literary experiment

Jessica Pressman is associated professor at San Diego State University (USA) and a member of the Board of Direction of the Electronic Literature Organization. This interview is focused on her work in the academic field, her essays and her books as well as the project of the Electronic Literature Organization.

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.

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

Rui Torres is Associate Professor at University Fernando Pessoa (UFP) in Porto and also author of several works of digital poetry. In this interview he explains how he started working in this field and where his inspiration comes from. Furthermore he explains why he sees the works of electronic literature as literary experiments and his concept of aesthetics taking in account his privilege for multimedia and the active participation of the readers in the creation of some his works. In the end he makes some considerations about preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature.

The e-book has been launched several times during the last decades and the book’s demise has often been predicted. Furthermore networked and electronic literature has already established a long history. However, currently we witness several interesting artistic and literary experiments exploring the current changes in literary culture – including the media changes brought about by the current popular break-through of the e-book and the changes in book trading such as represented by e.g. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks – changes that have been described with the concept of controlled consumption (Striphas, 2011, Andersen & Pold, 2012). In our paper we want to focus on how artistic, e-literary experiments explore this new literary culture through formal experiments with expanded books and/or artistic experiments with the post-print literary economy. Examples of the first are Konrad Korabiewski and Litten’s multimedia art book Affected as Only a Human Can Be (Danish version, 2010, English version forthcoming) and our own collaborative installation Coincidentally the Screen has turned to Ink (presented at the Remediating the Social conference, Edinburgh 2012). Examples of the second are Ubermorgen’s The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb which will be released in January 2013 and is an intervention into the Amazon Kindle book production and distribution platform with a new form of literature generated from YouTube comments. The paper will discuss how such projects explore how literature currently becomes part of a post-capitalistic production process through controlled consumption platforms. If the printing press was the first conveyor belt and thus an integral part of developing industrial capitalism (such as famously argued by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter J. Ong), then this paper will aim to sketch out how contemporary literary technologies is integral to develop and reflect critically on post- or semio-capitalism, and furthermore we will discuss how literature functions in a post-industrial software culture such as the one presented by Apple, Amazon and Google.

The first experiments in digital literary forms started as early asthe 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that,according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered asa ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in theproliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexingcreative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving accessto hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000,digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked bythe creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation andselection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they arenecessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is toprovide a critical discussion of these criteria.

I will first compare the corpus of two founding initiatives, i.e. collections1 and 2 edited by the Electronic Literature Association(ELO)1 and the ‘improved sheets’ published online by theCanadian nt2 laboratory2, in order to bring out a list of workscommonly considered as ‘worthy’ by these communities. I willthen put the positions of four important players of this field intoperspective: Bertrand Gervais (director of the nt2 lab), ScottRettberg (co-editor of the first ELO collection and leader of theEuropean ELMCIP project devoted to digital literature3), LauraBorràs (co-editor of the second ELO collection and director ofthe Hermeneia research group4) and Brian Kim Stefans (co-editor of the second ELO collection, and author of various workspresented in the ELO collections and nt2 ‘improved sheets’).In spring 2011, I questioned them about their initiatives and theirselection criteria. In the ‘crossed corpus’ of ELO and nt2 works,I will finally identify these selection criteria through a semiopragmaticmethodology.

Source: author's introduction to article