e-lit

This work presents an artistic process based on a dream that took place in the capital of Czechoslovakia, a region unknown to the dreamer, which happened at the beginning of the quarantine period due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first stage of this creative process started with the confirmation of coincidences between real-life Prague and the dreamed Prague. The similarities, discovered mainly through the search algorithms that led to Google maps, touristic blogs, Wikipedia, and other websites allowed the collection of data for the memories would not be lost and could be used as tools for the creative process. That fact so unique and different from other experienced dream phenomena aroused a series of sensations and reflections on the possibility of incorporating the unforeseen and irrational element as a means of promoting academic inquiry and artistic research. It was also an encouragement at the critical moment of confinement and pessimism.

In Antiquity, as the work of Artemidoro confirms, the dream had a cosmic dimension related to the mystical tradition and the collectivity. However, the psychoanalytic conception, influential in Western society since the first decades of the twentieth century, contributed to fixing the perception of dreaming as a private event that concerns only the individual dimension. On the other hand, neuroscience favors a biological approach to dreaming, even though Sidarta Ribeiro is a dissonant voice in this environment. The Brazilian neuroscientist relates dreams and memory since we dream as a way of remembering what we are and what we do. According to him, we also dream to prepare ourselves for the future.

The conceptual project started from a dream and proceeded, at first, with the help of Internet search engines. The dream experience allowed a deviation in the search algorithms using private intuition. This methodology contradicts the rational tendency behind the “improvement” of the artificial intelligence of these mechanisms. This effort included bibliographic research and the construction of a web page that will contain more information about the work in development. The process also allowed the idealization of Oneirographia, which is a 3D interactive online environment that is under construction. In this work, the interactor can build or simulate his digital dreams with data input that´ll randomly create a sensory ambiance. First, the user will fill a form and, then it will be possible to choose between a dream or a nightmare to define the atmosphere of the digital experience. After that, the user will navigate between images, words, and sounds, and, at any moment, he can choose to capture photographs of the digital dream to download or share them on the social media networks.

Dreams hold relevant messages and memories that we cannot access otherwise. However, its encrypted language makes it difficult to understand, and usually, during the wake, we quickly forget what we have dreamed of. Oneirographia aims to facilitate the remembering, reimagining, and sharing of this important aspect of our lives.

“He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

This is because whatever is literary in a humanist sense is not usually considered communicable in anything other than human-only language. And yet, here is this alien “alpha-eater” not only hijacking control of the narrative from the children, but also ‘eating the alphabet’ and regurgitating it in human-readable, or what I venture to call ‘plus-human’ code.

Turning from Cold War-era sci-fi to electronic literature, Nick Montfort’s single page of Python code in The Truelist bears remarkable similarities to Brooke-Rose’s Poccom 3. Although the code can only be found on the last page of this book-length poem, it is as in Xorandor central to the book as artefact, for it was used by Montfort to generate the poetry. “Xorshift to create a random-like but deterministic sequence”, reads one of the lines of code, simultaneously describing its role in recombining a concise inputted lexicon according to rules also specified by Montfort.

The effect is a journey “through a strange landscape that seems to arise from the English language itself”, complete with idiosyncratic compound words (e.g., “voidring”, “book-bound ear”) not without analogues in Jip and Zab’s private programming-inspired idiom (e.g., “diodic!”, “Avort”, “flash-in-the-datasink”).

Notwithstanding that Xorandor and The Truelist are books containing and driven by pages of plus-human code, it is the profound differences between the two that gives scope to this proposed paper. Brooke-Rose’s is firmly of the print tradition, where the paper medium brings to readerly attention issues of language such as: the richness but also (from the perspective of a computer) the illogic of polysemy; the power of discourse to subject a sub-human object to study or enslavement, to make peace or war. Montfort’s offering, although in the final instance presented on paper, belongs to an emerging tradition within electronic literature: one that produces and benefits from a programmed artefact’s affordances for scale, dispersal and change (e.g., Stephanie Strickland’s V: Vniverse, Deena Larsen’s Stained Word Window), before remediating it to the stable, serial, although not necessarily linear platform of print (Strickland’s Losing L’Una/WaveSon.nets, Larsen’s Stained Word Translations).

This begs the question, What does electronic literature – for which ‘born-digital’ is at once a sine qua non and a raison d’être – seek to gain, supplement, or reverse by printing out its exercises in plus-human language?

In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices. Hence, pointing out to technotexts developed within and with the popular platforms, in instances of "an impersonal assemblage of enunciation" (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 25), I would like to explore the conceptual potential of "becoming-minor" (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p.22).

I am going to argue that to provide the accurate critique of the phenomenon, e-literary practices of writing with and within popular social platforms (flurf poetry, memes, Instapoetry) need to be framed in the context of neoliberal landscape of digital, metrics-oriented capitalism (Brown, 2015), exceeding debate fixated on the clash of aesthetic distinctions or generational differences. Seen from such perspective, third-generation e-literary practices often seem to thrive on exploiting the platforms' operational logics and mechanisms, "unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards." (Manning, 2016, p. 1).

The strategies - based on mimicry and constituting the "vapors" (Olson, 2017) of ever-present and ubiquitous availability of digital networks - can be seem far from the openly voiced cultural critique. Nevertheless, to grasp the full potential of such "vaporized" collective writing assemblages, hitting the minor key (Manning, 2016, p.1) might be useful. De-colonization of electronic literature might then become less obvious in terms of communicational strategies, but more thoroughly shedding the light on what is below the (textual or even programmable) surface of networked technotexts.