failure

his presentation addresses the fate of 1990s pioneering programs of electronic literature during the 2000s. What happened to 1990s electronic literature aesthetic theories and programs once its distribution shifted from floppy disks and CD-ROMs to the Internet? How did early authors of electronic literature revisit their work in light of the ubiquity of the Internet as a form of writing?

Jean-Pierre Balpe’s pioneering work in text generation (1985–2000) makes him a “canonic” author of electronic literature. His work was distributed through the main French venues for electronic literature (exhibits by the Alamo, publications in alire and DOC(K)S), and he directed one of the first academic departments of hypermedia in France. Yet, the majority of his early work in text generation has disappeared from the literary scene as its data storage deteriorated and is now in the hands of a few media archivists. More importantly, his works took a spectacular turn when he started the creation of La Disparition du Général Proust (2005–2014), a seemingly endless production of narrations written under various alter egos, and dispersed on many different blogs. One of the many perplexing aspects of this ongoing work is the presence of generated texts recycled from Balpe’s early text generators. Balpe’s text generators were distributed in the 1990s as computer programs, entrusting readers with an exploratory and configurative function, and promising the advent of a new form of literature reinvigorated by a computerized analog to speech. In contrast, the generated texts found in La Disparition du Général Proust are inert pieces of writing, dispersed wastes of obsolete generators, ruins of a former aesthetic dream. The idealistic prospect of literary text generation seems to have made room to a different form of generation made possible by blogs: the recycling of literary waste. A new understanding of the electronic in literature emerges from Balpe’s late work, one that recycles early electronic literature into an aesthetic of ruins, unoriginality, and obsessive hoarding, illustrating the paradoxical power of literature to repurpose failure into poetry.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This essay was presented as the keynote talk at the 2014 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Milwaukee, WI. In this keynote, Illya Szilak highlights the power of “minor forms” in digital literature. Through a wide-ranging survey of works, Szilak identifies the tendency for “failure” in electronic literature as its most powerful feature: its capacity to deterritorialize the parameters of discourse and expand the potential of subjectivity in the process.

Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. "The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." ~ Craig Dworkin

Limbo, released in 2010, is a puzzle platformer that features a player character who awakes in Limbo, on the edge of hell. He must traverse a world of bear traps, giant killer spiders, and spinning gears. As with any game, the player of Limbo will necessarily fail while solving the game’s puzzles; however, this game makes those failures especially painful. The player character is decapitated, impaled, and dismembered as the player attempts to solve each puzzle. The game’s monochromatic artwork, its vague storyline, and these gruesome deaths meant that Limbo, predictably, found its way into various “games as art” conversations. However, this presentation asks whether Limbo can serve as a different kind of boundary object. Given its complete lack of text and its minimalist approach to storytelling, what is the status of Limbo as a literary object? Given Katherine Hayles’ arguments that the field of electronic literature is best served by expanding its perspective to the “electronic literary” and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s research on how both games and digital storytelling can be examined in terms of their expressive processes, it is relatively uncontroversial to consider Limbo in the theoretical context of electronic literature. However, what would such an approach yield? What are the literary traits of such a game, and how might we analyze such traits while ensuring that the game’s procedural expressions and computational expressions are given their due? In short, how might we consider Limbo as having one foot in each world, videogames and the electronic literary, and what would such a consideration provide scholars in electronic literature and game studies?

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/limbo-and-edge-liter… )

"Jumping to Occlusions" is perhaps the first thorough statement of a poetics of online space. In the present hypertextual trickster edition, a lively investigative language of the link is employed helping to develop this essay's written argument through its own hypertextuality -- its jumps, sidebars, graphics, embedded sound files, misleadings, and other features. This essay explores electronic technology's opportunities for the production, archiving, distribution, and promotion of poetic texts but most importantly, argues that electronic space is a space of writing. For previous excursions into this a written terrain of links and jumps one need only look to the language experiments of certain poets writing in this century. Such poets include Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Language-related experimentalists such as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Susan Howe. Electronic writing, like previous instances of writing, engages the double "mission" of writing evident in some of this experimental poetry: to varying degrees, writing is about a subject, but also about the medium through which it is transmitted. If relevant previous poetic experiments involved the exploration of language as physical, what are the physical parameters of webbed online space? Texts move not only within themselves but into socially-charged externalities, "a webbed interference of junk mail, 'frets' of information, systemic failures, ephemera, disunion. There is no resting place -- only the incessantly reconstituted links dissolving each time the reading is entered." The physical features most up for grabs? These include online hypertext itself, a mass of fits and starts. Links are at the center of an electronic hypertextual writing and links introduce disjunction. This post-typographic and non-linear disunion is no news to poetics. It is through a poetics of experimental poetries that a framework is sketched and progress is made towards the building of an electronic poetics, one where experiments that changed poetic language may inform the electronic air we breathe.

(Author's abstract in PMC)