Weblog

hypertext? cybertext? hypermedia? webart? while new media critics debate the terms, Talan Memmott has produced the thing itself, a creative use of applied technology.

(Source: ebr)

In 1962, MIT scientist Steve Russell presented one of the first videogames in history: Spacewar! in which two starships maneuvered around a star and tried to destroy each other. A year earlier, Raymond Queneau had published Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a potential literature book consisting of ten sonnets printed onto cards, with each line written on a separate strip, offering readers 100 trillions of possible combinations.

At first glance, the connection between these two milestones from worlds as different as literature and computer science would seem to be remote, but they are actually the start of a convergence of experiences and interests that have radically changed the way we read and write stories.

The sixties marked the start of a series of experiments in both literature and computing that mutally influenced each other and challenged the narrative, physical and conceptual boundaries of literature. This text looks at some of these connections.

(Source: Author's Introduction)

A brief review of Álvaro Seiça's works on the transducer function applied to e-lit and digital art, under the perspective of interdisciplinary studies.

In the visual arts, from the 60s, pop art makes a profuse use of the appropriation. The topic of appropriation approaches dangerously to paranoid. Here, alteregos and eschizophrenic ghosts of the own-someone else's and own-other appear. In this game od double meanings and double codes -expectation, reading, listening-, the meaning becomes double, always distorted, processing questions. Reference without reference, as Derrida said? Doubles of anything, according to Baudrillard? The appropriation invites us to mistruct every text, every sign, every indentity.

Schools as well as universities have subjected writing to the dogma of access to knowledge and to the imperative of communication for too long.

They have restricted it to the role of an instrument which goes along with cognitive capitalism (Yann Moulier Boutang), by industrial production of knowledge, thereby steadily removing its artistic, aesthetic and political dimensions (Luc Dall’Armellina).

In today’s situation, for most pupils and students, writing is nothing but a compulsory step, a skill among others, a technique one has to manipulate for it is required in order to do well at school, whatever the subject.

Is electronic literature in a cul de sac? For the main audience only digitized literature exist. E-books, e-readers, self-publishing, tablets, digital libraries, publishing houses in the Web, etc. Electronic literature needs certain conditions to revive: 1. The literary corpus should increase. 2. The text should be the focus, the story should not be hidden with special effects that can be of no interest at all. 3. There must be professional criticism on digital works.

A review of Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue contributed to the CultureNet's course-blog.

As part of my on-going “Abstract Language” column at Abstract Comics: The Blog, this month I discuss ottar ormstad’s 2007 op art visual poetry suite bokstavteppekatalogen.

Source: author's blog

This is the text of a talk given at the plenary panel at the Electronic Literature Showcase at the Library of Congress, curated by Kathi Inman Berens and Dene Grigar.