aesthetic

Originally I proposed a 20 min long performance called ThinkTalk with Rob Wittig – In it, we wanted to mix objects, voices and text live (using webcams) to compose something like a text opera with solos, dialogs, a choir and organic chaos. It should have been a meandering text collage with coincidences and contingency leading to unintentional meaning. - if you have an opportunity to invite us?Instead I will tell you about my relation to electronic literature and my struggles defining my artworks.

In a relatively short time, apps have become highly popular as a platform for children’s fiction. The majority of media attention to these apps has focused on their technical features. There has been less focus on their aesthetic aspects, such as how interactive elements, visual-verbal arrangements and narration are interrelated. This article investigates how a reading of a «picturebook app» may differ from readings of the narratives found in printed books and movies. The discussion will be anchored in an analysis of the iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. This app, which is an adaptation of an animated short film, relates the story of a book lover who becomes the proprietor of a magical library.

In this interview Dene Grigar tells about her approach to electronic literature in the early 1990s and about her work as curator for the exhibit "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" in 2015. She goes on describing some distinguishing features of electronic literature and explaining her 'conceptual shift' on regard to the way of working with computers. Finally she suggests some methods of analysis for the understanding of electronic literature for both academic scholars and mainstream audience.

Following Michel Foucault's brief works of art criticism, Rene Magritte's paintings, and Jodi's websites, this essay performs a close reading of HTML code using the aesthetic logic of the calligramme. To begin I construct a genealogy of critical image production surrounding Magritte's now classic 1928-29 painting La trahison des images. A slowly decomposing relationship between language and images begins with Scott McCloud's reductive materialism in Understanding Comics (1993) in which McCloud's comic book avatar lectures on the material and mimetic aspects of Magritte's pipe for purely ironic effect. Unlike McCloud's attempts to distill materiality down to traditional media types, Henning Pohl's La trahison des images numeriques (2009) implicates both pipe and text within a transcendental image-space beyond medium specificity which, like Giselle Beiguelman's //**Code_up (2004), promotes the fantasy of diving into data. Douglas R. Hofstadter's clever calligramatic sketches in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979) inject language into the system via a paradoxical operation similar to that of the Liar Paradox in which Epimenides, a Cretan, declares "all Cretans are liars." Finally, in Michel Foucault's five part procedural analysis This is Not a Pipe (1973)--inspired in part by Guillaume Apollinaire's calligramme Fumees (1914)--a method for reading wwwwwwwww.jodi.org emerges. wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is a frequently discussed digital media artwork by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans (collectively known as Jodi) in which meaning is produced specifically through the dynamic interplay of imagistic code reminiscent of the atom bombs' schematics and neon green, alphabetic output suggestive of nuclear fallout. My work picks up where Alan Sondheim, Peter Lunenfeld, John Cayley, McKenzie Wark, Alan Liu, and C. T. Funkhouser each end his criticism of this iconic work. Instead of reading narrative or ironic causality between code and output, I perform a Foucauldian reading which emphasizes the disconnect between these two orders through the intervention of the calligramme. Though at first the website appears decodable, a dynamic exchange oscillates between mimetic representations of exploded code and linguistic trauma of speechless, unintelligible text to trigger an affective explosion. wwwwwwwww.jodi.org relays the trauma of the atom bomb through the history of digital media and art evokes digital media's academic history, technical precursors, and direct ties to the US military-industrial complex. Rendering the bombs and the process by which they function on the web implicates two important historical figures: Vannevar Bush and Alfred H. Barr Jr. Bush acted as the first Presidential Science Advisor, developed the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project, and invented the Memex, an influential thought experiment in the history of new media. Alfred H. Barr Jr. was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York who advocated a permanent collection via calligrammatic diagrams of a "torpedo moving through time" whose nosecone noncoincidentally points at the soon to be explosion of 1950's Abstract Expressionism. Thus in the moment that Jodi is engaged is semiotic destruction it is simultaneously implicating itself within a particular cultural narrative regarding the relationship of digital media to art history and American militarism.

What can be said about the detail as an aesthetic category within the framework of an emergent electronic culture? The paper does not aim to draw a standpoint on the subject but rather to identify possible paths of reflection and inquiry starting from a particular model: a form of zoomable text (z-text) and interface (zoom-editor) allowing the text to be structured on levels of detail and explored by zoom-in and zoom-out. The questions that we intend to address concern the role of detail as a trigger fostering both the writing and the reading process. As an essential ingredient of the zooming paradigm - urging the writer to say and the reader to ask more about what has already been said - the detail acquires a prevalent character, that of trigger of the textual unfolding and core of the interface functionality.

 The paper focuses on samples of constructed z-texts pointing to the following aspects:- disclosure of details as a strategy of storytelling, e.g. progressively turning a few outline paragraphs into a full-fledged story (narrative triggers);- variable physical or emotional proximity/distance of the reader to a textual object by simulating a camera-like approach in a descriptive setting (descriptive triggers);- gradual movement from particular to general, general to particular, simple to complex in inductive/deductive or pedagogic essays (logical triggers).

While centered on literary and digital features (textual unfolding based on a visible/hidden detail dynamics), the paper also refers to conceptual constructs related to other media (printed text, photography), such as Naomi Schor’s (2007) delayed, absent or absorbed detail, and the discursive punctum inspired by Barthes’s reflections on photography (1981).

References

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981.

—Schor, Naomi, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (first published 1987 by Methuen, Inc.), Routledge, New York, London, 2007.

I will try to make a blend between the notion of "creative writing", which is typically American (and doesn't exist in most of continental Europe), and the discourse of creative industries, which is typically European, and try to stab the notion of "creative" a bit as a kind of helpless placeholder for something that, for whatever reason, is no longer called literary or artistic. So, referring to Kenny Goldsmith, it's not about a dichotomy creative/uncreative, but what's questionable about the concept in the first place. If we shift the issue from an idealist to a materialist perspective, then the difference between creative/literary writing and common writing has always been arbitrary.

The critical edition of Kafka, which now includes the documents he wrote for his insurance company, is a good example, as are earlier examples of published letters, diaries etc. Foucault's criticism of the the notion of the oeuvre, whether it would include scraps and laundry bills or not, seems quite backwards to me. The actual difference has been one of published and non-published writing, with publishing being (for technical and economic reasons) controlled by an industry.

With the Internet, particularly social media, this difference is gone. There also is no real difference anymore between written language and spoken everyday language, everything is in one space. Yet it seems to me as if 'electronic
literature'/e-poetry is not embracing this - which would even be a logical consequence of the innovation of literary writing through Joyce, W.S. Burroughs and others -, but preserving a narrow concept of the literary within the massive writing/reading environment of the Internet. (Hence also the insistence of e-literature on works in
self-contained files, a legacy of Brown University hyperfiction, which recurs for example in the acid-free bits debate.) My conclusion will be that the notion of 'creativity' is reactionary, and that 'uncreative' is just its dialectical flipside.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

This paper deals with the eLiterature formalization and its pedagogical implications. Firstly, it considers the pressing need of an official formalization of Electronic Literature. Secondly, it provides a proposal for the appropriate pedagogical theory and methodologies necessary to take advantage of the possibilities offered by New Media Writing in educational contexts. Finally, it offers some examples of possible pedagogical practices which adopt Digital Literature.