digital native

Five minute lightning talks addressing the question: What comes after electronic literature?

Steven Wingate: eLit and the Borg: the challenges of mainstreaming and commercialization
Leonardo Flores: Time Capsules for True Digital Natives
Maya Zalbidea, Xiana Sotelo and Augustine Abila: The Feminist Ends of Electronic Literature
Mark Sample: Bad Data for a Broken World
José Molina: Translating E-poetry: Still Avant-Garde
Daria Petrova and Natalia Fedorova: 101 mediapoetry lab
Judd Morrissey: Turesias (Odds of Ends)
Jose Aburto: Post Digital Interactive Poetry: The End of Electronic Interfaces
Andrew Klobucar: Measure for Measure: Moving from Narratives to Timelines in Social Media Networking
David Clark: The End of Endings
Damon Baker: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!": New Developments in the CaveWriting Hypertext Editing System

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests that there are at least eight different types of intelligence. Due to genetic variation and personal experiences, no two people have the same combination of intelligences. These do not only signal the way we interpret and cope with the world around us but the way we react to it. It is no coincidence that Reader Oriented Theories focus on the role of the reader in processing and interpreting text and not solely on textual perception. As readers and students of literature, the act of interpreting is key to understanding; but limited by outdated methodologies of assessment the opportunity to demonstrate what has been learned is practically bound to their linguistic intelligence. With the change of medium, from paper to screen, literature has undergone a kind of art and media hybridization that far from being something new and original recovers and allows the coexistence of multiple means of storytelling that extend the concept of reading, understanding and expression. In a literary world of "Multiple Intelligences" and "Digital Natives" Electronic Literature offers not only the possibility of re-interpretation but a new approach in assessment methodologies that allow students from any background to express themselves in what Sir Ken Robinson would nowadays considered their "natural element". Some methods are already being put into practice by scholars and teachers of this new literary genre: using Formative Assessment and Project Based Assessment methods, among others, that have been improving academic results in all sorts of subject matters. Domenico Chiappe’s hypermedia novel “Tierra de Extracción” (Electronic Literature Collection Vol 2) covers, thanks to media rhetoric, all the intelligences Gardner mentions by encouraging cognitive development so that the reader as he or she explores, can also interact freely with images, drawings, videos, music, audio and text understanding by means of their intelligence as much of the message conveyed. But, what is even more interesting is that by deconstructing the intricacies of its creation students could re-create and produce their own particular results. Proving, in their own way, what they have learned and understand that the skills they already posses, whether they may be linguistic or not, have not only real world applications but literary ones as well. Tierra de Extracción was created by combining the Intrapersonal and Naturalistic Intelligences of a group of artist whom worked in collaboration to create a multi-plane narrative with a single artistic direction: Hyperphony (Multiple voices: Creative and Narrative) Intermediation / Remediation: *Text (Linguistic Intelligence): First plane of contact with story and content. *Music / Lyrics / Voiceovers (Musical Intelligence): The mood of each chapter is dictated by the soundtrack and its lyrics expose the subconscious of the characters while female voiceovers act as an omnipresent narrator. *Images (Visual Intelligence): Artists linked drawings and photographs to what is said in the text while portraying the cruel reality of “Mene Grande”. Interactive Fiction / Animation / Hypertext: With the collaboration of Andreas Meier Mathematical and Kinesthetic intelligences played a key role in the configuring of screens, interactive mechanisms and animation using programing tools like Shockwave and hypertextual links that puzzled it all together. Collaboration (Interpersonal Intelligence): Writers, Programers, Actors, Musicians and Photographers come together to create an electronic literature narrative adventure only possible on the interface of a screen.

The Internet epistemologist Richard Rodgers describes the latest evolution of digital culture as “the end of the virtual,” a moment at which attention can no longer be confined primarily to integration, encapsulation, or remediation, but must turn instead to natively computational questions and methods. The meaning of this periodic shift is clear enough for the social and information sciences, but less so for the humanities: especially for literature, a field recently split into core and periphery, a home ground of literature-proper set against a hazier outline or outland that has come to be called “the literary.”

This talk begins by subverting the all-too-familiar topos of end-times or elegiac criticism (the end
of some world as we know it), by insisting that end may as easily refer to contour or wrapping as
termination or extinction. That is, an end may also be an edge, a line along which a structure becomes ready-to-hand, or available for manipulation. An end in this sense is an affordance for engagement: commonly, for lifting and carrying.

Equipped with this metaphor, I turn to an interestingly problematic set of digitally native productions,
three examples of Internet-mediated, found composition:
-- Michael Joyce’s “novel of internet,” Was: annales nomadiques
-- K.C. Mohammad’s “flarf” poems collected in The Front
-- Andrei Georghe’s programming project, “The Longest Poem in the World”

Each of these texts involves lifting in two senses: most literally, they use words and phrases lifted or
appropriated from Google, Twitter, and other online sources; at the same time, this light-fingered
procedure lifts and repositions “the literary” at various angles with respect to literature, prompting
serious thinking about their ongoing relationship. Does “the literary” have any use for self-described
writers? What is the nature of language in “the literary?” Joyce locates himself within modern and
postmodern traditions, which have familiar responses to these questions. The same seems at least
partly true for Mohammad, though flarfists seem as anxious about poetry as a profession as they do
about flarf as a program or movement. By contrast, Andrei Gheorghe does not identify as a creative
writer, seems to think of writing as primarily a formal process, and describes his project as purely
technical, even though it meets at least some specifications of verse.

These three texts (admittedly a small and arbitrary sample of a digitally-native literary) may suggest
a trajectory, alignment, or figure, which I will attempt to use as a defining contour of post-virtual literature, especially with regard to certain neo-parodic or reverberative practices they may inspire, or require.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)