media archeology

Since the 1960s, several Peruvian poets, insular and heirs to an experimental poetic tradition, created works with visual and verbal elements that advanced the presence of poetry in electronic media and platforms. Works such as those by Jorge Eielson, Raquel Jodorowsky, Ricardo Falla, Enrique Verástegui, César Toro Montalvo or Juan Ramirez Ruiz already showed in Peruvian creators an awareness of the existence and assimilation of electronic media to their productions based on references to circuits electronic (1964), computers (1973-1988) and formal and experimental games with the algorithm (1977). Works like these are used in key antecedents to reimagine the Peruvian poetic tradition, but, at the same time, they raise the need for an approach that analyzes and discusses the adoption of the media as part of poetic experimentation to understand, in all its dimensions, at the time of the internet boom and its platformization, the work carried out in later decades by José Aburto with interactive poems using Flash (2000); Oswaldo Chanove through the possibilities of the hyperlink in a web platform (2001); Enrique Beó with hypertext poems in binary language through Wix and Issuu (2010); and Rafael García Godos with MVX0 a video game poem programmed in Unity (2017). Therefore, the objective of this panel is to show how, since the 2000s, Peruvian poets have inhabited digital platforms with works that used different technologies in trend, as practices related to what was previously developed by their peers in the materiality of paper. For this, our research will focus on this problem from a media archeology with two areas that must necessarily dialogue: discursive and digital. In the first case, to trace the insularity of these authors, we start from Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy as the study of a non-linear and heterogeneous history of knowledge, contextualized by power relations. In the second case, to show the jobs that were hosted on the Internet, we will use various rescue platforms such as wayback machine, for old websites; Ruffle, for work done in flash; and videos of the experience in the case of wix. The result of this work will be exposed in a data visualization on what we have called the origins of electronic poetry in Peru. In this way, we consider that a genealogical work must combine the apparatus of symbolic evaluation and the consequent use of platforms to counteract the absence of a critical and theoretical approach to this complex field, but also the obsolescence of technology.

Presentation by Piotr Marecki of UBU lab at Jagellionian University, discussion of different lab models for e-lit and digital culture.

Judy Malloy is a pioneer in the field of electronic literature. As she writes in this interview, she wrote the first hyperfiction in 1986 called “Uncle Rogers” a series of works of hypernarratives for Eastgate Systems, the first hypertext publishing house founded in 1982 in Watertown, Massachusetts (USA). The interview is a resume of her work as an author and visiting lecturer at Princeton University that still goes on as her latest publication in 2016 can prove.

The demoscene is a European subculture that gathers computer programmers, who generate computer art in real time, the origins of which date back to the 80s. The most important genre created by the scene are demos – programs of which the sole aim is to impress the audience and demonstrate the abilities of the computer and the programmer. The demos are created in real time during demoparties, their effects are generated by a processor processing input data according to the created algorithm. The demoscene and its works are examples of pioneer creative computing in the field of digital media, at the intersection of computer science, media art and underground subculture. The aim of this paper is to attempt a description of the literary esthetic of the demoscene in scene genres such as demos, real-time texts, interactive fiction or zines. Special attention will devoted to the analysis of these genres in from the perspective of camp, pastiche, trash, bad taste. The point of departure will be the activity of the group Hooy-Program, and one of its members, the demoscener Yerzmyey, the author of various works, including the work of interactive fiction The Road to Assland. The group is treated as characteristic of the general phenomenon. Demoscene creators, programmers, and computer geeks are both artists and programmers, who can appreciate the aesthetics of the programs written for demos and who are aware of the possibilities and limitations of the platforms they use. Platform studies methodology shall be applied to the study of the achievements of Yerzmyey, a scener working with the ZX Spectrum 48 and 128 from 1989, in order to enable focus on the material, formal and historical aspects of programming and language. Media archeology focusing on the textual aspect of the demoscene may be an important discovery for researchers of the beginnings of digital literature and genres of digital-born texts.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.

TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.

What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.

(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces is a media archeology of the interface. A critique of the "invisible" interface, the "magic" of iOS that "just works," Emerson analyzes how interfaces promote or occlude human agency in computational environments. Anti-telelogical in order to interrupt the "triumphalist" narratives of progress that can characterize much writing about media, Reading Writing Interfaces stages its four chapters and postscript ("The Googlization of Literature") as "ruptures" to emphasize failure as a key element of media development.

In Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Indistinguishable From Magic | Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier

Chapter 2: From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Chapter 3: Typewriter Concrete Poetry and Activist Media Poetics

Chapter 4: The Fascicle as Process and Product

Chapter 5: Postscript | The Googlization of Literature

Works Cited