Aurature

Aurality may be understood either as the entirety of distinguishable, culturally impli- cated sonic phenomena or, more narrowly and with specific regard to aurature, as the entirety of linguistically implicated sonic phenomena.

Aurature must be distinguished from oral literature (in orality or oral culture), for at least two reasons. In the first place, to emphasize that aurature comes to exist more on the basis of its being heard and interpreted rather than on the circumstances of its production (by a mouth or speaking instrument) and secondly, for historical reasons, because contemporary digital audio recording, automatic speech recognition and auto- matic speech synthesis technologies fundamentally reconfigure—in their cumulative amalgamation—the relationship between linguistic objects in aurality and the archive of cultural practice. Whereas, during the literally pre-historic period before writing (before there were linguistic objects as persistent visual traces), essential affordances of the archive were denied to oral culture, in principle, the digitalization of the archive allows aurature to be both created and appreciated with all the historical affordances and the cultural potentialities of literature.

This is the currently proposed definition of aurature that most concerns us, but it would be quite appropriate for the term to be applied to the entirety of recordable linguistic practices in aurality, including documentary as opposed to artistic practices, for example—by analogy with literature as it is applied with respect to visually supported linguistic cultural practices. 

(Source: Author's abstract)

Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now: How will our encounters with these intelligent personal assistants - robots we’ve invited into our homes to speak with and listen to us, who share this data with vectorialist institutions that monitor our networked transactions - alter both human language and our efforts to lead meaningful lives? In a wide-ranging, philosophical essay that exposes various myths of computation while presenting a candid assessment of the rapidly evolving culture of reading, poet John Cayley speculates that literature will be displaced by aurature. Listen up, readers: A major challenge in the programming era will be to develop linguistic aesthetic practices that intervene significantly and affectively in socio-ideological spaces thoroughly saturated with synthetic language that are largely controlled by commercial interests. The time for aesthetic experiments that disrupt the protocols of a still-nascent aurature is now.

The question of electronic literature – its definition, existence, significance, relationship with literature (plain and simple) – has always been bound up with questions of media and medium. New media. Electronic media. Media qualified by digital, computational, networked, programmable and so on. And all of these terms hypostasize practices while encapsulating and concealing an even more fundamental problem concerning their medium in the sense of artistic medium. Historically, as of this present, an electronic literature exists. It exists significantly, as corpus and practice, and as an institutionally supported cultural formation. It has established a relationship to literature as such, and this is also, to an extent, institutionally recognized. However, questions and confusions concerning media – signaled understandably but inappropriately by the absurd, skewmorphic misdirection of “electronic” – remain encapsulated in “literature” itself. The medium of literature is not letters or even writing. The medium of literature is language. And this latter statement is a contradiction, arguably an assault, by literature, on language itself, as if the art of language could be entirely encompassed by an art of letters. The future historical role of “electronic,” digital, computational and programmatological affordances will be that of enabling artists and scholars to overcome our long-standing confusions concerning literature and writing, but not by replacing literacy with digital literacy. It has become a commonplace of the discourse surrounding electronic literature to say that the predominant practices of aesthetic language-making are currently produced in the world of (print) literacy and that this has been problem since the advent of “electronic” literacy. It has been a problem for far longer than that. Our predominant art practices – of visual or fine art – are currently produced, chiefly, in the world of visuality. Qualifying (visual) art with “digital” or “electronic” is less and less necessary because “digital media” simply allow visual artists to explore visuality in new ways, continuous with those of previous practices and institutions. For art, media may have changed but the artists’ medium is consistent. By contrast, digital media will enable us to discover that aesthetic, artifactual language-making may also take place in the world of aurality, in the world of what we can hear and, in particular, of what we can hear as language, and faithful to language as artistic medium, as aurature. (source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)