production

The question of what are the aesthetic- politics of electronic literature in Latin America, constitutes the point of departure of this research. In this paper I aim to discuss about this issue regarding the electronic novel “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier. Using macromedia director, this polyphonic novel was presented to the public for the first time in 2000 and it is available on internet since 2007. It was included in the 2010 second volume of electronic literature presented by the Electronic Literature Organization, in the category of multilingual or non-English narratives. The analysis considers two dimensions, the modes of production of electronic texts and its forms of reception. The first dimension — production— is related to the decisions of the authors about aesthetics, levels of interaction/participation of the readers and technologies used to produce the texts. The second dimension — reception — refers to two “sub-dimensions”. The first one is the creation of alternative ways of distribution/circulation of the texts (mainly internet). The second is related to changes on reading behavior and the development of creative communities (or collective-interpretative intelligences), which are directly related to a conception of the relation with technology contained in posthumanist theories. Terry Eagleton poses that modern literature has a contradictory function. On one side, literature cannot be detached from the ideological forms belonging to the modern society of classes. Thus, literature reflects the context where it is produced and, to some extent, it reproduces that context. On the other side, literature creates spaces that allow us to think in alternatives and transgressions to the dominant contexts we are living in. The ways electronic texts in Latin America are developed reflect Terry Eagleton’s proposals. In summary, from the analysis of Chiappe and Meier’s electronic novel we propose a definition of a mode of literary production characterized by the uses of the new digital technologies that derived into practices of distribution and reception, related to forms of appropriation of these technologies, which are creating cultural meanings and social relationships in the context of informational capitalism.

Copyright is a legal sanction that grants monopoly rights to individual or corporate content producers with regard to the use of their productions. Copyright may include a producer’s right to be identifi fied as the author of her work, her right to control that work’s distribution (commercial or otherwise), and her right to restrict the production of works derivative of the original. Generally, any work fixed fi in a tangible form (e.g., a story that is written down or a song that is recorded) is eligible for copyright protection through the positive action of the producer (who files fi for copyright) or by default (as in the United States, where copyright protection accrues automatically upon the production of such a work). Copyright is one branch of intellectual property law, which also includes patent, trademark, and trade secrets law.

The history of copyright is inextricably tied to the history of the invention and innovation of technologies of cultural production and distribution. The widespread use of the printing press by the sixteenth century led to the regulation of presses (in the sense of the actual technology rather than the sense of “publisher”) for purposes of political censorship and reducing competition among printers. For example, the long title of a 1662 British law was “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.” Even earlier, the 1556 Charter of the Stationers’ Company “gave the stationers the power to ‘make ordinances, provisions, and statute’ for the governance of ‘the art or mistery of [s] tationary’ as well as the power to search out illegal presses and books and things with the power of ‘seizing, taking, or burning the foresaid books or things, or any of them printed or to be printed contrary to the form of any statute, act, or proclamation’ ” (Patterson 1993, 9).

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The e-book has been launched several times during the last decades and the book’s demise has often been predicted. Furthermore networked and electronic literature has already established a long history. However, currently we witness several interesting artistic and literary experiments exploring the current changes in literary culture – including the media changes brought about by the current popular break-through of the e-book and the changes in book trading such as represented by e.g. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks – changes that have been described with the concept of controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011, Andersen & Pold, 2012). In our paper we want to focus on how artistic, e-literary experiments explore this new literary culture through formal experiments with expanded books and/or artistic experiments with the post-print literary economy. Examples of the first are Konrad Korabiewski and Litten’s multimedia art book Affected as Only a Human Can Be (Danish version, 2010, English version forthcoming) and our own collaborative installation Coincidentally the Screen has turned to Ink (presented at the Remediating the Social conference, Edinburgh 2012). Examples of the second are Ubermorgen’s The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb which will be released in January 2013 and is an intervention into the Amazon Kindle book production and distribution platform with a new form of literature generated from YouTube comments. The paper will discuss how such projects explore how literature currently becomes part of a post-capitalistic production process through controlled consumption platforms. If the printing press was the first conveyor belt and thus an integral part of developing industrial capitalism (such as famously argued by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter J. Ong), then this paper will aim to sketch out how contemporary literary technologies is integral to develop and reflect critically on post- or semio-capitalism, and furthermore we will discuss how literature functions in a post-industrial software culture such as the one presented by Apple, Amazon and Google.

These days, commonplaces are repeated about contemporary literatures: new readers, new ways of reading, globalization, etc., because we are witnessing a global change in the way of leaving and interacting, an unprecedented acceleration of the circulation of products and materials, of people, texts and memories that make us learn and look into the world in a different way. The national and global imaginaries coexist and are producing literatures, but, in fact, we do not find enough contrasted experiences and studies that show us how these two imaginaries are working together. It is time for us to ask whether interrelations between global, regional, national, social, generational, sexual memories are modifying the patterns of production and consumption of reading of digital literatures in a very particular way and, in this case, it is also time to change the way in which we approach the text and the way we teach and learn literature. In the frame of the experiences and the research that our Research Group (Leethi) has developed on rituals for e-readings and strategies to read e-literatures and focusing on e-Literature written in Spanish, we will try to answer to these questions: - Concerning the extension and multiplication of media, Is this really modifying local, digital, literary production? Then, do they really exist local, rooted, national literary productions? How does it work with e-productions when the text goes beyond the language? - About our space in the Internet, do they exist national borders? How do readers need to carry across them to enter a global arena through mass media, social networks, blogs, video-games, virtual repositories, etc., to read digital literatures? It is the language the new boundary for readers? - What connective structures are activated to read e-literatures? Which one is the new global imaginary that let us read and understand transcultural productions? Is it related to science, networks or videogames? Which are the new cultural icons? Is there any kind of global memory which e-literatures are contributing to produce? - How could e-Literature help us as teachers to wide the view of our students and to show them a transnational world? In this contribution, we will try to ask to some of these questions by studying some very concrete hispanophone examples of e-literatures in which we could find signs of all these items.

The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text. Cohesion of both work and text is hindered by the potentially out-dated, though still functioning, software code of earlier versions of the MUD. Further complications arise during the integration of a new literary text with the already established text of the MUD: style, grammar, language, and thematics, for example, must be uniform. A creative writer, whose intent is to produce a new literary text for a MUD, may be confronted by an already-established literature, into which his or her literary text must be incorporated. The limitations of the code base itself may likewise limit the creative scope for expression. A contributor is limited to only those interactive elements that are supported by the underlying coding architecture. Old versions of code must remain compatible with newer versions, and the opportunities for coherent revision of the entirety of creative output are limited by available developer expertise and the scope of the exercise. A MUD is structurally and creatively dynamic, yet all elements must cohere. We discuss the collaborative development of creative works within the context of software communities, and how systems such as auteur theory have difficulty in providing a theoretical framework for multi-author software projects that have creative outputs, even in those hierarchical projects where they would seem most appropriate. We outline how players in these environments encounter a rich and varied literary experience that is an amalgamation of multiple authors and styles of writing. We discuss relevant models for analysing and understanding this type of e-literature, and provide guidelines for how they can be altered to allow for a more effective application.

That spark of interaction that happens during a successful and inspired collaboration is as important as it is elusive. Said spark involves friends having fun together, and may be beyond the grasp of traditional academic language. Chemistry is an apt metaphor, and while it is unreasonable to expect a theoretical chemical formula to reproduce the web of motivations, sensibilities, and techniques that underlie a collaborative work of art, some strands can be identified. I am particularly concerned with the role of Producer, as well as certain types of feedback between machines and artists that shape the artists' intentions.