English

A description of the general direction of Sondheim’s work in relation to

codework, the body, "semantic ghosting," and tools; Focusing on the last, we will be thinking about methods and meta-methods.

Rather than taking a lit-crit approach to a single piece of e-literature, we used this session to collect and discuss “e-lit in the wild”: works that we have found that often don’t have ties to the academic or artistic circles we traditionally look to for electronic literature. We created a Google Doc list of works we have come across that make interesting artistic and narrative uses of digital spaces, including customer reviews of products, interactive web comics, online bulletin boards, Reddit users, indie games and more.

We began with Lyle discussing the items on the list so far, and why, to her, they qualified as “e-lit”. The discussion quickly branched into topics such as: defining e-lit, finding e-lit, the evanescence of art, the use of “1st/2nd/3rd generation e-lit” as classification, and what the digital medium means for linguistic arts. We found common ground in the notion that some work cannot be separated from its medium of origin without loss of coherence, and that various media shape their texts in a myriad of meaningful ways.

A Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi was the first Arabic e-lit piece to come to my mind when thinking of what to present in the ELO salon. It is available in English and Arabic so, the English-speaking audience will be able to engage in the reading process. This piece is based on the idea of the January 25th revolution in Egypt, which is a special event to all Egyptians. I thought that the Western audience would be interested in knowing more about this glorious revolution. Most importantly, the technique of weaving different voices into one text and visualizing it in a wheel-shaped dictionary is unique. In addition to all these causes that make A Dictionary of the Revolution a good fit to the ELO salon’s presentation, this piece is the winner of the New Media Writing Prize and The Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature.

The process of creating this piece is interesting. The digital artist Amira Hanafi did meetings with 200 persons from 6 Egyptian governorates: Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Mansoura, Sinai, and Suez in the time period from March to August 2014. She asked those people to choose a card from a vocabulary box containing 160 words in Egyptian colloquial related to the Egyptian revolution. People were required to speak about the chosen word namely, its definition and the related accounts. The interviews’ recordings were transcribed and woven by the artist to end up with multi-voiced storytelling on the Egyptian revolution.

This session explored how excel spreadsheets can become a multilayered narrative writing format.

The second of the monthly 2020 Virtual ELO Salons was held via Zoom on Tuesday, March  10.  Dutch artist and writer Annie Abrahams (living in France), who had volunteered to facilitate the second ELO Virtual Salon, proposed a “reariting” session using Zoom and the collaborative writing environment Framapad centered on “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric,” a multimedia text by Lily Robert-Foley a writer and translator who is an active member of Outranspo: a motley group of multilingual translators, writers, researchers and musicians who joyously devote themselves to creative approaches to translation, primarily through monthly virtual meetings. http://www.outranspo.com/

Explaining why she proposed this text and a “reariting” approach to it, Abrahams commented, “‘reariting’ is the act of simultaneous reading and writing together on the Internet. This session, which is based on the ideas explored in my Reading Club project that I developed with Emmanuel Guez, is not about producing a text together, but about using ‘reariting’ as a technique to think through a text together.  In the process we will produce a new text with an undetermined status that we will collectively discuss after our rewriting session.” 

To facilitate the session, Abrahams, via the group Zoom call, first briefly introduced Robert-Foley’s work and then sent the essay “Extra-terrestrial Rhetoric” to each of he participants via e-mail.  The text, a four page document that, at first, appears to be an academic article about translation strategies, slowly reveals itself as something that may not be what it at first appears to be.  With time, the reader becomes aware that if what they are reading is an academic article it is quite unlike anything they have read before. Each participant read the text and then “met” up in the Framapad collaborative writing environment, where they explained and explored their understandings, misunderstandings, reactions to, and asides related to the text they had just read.  After one hour, the participants reconnected on Zoom to review, discuss, and evaluate the experience, the process, and the results.

The first of the monthly Virtual ELO Salons was held via Zoom on Tuesday, February 11.  At that pre-global-pandemic time, we all felt we were engaging in something quite new by meeting virtually via Zoom.  Obviously, we did not know then that our virtual meetings would become the new “normal” for social and professional interactions worldwide.  The Russian poet, translator, and scholar Kirill Azernyi courageously volunteered to facilitate the first ELO Virtual Salon and selected a section of an untitled poem by the contemporary Russian poet Nika Skandiaka for the participants to discuss.  

Explaining why he proposed this particular text for discussion, Azernyi explained, “I was interested in selecting a text that would require some engagement by readers in constructing its basic meaning. Rather than inviting a traditional ‘interpretation,’ Skandiaka's poems suggest the need for readers to engage in a process of ‘solving’ many issues aesthetically.  In this text, in particular, we might initially attempt to read it as a traditional poem but find the text resisting these attempts. Instead, we may need to start reading this text as being constructed (‘work in progress’), noticing paradigmatic relations of used patterns over the syntagmatic ones (based on word collocations). Some questions that will need to be addressed include: How can we combine a pattern-based approach to reading while still taking into account the expressive role of each part? This text gives us no illusion of 'life-like-ness' (even in the terms of syntactic plausibility as described by Kristeva), and I see it as a great opportunity to think about how our aesthetic feeling of a text is constructed, and how this correlates with formal intertextual relations that we may or may not be able to readily ’make sense’ of." 

While Sandiaka’s text proved to be a challenging and highly “open” one, the eight participants involved in the Virtual Salon had a very lively conversation via video, Zoom text chat, and a shared Google document.  We generally disagreed on the extent to which the text "made sense."  And, one of the more interesting discussions related to this question was how much more forgiving readers tend to be of nonsense generated by machines than by human poets.  We also spent a great deal of time discussing the numbers in the piece, how to read them and how and what they might signify or not signify. We also, eventually, figured out how to access the performative aspect of this work by practicing different approaches to reading sections of it out loud to one another during the Zoom conference call.

Out of our discussion also came a couple of interesting ideas for collaborative  projects: 1/ have all of us read the poem aloud and make a synthesized recording of our different readings.  2/ read the poem to a speech to text translator and see what was generated by that. Additionally, we speculated on how disjunctive syntax pushes us towards establishing paradigmatic relations within a work, and how this paradigmatic network could replace syntax and agreed that in fact we don't have to choose between these options (to read text "syntagmatically" or "paradigmatically"), but are able to practice all possible approaches simultaneously which would give us access to both semantic and structural aspects of the work.  Finally, we thought about how much such an open and electronic work needs to be read "electronically,” a term that we all agreed we would continue thinking about and talking about moving forward.