individuation

This paper will explore subversive practices of electronic literature as contexts for the experience of agency within various systems of control. Through close readings of covert communication practices in prison narratives alongside the works like Rob Wittig’s Netprovs, Richard Holeton’s slideshow narratives, Nick Montfort’s !#, and Darius Kazemi’s “Tiny Subversions,” this essay will consider poetic interventions against media culture, professionalization, and cybernetic systems in relation to the codes, mnemonic devices, and flights of fancy used by political prisoners and POWs to maintain identity against isolation, torture, and manipulation. In particular, this paper will touch down on the question of “the ends of electronic literature” by exploring the interrelational aspect of writing as a process that is primarily concerned with the creator imagining an other (an “author” reaching out to a “reader,” in the conventional literary sense) and the user finding meaning in the text (the reader having an encounter with the work of literature).

In addition to the mediation of relationships via the text, this paper will also consider various boundaries constructed to restrict communication (imposed by social, technical, and penal systems that attempt to discipline subjects and restrict communication to official channels and approved topics). Further, this paper will consider the micro-practices of resistance, the absurd logics of creativity, eccentricity, and interpretation that generate pleasure for the individual reader while guarding subjective practices from what Lyotard has called “the inhuman.” The goal of this paper is to consider (via electronic literature) “the human” as that which is not only essentially without essence (to paraphrase Stiegler), but which actively strives to maintain individuation against control.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

In 2009 Nick Montfort wrote a short program--first in Python and later in Javascript--that generated an infinite nature poem inspired by the stunning Taroko Gorge in Taiwan. While Montfort never explicitly released the code of “Taroko Gorge” under a free software license, it was readily available to anyone who viewed the HTML source of the poem’s web page. Lean and elegantly coded, with self-evident algorithms and a clearly demarcated word list, “Taroko Gorge” lends itself to reappropriation. Simply altering the word list (the paradigmatic axis) creates an entirely different randomly generated poem, while the underlying sentence structure (the syntagmatic axis) remains the same. Very quickly Scott Rettberg remixed the original poem, replacing its naturalistic vocabulary (“crags,” “basins,” “rocks,” “mist,” and so on) with words drawn from what Rettberg imagined to be a counterpoint to Montfort’s meditative nature scene--a garage in Toyko, cluttered with consumer objects. J.R. Carpenter followed up Rettberg’s “Tokyo Garage” in 2010 with “Gorge,” a remix that relentlessly depicts the act of devouring food, and “Whisper Wire,” a remix that haunts Montfort’s source code with strange sounds, disembodied voices and ghost whispers. In 2011 an uncoordinated series of other remixes of “Taroko Gorge” appeared: J.R. Carpenter’s “Along the Briny Beach”; Talan Memmott’s cynically nostalgic “Toy Garbage”; Eric Snodgrass’s fluxus influenced “Yoko Engorged”; Maria Engberg’s campus parody “Alone Engaged”; Mark Sample’s Star Trek tribute “Takei, George”; Flourish Klink’s erotic fanfic “Fred & George”; and Andrew Plotkin’s meta-remix “Argot Ogre, OK!”Aside from a common DNA in Montfort’s original Javascript code, these remixes share other similarities, such as the title wordplay, often referencing the original title either homonymously or alliteratively; the list of crossed-out names of previous appropriators that appears on the upper right side of the screen; and of course, the dizzying repetition with a difference of a poem that will never stand still nor ever end. Yet despite these similarities, the various remixes are palpably distinct from one another, both stylistically and thematically. This dynamic between appropriation and individuation suggests that there is much to learn from the example of “Taroko Gorge” and its remixes. To this end, this roundtable will bring together many of the authors of the “Taroko Gorge” remixes. While each author will introduce his or her work with a 1-2 minute artist’s statement, the goal of this roundtable is not to dwell on any specific variation, but to discuss the implications of this work upon the broader spheres of text generation, electronic literature, and remix culture. After a series of prompts by the session organizer (Mark Sample), the audience will be invited to join the discussion. Note that two of the participants (Carpenter and Engberg) will be presenting their artist statements via teleconferencing.