This exhibit acknowledges the wide range of community practices converging and sharing reflections, tools and processes with electronic literature, as they challenge its ontological status. Implying an existing set of relationships, communities, such as those represented in this exhibit - the Artists’ Books, ASCII Art, net Art, Hacktivism/Activism, Performance Art, Copy Art, Experimental Poetry, Electronic Music, Sound Art, Gaming, and Visual Arts communities - share a common aesthetic standpoint and methods; but they are also part of the extremely multiple and large community of electronic literature. Our aim is to figure out the nature and purposes of this dialogue, apprehending, at the same time, their fundamental contributions to electronic literature itself.
Communities: Signs, Actions, Codes is articulated in three nuclei: Visual and Graphic Communities; Performing Communities; and Coding Communities. Each nucleus is porous, given that some works could be featured in several nuclei. Because it is necessary to negotiate the time-frame, locations, situations and genealogies of electronic literature, this collection of works expands the field’s approaches by proposing a critical use of language and code — either understood as computational codes, bibliographical signs, or performative actions. Therefore, the exhibit adopts both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, presenting works from the 1980s onwards, and showing the diversity of art communities working in nearby fields which, at close-range, enrich the community/ies of electronic(s) literature(s), either in predictable or unexpected ways. Distributed authorship and co-participant audience are key in this exhibit.
(Source: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)