e-literature

Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.

As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.

Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.

Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.

Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.

Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.

Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.

To read e-literature is to use multiple literacies. New media theory stresses the role of user interactivity or engagement, but it is critical to also engage with the hermeneutic readings leading us to question, what does it all mean? How is e-literature proposing phenomenological questions regarding selfhood/identity, communication, spirituality, consciousness? Poets and artists are instinctively reflecting an awareness of the paradigm shift that surged with quantum mechanics. Curiously, those same theories have been part of the long tradition of ancient Eastern mysticism. This dialogue between the two that began in the 1950s and resurged in the mid 1970s is very vibrant and present in today’s electronic literatures, particularly those with poetic inclinations. This presentation will briefly give an overview of my current manuscript Poética Quántica that examines how e-literature in Latin America reveal universal questions that have long been meditated in Eastern mysticism and have been paralleled in quantum physics discoveries. It is not an inquiry into the dialogue between the scientific and humanistic discourses, nor are these works simply “digitalizing literature” or just techy creations. Rather the study shows how these pieces have deep philosophical tendencies that draw connections with the socio-human cosmos-vision, as well as foresight about the meaning of being human, and the social philosophy behind alterity, otherness and the observer-I-Other quantum relation. The selected digital works speak of the diverse, regionalized and multi-ethnic reality of the Latin American experience in the realm of contrasts, contradictions and socio-cultural diversity where the Other harmonizes with radical multi-culturalism. These poet-artists, with or without intent, are literally closing the literary gap in Latin American literature by drawing subconsciously and/or accidentally on the shift in consciousness of our understanding of the world, and a new cosmos-vision due to quantum discoveries: that there is indeed a systemic or networked view of life (chapter 1), that effects of synchronicity may be tangible (chapter 1), that parallel universes are possible (chapter 2), that consciousness is a temporal and collective all-at-once (chapter 3), and that time is not a separate entity (chapter 4). The pieces themselves are creative, fun and engaging but become intellectually stimulating and emotionally charged as we dive into a deeper understanding of “how it is what it is,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase. I would like to propose a discussion of how e-literature does indeed reflect the way we think about culture, society and what it means to be human—very different than how traditional literature approaches these epistemological questions. The technologies used affords these artists/poets ways of experimenting, manipulating, creating and simulating ideas that are best placed in interfaces or formats that require participation (auditory, kinetic, visual, tactile). This is, a cultural study of how electronic literature is salient to our understanding of the world as we dive into their quest for an adequate explanation of contemporary reality.

model that its own authors rebelled against: “Harlequin thought of everything--except the readers, the authors, and the creative freedom which has traditionally been the cornerstone of literature in Western culture. This publishing giant molded romantic aspirations into super-rationalist forms of communication, the very antithesis of the readers' desires” (“Romance in the Age of Electronics: Harlequin Enterprises,” Feminist Studies 11.1, 54). This description of “molded” aspirations is not so different from the genre molds that dominate the landscape of mainstream gaming: the engines powering franchises place the same inescapable stamp as the Harlequin formula. Romance novels themselves have transformed in the wake of the “e-zines, chat rooms, and bulletin boards” (and their descendants) bringing authors and fans into direct dialogue (Rosalind Gill and Elena Herdieckerhoff, “Rewriting the romance: new femininities in chick lit?” Feminist Media Studies 6.4, 2006). The truest descendants of this resistance of male-mediated, commercially-formulated fiction might perhaps be found in fanfiction, which is in turn frequently remediated through the success of crossover franchises such as E.L James’s Fifty Shades of Grey series (2011) and Anna Todd’s After series (2014). However, the intersection of romance and interactive media typically eschews the experimental and queer discourse of fan communities for heteronormative visual novels and forgettable romance “choice-driven” subplots, such as those of Bioware’s games. In Ready Player Two (University of Minnesota Press 2017), Shira Chess posits that the needs of women as the ever-present but frequently ignored player base, or the so-called player two, are becoming an influential force in the landscape of gaming media: the success of titles ranging from Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (2017) to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (2017) reinforces the desire of players for alternative models of play, but within platforms and genres that are inherently normative in their “level-up” approach to romance. Twine, with its personal platform and flexible model of choice-modeling, offers affordances for subverting and building upon the romance genre. I examine several works built with Twine that challenge norms of romance novels while reflecting an active female gaze: Soha Kareem's reProgram (2014) explores healing from sexual abuse through a new relationship; Merritt Kopas’s Consensual Torture Simulator evokes BDSM from a knowledgeable perspective that goes far beyond the traditions of E.L James; Snoother's Sleep (2015) explores queer relationships and romance through a lense of anxiety; and KittyHorrorShow’s Wolf Girls in Love (2015) offers a minimalist and tragic lesbian romance. These works serve and reflect the gaze of player two, and perhaps even of Edmond Chang’s posited player three, the queer gamer, while serving simultaneously as a critique of the genre-patterned norms of much of interactive media. By subverting the heteronormative expectations of romance, the “literary” aspirations of electronic literature, and the formulaic choice systems of games, these works are at the heart of Twine as a punk movement.

(Source: ELO2018 Pinpointing Twine's Others: Panel Harlowe-quin Romance: Subversive Play at Love (and Sex) with Twine)

Fitting the Pattern is an interactive, animated ‘memoir in pieces,’ that explores aspects of my relationship with my mother, a dressmaker. The design of the user-interface repurposes sewing patterns and their instructional symbols to fuse the interactive process into the narrative world. The familiar mouse pointer is restyled as a series of digital dressmaking tools so the reader becomes actively involved in cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications and unpicking the past. Thus the reader becomes repurposed as the tailor who brings it all together to make the pattern fit the cloth of narrative coherence.

So now I will untangle various repurposed threads of Fitting the Pattern and expand upon these themes.

As a new media author, I write the visible, readable text (texte-à-voir *) and the underlying source code, the program (texte-auteur *). As a new media artist, I also design and create the user interface and the multimodal elements - the whole thing.

Since starting to write and create in new media, I have felt compelled, by the digital medium itself, to attempt to fully exploit the affordances of programmable media for expressivity by employing non-linear narrative methods, non-trivial interactivity and random programming in poetically and/or narratively meaningful ways. This has led me to create, what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls, playable media works.

Writing creatively for algorithmically-driven media, working with others’ code frameworks and writing my own programs has led me to consider the expressivity of game processes and, consequently, my work has taken on more game-like characteristics. I’d like to trace this development by presenting a selection of extracts from key works (listed below) which demonstrate this move towards writing for playability.

The key Electronic Literature works:

Fitting the Pattern ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html )
Underbelly ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/underbelly.html )
Out of Touch, an ongoing series ( http://www.crissxross.net/oot/indexoot.html )
Rememori ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/rememori.html )

*Philippe Bootz, Towards an ontology of the field of digital poetry

“E-literature”, as defined by the ELO, is a fairly sweeping term. Any sort of “born digital” text can potentially be claimed as “e-lit”: video games, works of interactive fiction, fan fiction, et cetera. As a scholar, it is tempting to dragoon a favorite text, to bring it into an e-lit context. But to do this is to ignore the differences in the communities that supported these texts’ creation. Similarly, it is tempting to declare the “end of e-lit,” since so much e-lit can also be framed as fan fiction, video art, games, etc., but to do this is to ignore the impact of the e-lit community and its structure.

This paper explores how online fandom is a global community that supports the creation of “born-digital” texts just as the e-lit community does, but has very different strengths and weaknesses. Three texts focalize this exploration. The first two are Machine Libertine’s Whoever You Are and Imaginary Circus’s Please Let Me Get What I Want. Each could be considered either as works of e-literature or as fanvid, but they were created in very different contexts. The third is The Care and Feeding of Stiles Stilinski (or how Stiles goes on four accidental dates and still gets no make-outs), by Lunarwolfik. This work of fan fiction initially seems like a simple e-book presentation of a short story, potentially not classifiable as “e-literature”, but deeper examination of the context of its creation shows that it takes great advantage of the affordances of networked computing – not in its format, but with regard to the community and tools that helped shape it.

The contexts of these three works are not limited to the aesthetic concerns of their intended audiences. The fandom community excels at lobbying for expansion of legal protections around fair use and at creating informal discussion spaces; the e-literature community provides excellent education resources and databases of works of various types. Both communities hold large and regular meet-ups, though in fandom the focus is on celebratory conventions (sometimes featuring an academic track), whereas the e-literature community focuses on academic conferences (often featuring festivals or shows). This paper will offer recommendations about what each community can learn from the other.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

PO.EX (http://po-ex.net) is a digital archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature that began in 2005. This literary database is coordinated by Rui Torres, at the University Fernando Pessoa, in Oporto, Portugal, and was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] (FCT) and the European Union, under two main research projects: “CD-ROM da PO.EX: Poesia Experimental Portuguesa, Cadernos e Catálogos” [The PO.EX CD-ROM: Portuguese Experimental Poetry, Notebooks and Catalogues] (2005-2008) and “PO.EX’70-80: Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa” [PO.EX’70-80: Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature] (2010-2013).

PO.EX (http://po-ex.net) is a digital archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature that began in 2005. This literary database is coordinated by Rui Torres, at the University Fernando Pessoa, in Oporto, Portugal, and was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] (FCT) and the European Union, under two main research projects: “CD-ROM da PO.EX: Poesia Experimental Portuguesa, Cadernos e Catálogos” [The PO.EX CD-ROM: Portuguese Experimental Poetry, Notebooks and Catalogues] (2005-2008) and “PO.EX’70-80: Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa” [PO.EX’70-80: Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature] (2010-2013).

(Source: Author's Abstract)