Italian electronic literature

In 2006 Tommaso Lisa stated that since Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I, notmuch has been done much to elaborate creative synergies between poetry andcomputer in Italy. In fact, the absence of Italy - homeland of Calvino, Marinettiand Toti - from major anthologies, collections, and exhibitions in the field of e-litconfirms such a bitter statement. But it is still the case? What is the current stateof Italian electronic literature? What should be the reasons for its absence on theinternational scene? What actions are being made and what still could be madeto spread electronic literature in Italy?

The paper is primarily articulated according to those questions, on which it intends to introduce a critical thought. To start, an attempt will be made to give an overview of Italian electronic literature, chiefly focusing on generative experiments. After a brief introduction on the precursors of generative dynamics, the analysis will focalize on the first example of Italian electronic literature: the aforementioned poetic combinatorial experiment made by Balestrini in 1961 using an IBM 7070 calculator. The work will be placed in the international and national context, in order to identify its affinities with coeval experiments – from Love Letters by Christopher Strachey (1952) to Autopoeme by Gerhard Stickel (1966) - as well as its role within the cultural milieu of the Sixties in Italy. A close look on the development of the Italian poetry generators which is the most vivid and dynamic field of artistic research in Italy nowadays, will be of help to understand the importance of Balestrini’s legacy. The analysis will then concentrate on some examples of multimedia generative poems up to the experiments conducted in the fields of chatbots and storytelling which exploits the capabilities of AI. Finally, an attempt will be made to extend the spectrum to generative art projects more closely related towards visual and sound aspect, as well as to generative design, projects that hybridize gaming and 3D technology, or explore the new frontiers of Cognitive Storytelling.

The paper aims primarily to provide room for further comparative studies, secondly to investigate untold archeologies between electronic literature and other expressive and material practices (Visual Poetry, Design, Marketing) and thirdly to reflect on the potential - but also the difficulties - that a social and cultural practice such as electronic literature may face in contexts like the Italian one.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

A deep analysis on the birth of Italian Electronic Literature in the 90's, with a special focus on "Ra-Dio", the first Italian hypertextual novel, written by Lorenzo Miglioli.

The work aims also to analyze the development of electronic literature by examining the work of associations such as ELO and ELMCIP, and to highlight the connections with Italo Calvino's postmodernist theories about combinatory literature.

Riccardo Giovanni Milanesi is creator and author of the two Web Series L’Altra (The Other Girl, 2011) and FableGirls (2012). In thi interview he explains how the work for the realization of L’Altra were carried out, an online project which was co-created with users/readers on FaceBook e published in real time. Moreover he announces the new Web Serie Vera Bes (2013).

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)

TheCoevas Strumentist di Parole is an group of authors or, as they define themselves, a literary band which created an interactive novel called TheCoevasIo interattivo (TheCoevas I interactive). The novel which was published in 2011 on the blog of the authors is accompanied by a medium-length documentary and is also published in form of printed book. Another characteristic of the novel is the variety of the online versions: iWork Apple, Powerpoint and pdf. As they explain in the interview, the project as a whole is conceived as an experiment of different ways of expressions and the work of writing is similar to the musical composition of a band. The very freedom of creativity is granted to the readers who can choose various audio-visual effects and narrative paths following their emotional and individual choices according to the demands of extemporaneity.

This paper aims at analyzing the historical evolution of poetry experiments in Italian and Portuguese languages. Poetry has always been interested in experimenting with new ways of writing; however the computer and internet media make the experiments with the language a basic question. The first part of this paper will refer to a historical approach tracing the most important breakpoints in the poetry development in Italian and Portuguese languages during the last century. We will focus above all on Italian Futurism and visual poetry and we will connect Italian visual poetry tradition to Brazilian concrete poetry to identify the main characteristics and to define the links between these movements and the contemporaneous epoetry environment. In the second part some Italian Portuguese e-poetries will be presented and analyzed. A close-reading of some famous works will be proposed trying to identify the strategic elements which constitute the poetics of digital text - the infographic images, the poeticity of the elements, theirs [il]legibility, the pluri-signification of the relation image. The third part will allow us to observe if there are some distinctiveness in Italian and Portuguese works due to historical reasons and traditions.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).