aesthetic experience

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

Digital literature is based on tensions that contribute to establishing its specificity: tension on the devices, on the programmed writing, on the media and on the aesthetic experience. The word tension does not necessarily mean conflict, but rather suggests the deconstruction of the obvious on both sides; it can be a creative tension.

- Tension on devices
Digital literature stresses the tension between the cultural, literary and artistic forms inherited from the printed world and those born with the Digital. The tension regarding devices does not only refer to the tension between the digital medium and the printed medium, but also to the tension between the various devices used to render the work (in the framework of an installation or a performance e.g.).

- Tension on the programmed writing
A program makes it possible to define in advance the manipulation of units that will be executed automatically. On the other hand, writing can be defined as a system of expression that reflects thinking. One can thus identify a tension between the program (which is an automatic manipulation of symbolic inscriptions) and writing (which is a device used to externalize memory and thinking). On the one side a form of closure, on the other the possibility of the expression of meaning. The challenge is to create a space for new meaning from an initial impossibility. There is thus a tension between programming and writing, which is a creative tension.

- Tension on the media
Technically, thanks to the digital, all media (linguistic text, image, sound, video) are encoded in the same way, i.e. in binary form. But from a semiotic point of view, they retain properties inherited from cultural traditions. Thus tension arises between the technical potentialities made possible by the digital and the semiotic properties of these different media, as well as the way they make sense together and are transformed by this inter-semiotisation.

- Tension on the aesthetic experience
There is a tension between the contemplation of the revealing of meaning and the physical action which is necessary for this revealing. Indeed the creations of digital literature often rely on devices in which the reader acts, composes, constructs. Is this experience, which is based on gestural activity, compatible with an aesthetic experience - or even an aesthetic revelation? The creative tension here is between the openness to meaning which requires the reader to be ready and available, and the closure of the device which requires him/her to be be busy, active, engaged. The device has to entail an aesthetic experience, which can not only be based on “doing”.

I will show these tensions through examples. All these tensions are not new with digital literature, but they are probably raised anew. It is on the basis of these creative tensions that digital literature can build its identity and consider new perspectives.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)

The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured by difference, complexity, and multiplicity. Together, they offer intriguing ways of understanding the changed position of media in today's Germany and beyond. Contributors: Nora M. Alter, Michel Chaouli, Diedrich Diederichsen, Sabine Eckmann, Margit Grieb, Boris Groys, Juliet Koss, Richard Langston, Lev Manovich, Todd Presner, Juliane Rebentisch, Carsten Strathausen. Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Erin McGlothlin is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Source: Publisher's Peritext