Poetic

The umbrella term ‘electronic literature’ arches broadly over a multitude of digital art forms, so long as they satisfy the criteria ‘electronic’, and ‘literature’. However, it is this paper’s primary contention that the extent of the term’s coverage is delimited by whatever has already been archived. Understandings of what constitute ‘literature’ and the ‘literary’ are manifold and include concepts of the letterary (also as in ‘belles lettres’), the poetic, the lyrical – but also, the canonical, and the institutional. This paper will argue that that which can now be pointed to by literary and digital humanities scholars, and called ‘electronic literature’, is in large part only recognisable because archivisation has been used in its regard as an instrument for institutionalisation and canon-creation. This body of work is also only findable because archivisation has preserved it, faced as it is with the constant threats of platform erosion, and obsolescence sooner rather than later. Archivisation is therefore both a problem of media, and a problem of selection. Indeed, it is one because it is the other: electronic literature must be archived based on practical merits, like the feasibility of emulating, migrating, or documenting works; as well as conventional merits, such as iconicity, or importance for anchoring the praxis of electronic literature within a scholarly tradition. That which is less iconic, little studied, or a repetition of what has already been done, is consigned to the peripheries of the field to await oblivion, its fate sealed by a platform that is intractable and unamenable to archivisation. The peripheries teem with relatively unknown works that nonetheless speak for the potential evolution of the field. It is one such work that this paper will examine, in order to enable the final argument: that recent undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the term ‘electronic literature’ (reminiscent of those felt in the early years of the field) are now perceivable because there is a need to expand the horizons of what electronic literature is now; how is it increasingly practised and theorised. As ‘a periodic snapshot of an emergent field in motion’ (Scott Rettberg), the canons of electronic literature must move with the field, its evolution snapped – albeit selectively – by the archive. Some of what is at the peripheries ought to be pulled into the center by the archive’s gravity if ‘electronic literature’, or whatever it’s called now, is to stand the twin tests of time and nomenclature.

This paper invites the “dangerous vertige” once brought on by the “endless oscillation of an intersubjective demystification” at the heart of the crisis of literary criticism famously illuminated by Paul de Man in 1967. I investigate two conventions of writing e-lit criticism (and digital art criticism). The first utilizes the figure of the participating observer/reader in a phenomenological narrative that serves as a textual or formal analysis of the primary object. The conjuring of such a figure is often necessary to the articulation of e-lit’s capacity to deliver us from a finite and single text, in a way that hearkens back to critiques of the fallacy of a finite and single interpretation.

The second is seen in technical descriptions of how e-lit works in its mechanical, electronic, computational, or otherwise technological being, and this technical writing too serves in the place of a formal textual analysis. The anima of techne displaces both human subjectivity and technological instrumentality at the center of the poetics of e-lit. Even as the deconstruction of the sovereignty and authority of the subject opened up new worlds of textuality across the disciplines, especially within the social sciences, de Man cautioned that we might see in “demystification the most dangerous myth of all.” For de Man, the proximity of crisis to criticism is preferable (or less boring, as he puts it) in that it forces us to scrutinize the act of writing at its origin. 

In this context, I explore the possibilities of writing e-lit criticism back into crisis, as it were, through an analysis of the interactive XYZT exhibit by Adrian M and Claire B (including Letter Tree, Shifting Clouds, Discrete Collisions, and Anamorphosis in Space). I consider how the act of perception, which replaces the act of interpretation, plays with gaps in expectation, variable speeds in attention, gaps between proprioception and kinaesthesia, intentions and desires to move and to receive feedback form the screen and the space of projected light, and the rhythms of an individual body’s speed, slowness, and stillness, as well as the composition of multiple bodies and their aggregate over the duration of the installation. On the one hand, the space of interaction might be seen as a correlate to the gap once discovered within the text, leading us once again to a cultural writing of difference. On the other, such acts of interpretation may be superseded by other possibilities of reading and writing opened up by e-lit. In fact, we might easily imagine that e-lit criticism already exists more effectively and efficiently within e-lit itself, among powerful capacities to capture and analyze data. The best e-lit criticism may already be contained within e-lit itself.

At this point, it may be necessary to pursue a different line of questioning about the space of scholarship, the social significance of e-lit criticism, and the ongoing and often uninvestigated institution of literary criticism within whose auspices e-lit scholars continue to operate. In my own attraction to the “dangerous vertige,” I rediscover the joys of writing (e-lit) criticism, for without crisis, there ensues a certain boredom.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Murmurs seeks to gather and link texts written with a poetic intention and available in the net in order to present them in a consistent form within the outline of a hypertext. These texts will be identified by an algorithm and interconnected through semantic links generated with the use of coincident words.

Thanks to this process, the texts with poetic format, already published online, will become a sole extensive and surfable piece that can be analyzed and can receive feedback from blogs, twits, and by any other indexable means. This way we seek to generate a piece of e-poetry by uniting those expressive texts in the net that cannot individually be classified as e-poetry. In order to achieve this we will use algorithmic processes, databases, crawlers for indexing, Big Data analysis, all presented as self-generated hypertexts.

The study of these texts through systems of computer linguistics will allow finding coincidences in the use of language with expressive intentions in the net. In a second moment, an API (application programming interface) will open and allow the free processing of the information gathered.

Murmurs dreams of waking up one day and finding an ocean of poems united by transparent threads of saliva through which we may roam from one brilliant moment encountered to another one especially felt by somebody in some corner of the net for you.

In this paper, we will address all the theoretical aspects of the project and the reasons for its implementation. Starting from the analysis of (1) the aesthetics of written poetry in digital format and the characteristics that make it possible to be analyzed through algorithms. After this we will review the way (2) the isolation of poetic texts in the net appears as a phenomenon that weakens their possibilities to be found by potential readers.

Later on, we will address (3) the text as a coinciding correlation which will open the doors for a solution out of the nature of the very poetic digital text, which in turn will allow us to consider (4) the “findability” as a new paradigm replacing the editorial distribution and (5) the relevance as the new utopia of the poetic text, thus allowing a better access to these text thanks to a unifying proposal. Finally, once we have achieved this we can present (6) the computation as a tool for the literary criticism of online poetic texts where we will see the implications of an articulate poetry corpus in digital format ready for the academic analysis.

The final aspect goes deep in (7) our proposal where we present the tools we will use, the key factors, the progress of the project up to the current moment, and the possibilities for cooperation in the community of developers. Musarañas is the prototype of Murmurs, created out of a database of the author’s poems, which allows us to test the basic functions such as the style of navigation, indexing, managing tools for tagging and the bunches of words necessary.

Currently, there is a functional prototype of the tagging system available at http://labs.phantasia.pe/musarana/.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Since the early 2000s, media artists have explored the potentials of location-based technologies, developing locative media projects “in which geographical space becomes a canvas” (Hemment 2006). Artists both within and without the locative field, such as Teri Rueb (USA), Blast Theory (UK), Jeremy Hight (USA), Janet Cardiff (Canada), Chris Caines (Australia) and Paul Carter (Australia) have developed creative works involving narrative, textuality and place-based storytelling within a site-specific context. In many of these works, real world spaces are annotated and augmented with a range of artistic contents – primarily audio and/ or textual – and mediated by mobile devices.

Certain earlier, pre-digital practices also involve the augmentation of real world spaces with cultural contents, such as various pilgrimage and walking practices involving the spatialisation of narrative and the virtual annotation of the world. These highly embodied and imaginative site-specific practices involve landscape operating as an interface to “an enhanced, symbolic world” (Czegledy 2005), involving “stories we can trace with our feet as well as our eyes” (Solnit 2001) and resonating with contemporary techniques of spatialisation, annotation and augmentation within digital contexts.

The paper will discuss my 2013 locative media work Notes for Walking (the space in-between time), a locative narrative / augmented reality work that was exhibited in the Sydney Festival 2013, a major Australian arts festival. Notes for Walking annotated 13 video notes (comprised of text, sound and moving image) to an abandoned naval fort at Middle Head on Sydney Harbour by using locative and AR technologies, and was experienced as a walked, locative work by audiences using their own smartphones and a free, downloadable project app. The project drew audiences of over 5000 people to Middle Head during the Sydney Festival period in January 2013, and was downloaded to over 2,600 mobile devices in this time.

Notes for Walking emerged from extended research into pilgrimage and related walking practices; in particular the 88 Temple Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku, Japan where the 88 temples ringing the island of Shikoku operate as a large-scale spatial narrative. The research revealed a complex, multilayered system of narrative spatialisation and annotated, augmented landscape within the Shikoku pilgrimage; including a straightforward annotative level in which temples are associated with miracle tales via oral history, and a more participatory, imaginative level in which haiku-like poems or go-eika – written in second person, present tense – act as specific textual triggers at each site, mediating the participant’s live experience of the landscape as a poetic and highly embodied technique of participation.

This research – and especially the discovery of the poetic device of the go-eika – provided a textual and creative framework with which I approached the conceptualisation and development of Notes for Walking. Given the large audience numbers and high level of participation in the festival, the approach appears to have proved engaging for contemporary audiences and may have relevance in a broader locative media and locative narrative context.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)