mashup

Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.The Fugue* book (ELC II; 2008) turns the reader into the author and protagonist of the same story he is reading and his real-life friends turn into fictional characters. Both obsessively harass him in a violent, sensual plot: with crimes, envy (including literary one), false attributions of authorship and bitter disputes in forums and social networks. Technically, the work is based on the idea of remixing and "mashup" and integrates elements as diverse as the Facebook APIs, applications in PHP and Javascript languages, automatic emails, PDF self-generation or speech synthesis. You can see a video of the work (https://youtu.be/m4UW5uo_H4M) which cannot be read right now due to the obsolescence of the Adoble Flash software.Technologies and platforms in this work are related to creation, not to edition or distribution, which supposes main problems and diverse derivatives of the technologies, like the need of continuous technological update, costs, dependence on the work to the availability of the technology and of the platforms, like for example, to other people's conditions, subjection to technological evolution of the platforms and the introduction of third parties, the big platforms, in the very heart of the works. This literary fiction is constructed with interaction, multimedia, language technologies, data obtained from the Internet and data provided by the reader, ingredients all of which involve well-known and used technologies and platforms.However, the reading pact that introduces us to fiction, reconfigures these platforms along different reading paths. The use of the wide range of platforms builds the plausibility of the stories and ironically places them at the center of the digital landscape in a critical review of the platforms themselves. The theme is distilled, refined, and focuses on the dehumanization of relationships between people, the text-context relationship, public and private space, the real self and masks (authorship, deception and plagiarism), gender literary texts and their analogy with the types of platforms… Texts and spaces related to a communicative situation completely out of literary creation make it possible for all these fragments to function as parts of a single literary narrative.Reading The Fugue* book is an intelligent, amusing and critical experience, with the subtle background of the complexity of the human being able to create (the) networks with words. When digital accelerates the hybridization of the arts, only the centrality of the word defines literature.

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses. In the realm of digital writing, there is a group of texts that seem to systematically depart from the supremacy of the author function. None of them makes this its objective nor its topic. It just happens that digital writings with a certain set of common features in their production and reception processes do away with the author function and allows to focus, as Foucault hypothesizes, on the modes of existence of these discourses, their origin and circulation, and their controller.

In my paper, I would like to look at the production and reception processes of a number of canonical digital literary texts, amongst them Toby Litt’s blog fiction Slice, the huge collaborative writing project A Million Penguins, Reneé Turner’s mash-up fiction She…, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and Charles Cumming’s Google-Maps mash-up The 21 Steps. They all share what I call delayed textonic authorship, i.e. contributions to and modification of the text that happen further to the end in the continuum of production and reception. They also share various expressions of uneasiness with traditional authorial roles and ultimately a departure from the supremacy of the author function. Looking at the primary texts, one can see various forms of disintegration of the author function, amongst them escape from one text into another, the indistinguishability of authors and characters, scolding of the authors by the editors, disorientation over the limits of one’s own text, and the renouncement of authorship.

In my paper, I would like to visualize the structural novelties in the production/reception processes of such texts by using the new model of the textual action space. I would also like to showcase the particularities of dealing with shifts of the author function and show that the departure from the author function does, indeed, not only allow us, as Foucault has predicted, to look at the modes of existence of discourses, their origin and circulation, and the underlying power structures; this is precisely what we are forced to look at when the author function is absent in aesthetic discourse. The insights gained by analysing electronic literature this way enable us to fundamentally rethink the possible commercial ends of literary production.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

I would like to present a concept which I fully developed in my contribution to the book edited by Nadine Desrochers and Daniel Apollon, Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture. In the text I propose a major reconfiguration of the main tenets of Genette’s paratextual theory in order to fully grasp the specific nature of today’s media environm
ent, where modes of circulation often seem more important than the digital content itself. I argue
that while the concept of paratext still provides a valuable framework of analysis, it should be reframed within the propositions of non-representational theory and read not only (or primarily) as relating to the set of subtexts, “parasitic” texts, annotations and markers accompanying the “main” text, but first and foremost as a semiotic-technological apparatus enabling the circulation of digital content across different media platforms. Such a re-reading also calls for an updated understanding of digital media, with more prominence given to relational characterics of the objects, as well as to fluidity and dynamics of the processes of circulation, rather than to digital “objects” as such. Therefore, choosing Google Maps mashups as my main example, I propose a shift in focus: from analysis of the textual (digital) objects themselves, which treats them as a set of discrete entities, to thinking about them first in terms of the possibilities they offer for the circulation of the content.

(Source: Author's Abstract)