polyphony

The question of what are the aesthetic- politics of electronic literature in Latin America, constitutes the point of departure of this research. In this paper I aim to discuss about this issue regarding the electronic novel “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier. Using macromedia director, this polyphonic novel was presented to the public for the first time in 2000 and it is available on internet since 2007. It was included in the 2010 second volume of electronic literature presented by the Electronic Literature Organization, in the category of multilingual or non-English narratives. The analysis considers two dimensions, the modes of production of electronic texts and its forms of reception. The first dimension — production— is related to the decisions of the authors about aesthetics, levels of interaction/participation of the readers and technologies used to produce the texts. The second dimension — reception — refers to two “sub-dimensions”. The first one is the creation of alternative ways of distribution/circulation of the texts (mainly internet). The second is related to changes on reading behavior and the development of creative communities (or collective-interpretative intelligences), which are directly related to a conception of the relation with technology contained in posthumanist theories. Terry Eagleton poses that modern literature has a contradictory function. On one side, literature cannot be detached from the ideological forms belonging to the modern society of classes. Thus, literature reflects the context where it is produced and, to some extent, it reproduces that context. On the other side, literature creates spaces that allow us to think in alternatives and transgressions to the dominant contexts we are living in. The ways electronic texts in Latin America are developed reflect Terry Eagleton’s proposals. In summary, from the analysis of Chiappe and Meier’s electronic novel we propose a definition of a mode of literary production characterized by the uses of the new digital technologies that derived into practices of distribution and reception, related to forms of appropriation of these technologies, which are creating cultural meanings and social relationships in the context of informational capitalism.

Conference presentation proposal for ELO 2014 “Hold the Light”

Unprecedented access to real-time social data is changing the way we tell stories about ourselves. Social data is being utilised within a wide variety of electronic literature and media art from Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Room to the recent explosion in Twitter bots which remix digital text. These practices have been designated under the rubric “environmentally interactive” digital writing (Wardrip-Fruin 2010, p. 41). Such writing often takes the form of a data stream (Manovich 2012), representing content as a chronological flow of units of information, with the newest information being most salient.

In this presentation, we propose to examine an opposing tendency which narrativizes data rather than representing it as a stream. Such work mounts a challenge to the claim by Manovich (2000) that narrative is being displaced as a symbolic form in new media objects. Examples range from the 2013 generative novel-writing competition NaNoGenMo, which featured a number of long-form works produced via data remixing, to older projects such as the Impermanence Agent by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al. We will share excerpts from our own work which has narrativized social data, including Enquire Within Upon Everybody, a public art project presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2013; and the art installation Everything Is Going To Be OK :).

The split between data stream and narrative reinscribes the famous formalist distinction between raw story elements or fabula, and plot or syuzhet (Shklovsky 1965). Works representing data as a stream typically present a time-ordered fabula; they are closely aligned with the conceptual poetry tradition, which emphasises verbatim transcription. By contrast, narrativized works freely reorder data to suit the purposes of plot construction and often interpolate fictive text. The two types of work also sharply diverge in how they are consumed. The former tend to invite audiences to browse, skim or adopt a distant reading posture (Moretti 2013); some purely conceptual works are not even intended to be read at all (Goldsmith 2011). The latter often invite readers to engage closely and thoroughly.

We will also draw attention to two other formal qualities of data-driven storytelling: polyphony, the deployment of multiple characters’ perspectives alongside that of the author (Bakhtin 1984), and heteroglossia, the use of multiple patterns of speech and discourse to express authorial intentions (Bakhtin 1981). Originally identified in the context of the 19th century novel, these emerge in far more radical forms in data-driven digital works, which often mediate the voices of living human subjects. We will show how polyphony and heteroglossia are enabling a unique interplay between authorial voice and the voices of real-life characters.

We contend that long-form, data-driven narrative holds exciting promise and merits further exploration. It allows readers to engage with data not in a distant or discontinuous way, but to experience it as an immersive story. It also enables authors to offer novel insights into the interrelationships between data; to explicitly critique dominant discourses and not merely recontextualise them; and to construct metanarratives which help us make sense of the stories around us.

(Source: Author's introduction)