This paper presents the ethnographic study, part of the HERA-funded project “Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP), which asks how creative communities form within transnational and transcultural contexts and a globalised and distributed communications environment.
Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP is intended both to study the formation and interactions of that community and also to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe. The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a publicly accessible online database that focuses on capturing core bibliographic data and archival materials about authors, creative works, critical writing, events, organizations, publishers, and teaching resources and on making visible the connections between creative and scholarly activities in the field.
This presentation will focus on three aspects of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base in particular:
1) Cross-referencing to make visible the emergence of creative and scholarly communities of practice
In developing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base platform, we put a particular emphasis on showing the connections between different forms of practice in scholarly and artistic communities, and making cross-references apparent and accessible. So for instance, records documenting creative works are automatically linked to critical writing that reference them, and vice versa, records of events and exhibition link to works that were presented, author records link to materials written, edited and taught. This capacity to show the web of connections on which a creative community is based is a distinguishing feature of the project.
2) Open access and international collaboration
The ELMCIP project is working with other international projects in the US, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Australia and elsewhere to establish open-access content sharing between the most active database projects and organizations in the field, to facilitate international cooperation and growth of the creative communities in which it is engaged.
3) Documenting and the path to Archiving electronic literature
The ELMCIP project includes both metadata-level documentation and some archival materials, such as .PDF files, source code of some works, audio and video documentation of presentations and so forth. This presentation will consider ways in which this might lead to the future development of an electronic literature repository, in which works of electronic literature are not only documented, but also in some fashion preserved for archival reference and future appreciation.
(Source: author's abstract)
Note: This presentation is based on the previously published essay "The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice"
Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction afternoon, a story was first publicly presented in 1987, and is generally known as the “granddaddy” of electronic literature (Coover, 1992). It has been anthologised by Norton, is substantially analysed and discussed in dozens of academic treatises and is taught or at least mentioned in almost every course taught on electronic literature. But afternoon is not the first work of electronic literature. Why did this particular work become the progenitor of a community of writers, a common reference point for scholars and students for the next 25 years? There were alternative possibilities. (The case has already been made that interactive fiction is equally a form of electronic literature - but IF is a distinct genre with a distinct community.) Why didn’t bp Nichols’ work “First Screening: Computer Poems” (1984) start a movement? Why are there no cricital discussions of Judy Malloy’s database narrative “Uncle Roger”, published on the WELL in 1986/97? This brief paper will question the role of the mythical progenitor in the creation of a creative communtiy. Why do we tend to imagine a father or “granddaddy” of a field? Are certain kinds of work more likely to be adopted as progenitor of a field, or does the choice of progenitor depend more on social networks, modes of distribution or even chance? Would electronic literature have been different today if Nichols or Malloy had been crowned as the grandparent of the field?
(Source: Author's abstract)
(Full text of paper available at http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/genealogy-creative-community-why-afternoon-“granddaddy”-hypertext-fiction - not in sidebar because URL is invalid - but works.)
Community has been a central focus of my career in the field of electronic literature, particularly in helping to shape and structure the Electronic Literature Organization, a USA-based nonprofit organization central to the field, and more recently as project leader of ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation and Practice. I consider practical research and artistic community development vital to the creation of a persistent environment that enables network-based creative communities. When creative communities and research communties are not geographically co-located, institutional identities, online publications, directories, and knowledge bases, and in-person conferences, festivals, and events provide for a kind of floating agora that enables creative community to thrive across borders.
At same time, my practice emerges from my background as a fiction writer. Creative writing is generally if not correctly conceived of as a solitary act in which collaboration plays a lesser role than in other sorts of creative practice, for example the production of a staged drama or film. Both writing and reading fiction are typically understood as highly subjective acts, and authors and artists are understood to "own" their ideas and works in a personal way. Network based reading and writing practices foreground a number of complications of subjective writing and reading, from community-based writing projects, to multimedial literary productions, to radical changes in the nature of the reception and reader response process. None of these changes eliminate "the author" per se, but all force us to reconsider the frame of authorship and the models of collaborative creative literary practice enabled by the computer and the network environment.
This presentation will discuss some of the ways that electronic literature complicates conceptions of authorship and collaboration in the context of its emergent creative community. I will test these ideas against examples, both from my own practice as an author of network-based fiction projects including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, The Meddlesome Passenger, and Implementation, all of which involved different models of collaboration, as well as recent collective or collaboratively authored electronic literature projects including The Last Performance by Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffrey, and others, the Exquisite_Code project by Brendan Howell and others, and TOC: a New-Media novel by Steve Tomasula and a team of artists and developers.
(Source: ISEA2011)
People on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea take responsibility for the fertility and reproduction of land and people. Through gardening, hunting, ceremony and initiation, they are continually ‘creating’: both people/places, and the conditions for the emergence of these things as recognisably human. Engaging in the continual creation of the human world is not optional for them but intrinsic to what it means to be a human being. Creativity is necessarily distributed in such circumstances, power over creation or destruction oscillates, but to be a person means participation. As such, the emergence of persons or things, as objects of contemplation, or exchange, or value and beauty, are achieved momentarily as elements of the wider process of which they are part and through which they have meaning.
By briefly reflecting on this example (of a people still located outside the reach of digital culture and historically unconnected with the conditions under which electronically mediated collaboration takes place) I wish to highlight questions about what we mean by ‘creativity’ in the realm of electronic literature and networked art (for example). In a culture where every action is a part of making the self, one with a very different history and technology from Reite, what is the analytic import of singling out digital arts practitioners from others as an example of a social ontology of creative practice? What (or who) is being made? What are efforts and actions directed through such channels making? If we accept (the premise of the panel rubric) that no action is outside creative process, then what kind of world is created by digital arts practices? Why do we use the language of creativity and of community here? Is it the recognition of creativity as such that makes such practitioners into a ‘community’?
(Source: ISEA2011)
Attending to the subcultural textures, the white noise of the ongoing process (processes of both development and devolution of langague and meaning) of a literary locus -- "poetic activity" rather than "poetry" per se -- reveals its values, its sociality, its -- to use a phrase from a bygone poltical and cultural era -- relevance to everyday life. So, in addressing e-poetic culture, I'm decisively not trying to establish an alternative canon but rather attending to writing processes, and to wrting that emobidies a "space-taking" or "world-making" postliterary vision.
Considerations of performativity, diasproa, fragmentation, identity, and access, all issues that preoccupy me, are central to Internet poetics.
Friedrich W. Block looks at the systematic and historical conditions of the emergence of a genre like “digital poetry.” He argues that it has been necessary to communicate and spread schemes of invariance and identification to tie to- gether a high variety of artistic practice. For this purpose, concepts and names of genres have been connected with different forms of institutionalization. From this perspective, his essay considers the conceptual and cultural devel- opment of “digital poetry” as well as its relation to historical filiations and their transformation. In conclusion, his considerations lead to an abstract reflection of a more general concept of “poetry.”
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)
Genre names function as a rather effective means of institutionalization. They serve to orient toward a certain field of artistic activity, even without clear definitions. But for this purpose, the signifier or name has to have at least some connotative meaning which originates from using the expression. In or- der to create a genre, usage has to tie a multitude of differences and this is best done via social and medial organization. Thus, location, origin, and communicative function of an expression like “digital poetry” are of interest.
I wanted to illustrate how the genre “Digital Poetry” has been constituted by an interplay of genre name, development of social, medial, and communicative organization, presentation of artworks, different forms of discourse, and curatorial praxis. The meaning of the genre has emerged from this complex of mediation and observation and much less from individual artistic production. Artists develop more individual programs, but they are prepared to participate in organizational forms following the concept of Digital Poetry.