectual view, as the work/artifact is no longer a consistent and identifiable element, since it is constituted by several process(es) and variables, e.g. code, network, surface, text, image, sound, input, output, that can operate on different levels of performative presentation and, being machine-dependent, behave differently over time. Moreover, if one considers generative works, the on-screen output might be always different from view to view. In time-based works, the output varies according to time parameters, as studying Philippe Castellin’s çacocophonie (2013), as a time-lapse experience, shows.
Therefore, the emphasis cannot be placed so much in a sole output as a unique object, but more in the underlying processes that create diverse output instantiations. As such, the term object becomes as obsolete as the affected and unstable character of any given text, sound or image in a precise spatio-temporal instance.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
To be sure, we went from work to text, from text to object and, now, we need to go back to the idea of work and rethink it as process, as neither text nor object account for this recent paradigm of unclosed or unfinished pieces. This explains why the terms process, practice and artifact are being used by authors to describe one’s creative piece or one’s critical writing focus. If not, how can text be merely associated with the main digital object, when digital poems are constituted not only by text, but also by sound, and image, and code, and text as code, and code as text, and text fed by different databases, and different users? Shall we speak of authorship? If not, where and how is the stable nature of digital poems?
My talk will examine the paratextual play inspired by Nick Montfort's generative poem "Taroko Gorge," which has prompted more than two dozen adaptations and remixes of its source code.
The poem's code is as much an object of fascination for its community of readers as the poem it outputs. What is the "paratext" in this setting? Is it the commented code directed at human readers? The two dozen adaptations? The "Taroko Gorge" meme authored by Talan Memmott? Or might it be the poetic output itself? One could think of the outputted poem as a dazzling book cover-like illustration of main story, the 131-line source code.
In print-based works, source text and paratext exhibit a clearly delineated ontological priority. The text is the main focus and paratexts augment or problematize it. My talk takes up the challenge of identifying the paratext in "Taroko Gorge," which is unstable and dynamic in at least two ways: as procedural code rendering outputs infinitely; and as a social practice among e-literature writers for whom "Taroko" has become a non-exclusive node for the social practice of remix. Of the Taroko adaptations we might ask: at what point does paratext become its own text? When does it stop being a paratext, if at all? My own "Tournedo Gorge" doesn't alter Montfort's code; it riffs on the double-entendre between cooking and executable code. "FirstChild" conjures "Julia Child"; "recipes" find affinity in "procedural" code and "authoring." I copied Nick Montfort's code for his generative poem “Taroko Gorge” and filled the variables with my own words and context. I wrote “Tournedo Gorge” because I wanted to mash the space of
computation with the female, domestic, and tactile.
Literary critical traditions customarily locate "art" as the end product: not the draft but the publication; not paper and ink, but the story those material objects conjure. In my talk I will explore why the "Taroko Gorge" paratext are unstable, and why such instability reveals new ways to conceptualize how poetry and media studies talk to each other.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
Writing (2012) was inspired by and built with Joe Davis’s Telescopic Text, pairing the possibilities of expanding, effacing essay with the musings of a Monson or a Mezzanine. An introspective, interactive non-fiction, the work unfurls, an exploration of the processes of composition as much as a finished literary product. As the piece grew to dozens of junctions and thousand of words, the editing interface slowed dramatically, each erasure oredit taking a minute or more. This in turn forced an accountability to first thought – it became easier to publically ‘rewrite’ mistakes, misspeaks and infelicitous phrases than to invisibly edit them away. The result is a thinking aloud on the (web)page, a map to the writer’s trains of thought for the reader to unfold and explore. Writing featured in the 2013 electronic poetry edition of Australian literary journal Overland.
(Source: ELO Conference 2014)
November 2013 marked twenty years since artist, writer, performer, and researcher J. R. Carpenter first began using the internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts. This interview examines the material, formal, and textual traces of a number of pre-web media – including the LED scrolling sign, the slide projector, and the photocopy machine – which continue to pervade Carpenter’s digital work today.
Andrea Zeffiro: Could you set the scene, so to speak, as to what lead you online in 1993?
J.R. Carpenter: In 1993 I was in my third year of a Bachelor in Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. I was majoring in Studio Art with a concentration in Fibers Structures and Sculpture. I was making stuff. Drawing, painting, sewing, crocheting, collage, book works, found object installations, assemblage. I didn’t own a computer. I was dead set against them. I hadn’t always been. I had a Commodore 64 as a kid that I mostly used to play text adventure games. One summer I spent a week at a Turbo Pascal Computer Camp. In retrospect, that was probably part of a cheaper-than-a-babysitter childcare scheme. I was a bit of a math wiz up until the 10th grade or so, after which point a succession of truly terrible math teachers turned me off. By the time I got to art school I had no idea what went on inside a computer. I had the impression that they were for other people and controlled by other people. Plus, they were expensive. I was extremely poor, and generally, however unwittingly, a Marxist. I had a roommate who had a computer. He spent a lot of time with it. Not even he could explain to me what went on inside of it. In the kitchen one morning he announced that he had renamed his hard drive Hard Dick, which certainly didn’t help matters.
It was one of my Fibers professors who finally dragged me kicking and screaming online. In 1992 Ingrid Bachmann launched an exhibition at The Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre called A Nomad Web: Sleeping Beauty Awakes, which was among the first networked art projects in Canada as far as I know.