experimental

Moving from writing to amateur video could not have happened without the easily available technology and the web and social media that enable the author to circulate their work without needing a heavy infrastructure. In this sense, and with the underlying open attitude to the concept of the literary and modes of publication, this new ‘vliterature’ is fundamentally governed by the logic of the internet. At the same time, in addition to being inspired by filmmakers’ diaries and experimental short film, it can also be seen as a return to an older form of literature, the tradition of orality. This paper proposes to discuss the context in which this trend has emerged and the various practices it has engendered, with a focus on the modes of presence of what can be considered to be ‘literary’ practices and artefacts in such ‘writerly videos’ or vliterature. François Bon’s reflections on the place of the videos in his work and their relation to literature, set in the broader context of the evolution of his literature from Minuit novels to blogs and print-on-demand self-publishing, will provide the main thread for thinking through the reasons and implications from the author’s perspective and imagining it further as a potential future form in the life of literature.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.

The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.

These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.

‘The text’ is thus suspended somewhere in between each iteration as it appears to the user, and the overarching structure provided by the code. Niemi selects the program’s vocabulary, the rules which it must adhere to, the inputs which a user can make, and the probabilities which determine the text’s production, but remains one step removed from the text as it appears on screen. Some control, in the shape of the buttons at the bottom of the screen, is given over to the user- who plays the role of glamorous assistant to Niemi’s conjurer and follows his prompts as the poem/game progresses.

The only serious attempt to critique this relationship as it exists within Stud Poetry is available on C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Poetry website after it was omitted from the print version. Funkhouser’s reading is fundamentally flawed as he misreads the code and believes it impossible to learn from each hand. The value of the words is calculated only once, at the beginning of the game and not at the beginning of each hand as Funkhouser has it. Through experience of the text, the user gains increasing control of it as they understand the value of each word, and can predict with increasing accuracy the way the poem/game will proceed, while recognizing that an element of uncertainty is involved. The element of competition quickly creates a narrative.

With its random-generation and interactivity, Stud Poetry is authored by Niemi without being controlled by him. He uses internet poker as a form, as a print poet might use a sonnet, but his is the more radical utilisation as it challenges what can be conceived of as literature, and where ‘the text’ may be in a work of this kind. His poem/game embodies the challenge which electronic literature poses to print literature, and should be recognised with discussion at a major conference rather than becoming an anomaly or outlier of the Electronic Literature Collection.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013)

As a seemingly limitless and comprehensive resource, UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) has put together a map of the past hundred or so years of ‘experimental’ writing, film, video, and sound art. It resembles the archive in its breadth and depth, in its relentless collecting, in its inherent totalizing tendencies. My argument is that UbuWeb, while not an ‘archive’ per se, does have a cataloging logic, though it is not apparent, and that its specific logic is based on the commodification of the artwork and the effects of that commodification on its exhibition. To understand that logic, I want to situate UbuWeb at the latest point in a series of discontinuous institutions and discourses that have all taken the ‘artwork’ as their object. By understanding the how artwork’s relationship to power is mediated by a historically developing series of institutions (royal art collection, national patrimony, public museum, commodified gallery), we can understand how these institutions function based on a legitimating logic that is shifting from sovereign power to disciplinary power to securitizing power and how each institution deploys a certain concept of the artwork specific to each regime of power. By contextualizing UbuWeb in the genealogy of the exhibition of artworks, it will be possible to reconceptualize the ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ works of the last century (those represented by UbuWeb) beyond the inside/outside binary that justifies the current discourse surrounding them. The archive, while undergoing many crises not unrelated to the conceptualist crises of the postmodern gallery, can provide an interesting alternative to the aesthetic-driven, galley-like organization principle that keeps UbuWeb from making good on its promise to be a space for utopian politics free from market constraints.