dialogism

Writers experimenting with electronic literature who remediate classic literary content provide a nexus for understanding rhetorical techniques evolving from print-based practices. Further, Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism provide a basis for the critical analysis of remediated texts. Therefore, this presentation advocates looking at the evolving rhetoric of electronic literature dialogically, in other words, analyzing works that remediate familiar themes and structures from print-based contexts into electronic mediums. Examples will be drawn from Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl" George Hartley's "A Madlib Frost Poem," Peter Howard's "Peter's Haiku Generator," Edward Picot's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Helena Bulaja's "Croatian Tales of Long Ago."

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

In this paper I will discuss three recent electronic art works in which biological processes or interfaces are investigated. These works are entitled "Teleporting an Unknown State" (1994/96), "A-positive" (1997), and "Time Capsule" (1997) The first work created a situation in which actual photosynthesis and growth of a living organism took place over the Internet. The second piece proposed a dialogical exchange between a human being and a robot through two intravenous hookups. The third approached the problem of wet interfaces and human hosting of digital technologies through the implantation of a memory microchip