avant garde

It's true, poets have been experimenting with producing writing (or simply writing, just writing of a sort not familiar to us - writing as input and writing as choosing) with the aid of digital computer algorithms since Max Bense and Theo Lutz first experimented with computer-generated writing in 1959. What is new and particular to the 21st century literary landscape is a revived interest in the underlying workings of algorithms, not just a concern with the surface-level effects and results that characterized much of the fascination in the 1970s and 1980s with computer-generated writing. With the ever-increasing power of algorithms, especially search engine algorithms that attempt not just to "know" us but to in fact anticipate and so shape our every desire, our passive acceptance of these algorithms necessarily means we cannot have any sense of the shape and scope of how they determine our access to information, let alone shape our sense of self which is increasingly driven by autocomplete, autocorrect, automata.

The "Googlization of Poetry," then, describes conceptual writing as an often overlooked aspect of electronic literature - my paper contends that the crucial contribution of conceptual writing as e-literature to contemporary poetry, poetics, and even media studies is an articulation of a 21st century media poetics. Building on the 20th century's computer-generated texts, conceptual writing gives us a poetics perfectly appropriate for our current cultural moment in that it implicitly acknowledges we are living not just in an era of the search engine algorithm but in an era of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "The Googlization of Everything." "Google has permeated our culture. That's what I mean by Googlization. It is a ubiquitous brand: Google is used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City." (2) In other words, when we search for data on the Web we are no longer "searching" - instead, we are "Googling." But Conceptual writers such as Bill Kennedy, Darren Wershler, and Tan Lin who experiment with/on Google are not simply pointing to its ubiquity - they are also implicitly questioning how it works, how it generates the results it does, and so how it sells ourselves back to us. Such writing is an acknowledgement of the materiality of language in the digital that goes deeper than a mere acknowledgement of the material size, shape, sound, texture of letters and words that characterizes much of twentieth-century bookbound, experimental poetry practices. Otherwise put, these writers take us beyond the 20th century avant garde's interest in the verbal/vocal/visual aspect of materiality to instead urge us to attend to the materiality of 21st century digital language production. They ask, what happens when we appropriate the role of Google for our own purposes rather than Google's? What happens when we wrest Google from itself and instead use it not only to find out things about us as a culture but to find out what Google is finding out about us?

In this sense, this cluster of Conceptual writing which both probes and is driven by the search engine in fact enacts a kind of study of software. Lev Manovich writes in Software Takes Command, "Software Studies has to investigate both the role of software in forming contemporary culture, and cultural, social, and economic forces that are shaping development of software itself." (5) And so if the search engine is currently one of the most powerful pieces of "cultural software," then, again, it's my sense that Conceptual writing's critique of Google ideally positions such writing as a mode of 21st century media poetics.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Contemporary “format disruptions” (Savikas) lead to a new experience and practice of scholarly publishing: it is global, virtual, and instantaneous. How does this apply to electronic literature? Elit works exist in a field of publication, characterized by circulation, commentary, and archiving. They are subject to complex corporate toolchains, software updates, social media, etc. The work is no longer just the work but the entirety of this field. Publication is no longer a single event or a single thing. Think of this in terms of Luhmann’s systems theory: the differentiating distinction between artistic production and critical discourse is shifted; the difference made by artwork - its “poetics” - is now systematically linked to critical discourse.

Our essay is a call for editors and publishers of works on / about elit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around works of elit. Traditionally editors were invisible, working in the background. By contrast, the contemporary publishing situation - as well as the specifics of publishing on elit - enables publishers and editors to address the global with local realities of writers, the virtual with the material concerns of the text, and the instantaneous with the measured need for critical reading. We look at two case studies. The first is a discourse analysis of existing publications on elit. Scholarly publishing is already in a tight reflexive relation with elit works (e.g. the ELD). We recognize these contributions, but we also examine how in many cases the unevenness of the existing field of critical discourse re-distributes and re-names these works as dealing with “new media” or “electronic culture,” or similar topics. Our second case study is Po.Ex, a collection of essays on intermedia and cybertext by authors from Portugal, currently being co-edited with Rui Torres, and due to be published in 2013 by the Computing Literature series - releasing print and ebooks - developed at West Virginia University, in collaboration with the University of Paris 8. The three primary contributions of the book are: 1) a historical model of elit within a continuum of avant-garde writing stretching back to the Middle Ages; 2) a hermeneutic model for finding meaning in electronic literature through intermediality; and 3) a semiotic model for the computer as the cybernetic extension of human creativity and as an enabling medium for merging writers with readers as mutual authors (as wreaders). While these essays demonstrably shaped the field of elit, especially in Europe, their influence is limited because new generations of artists, critics, and students of elit do not have access to the works. Our case studies shows that scholarly publishing as a critical practice can address such limitations. Our overall claim is that publishing can organize and create the field of discourse for elit. We conclude with proposals and questions for future directions of critical publishing on elit.

(Source: Authors' abstract ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/editing-electronic-literature-global-publishing-system)

Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

A prominent strategy in some works of contemporary electronic literature is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call "digital modernism." This paper examines digital modernism as a strategy relevant to rethinking not only the origins of electronic literature but the ways in which we discuss and understand the field of electronic literature in general. I examine Bob Brown's Readies machine (circa 1930), an avant-garde attempt to speed up text and thus transform literature and reading practices, in relation to works of electronic literature by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and William Poundstone. These contemporary works employ Flash to create a flashing aesthetic that resonates with Brown's goals for the Readies. Situating electronic literature within this forgotten but distinctly literary history of machine-based textual experimentation exposes the importance of reading today's new, new media literature in relation to the a movement from the early decades of the twentieth century which sought to "make it new" in the new media of its time.