scholarship

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 On the other, such acts of interpretation may be superseded by other possibilities of reading and writing opened up by e-lit.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)

Scholars of electronic literature explore complex multimodal works. However, when they go to report their research, they face the confines of print-style documents that force them to reduce their discussion materials to written descriptions and select still images. ACLS Workbench is a new online tool developed for the analysis of electronic literature and other digital objects. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the tool was created by Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer, built upon the ANVC Scalar platform.

The tool was developed to promote collaborative scholarship of electronic literature, offering several key affordances. First, scholars can upload and organize assets (such as video, images, and source code) for use in arguments. Second, scholars can annotate all of these assets. Third, scholars can weave these assets into threads of scholarly argument. But perhaps the most significant innovation especially for the development of the field is the ability to “clone” books of assets, so that new scholars can clone existing books of resources in order to build on previous scholarship. We hope that these affordances will make scholarly work in electronic literature much less about one-offs or magic shows (arguments where only the author has all the resources) and more about sustained and expanding scholarly work.

In this presentation, I will demo the platform, first described at ELO 2013 in Paris, and demonstrate some of the early explorations of electronic literature that have been conducted on this platform.

(ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper originates from a conference paper presented and published in the book collection OLE Officina di Letteratura Elettronica. The here presented paper publication appears with minor edits.German net literature had an early and very public start through competitions organized in 1996-8 by the major newspaper Die Zeit and IBM, but was declared dead or stillborn immediately afterwards. Consequently, net literature became a subject of controversy between artists, theorists, and literary critics from which not only a strong community evolved but also a literary system. In this system, competitions served as public, peer-reviewed mediators for net literature and became an important feature of “post-processing.” Since the end of the 90s however, German net literature became slowly invisible. The lack of public awareness of net literature is common to many countries. Post-processing is a key for public visibility and according to Siegfried J. Schmidt et al. an important component in a literary system. In search of reasons for the state of invisibility of German net literature, I analyze mechanisms of post-processing in our community, which I regard as a literary system. This descriptive synopsis is the first paper in an upcoming series that opens up questions towards the role of peer-review, public reception, and artists' community-building. 

Emerging media forms do not merely excite artists; they also inspire critics to develop innovative
scholarly works. For over seven years, the USC-based Vectors Journal has promoted webbased
scholarship by developing and publishing projects that utilize experimental design
interfaces, data structures, and digital authoring tools. In this presentation, Vectors’ Creative
Director Erik Loyer, Info Design Director Craig Dietrich, and 2011 Fellow Mark Marino will
present glimpses of critical works that use innovative platforms to explore their material.
Loyer will begin with a presentation that looks at several of his collaborations with scholars
to create the dynamic multimodal works of Vectors. Dietrich will follow with a look at the
new platform Scalar, a publishing platform based on Vectors’ workflows and Semantic Web
technology. Dietrich will also detail Magic, an experimental design fork of Scalar centered on
the presentation of software code. Marino will then present his Scalar piece based on the Magic
fork which analyzes a work of electronic literature, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, including
annotations of the tool’s code.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

In this talk, I introduce a new literary and arts collective, electronic text + textiles, whose members are exploring the convergence of written and material practices. While some associates create actual electronic textiles (the 'smart fabrics' produced by textile artist Zane Berzina in collaboration with materials scientists based in Greiz, Germany ), I myself have explored the text/textile connection as it manifests itself in writing produced within electronic environments. My online laboratory consists of two literary web sites, ebr (www.electronicbookreview.com), a literary journal in continuous production since 1995, and the Electronic Literature Directory (www.eliterature.org), a project that seeks not just to list works but to define an emerging field. Rather than regard these sites as independent or free-standing projects, I present their development in combination with the current (and similarly halting) development of semantically driven content on the Internet (e.g., The Semantic Web, or Internet 2.0). My purpose is to determine to what extent concepts can flow through electronic networks, as distinct from the predominant flow of information. The latter, in which documents are brought together by metatags, keywords, and hot links, is arguably destructive of literary value. Where tagging and linking depend on direct, imposed connectivity at the level of the signifier, the creation of literary value depends on suggestiveness, associative thought, ambiguity in expression and intent, fuzzy logic, and verbal resonance (where slight differences, not identifications among fixities, are the origin of meaning - "the difference that makes a difference," in Gregory Bateson's phrase; Emily Dickinson's expression of "internal difference / where themeanings are," and so forth). Conceived as a fusion of verbal instruction and iconography rather than a narrative reinforced, directed, or opposed by imagery, written texts on the Web can scarcely be expected to be read, considered, and interpreted as text. At a time when powerful and enforced combinations of image and text threaten to obscure the differential basis of meaning as well as the potential for bringing together, rather than separating, rhetorical modes, electronic text + textiles seeks to recognize and encourage the production of of nuanced, textured languages within electronic environments. I take ebr as my primary example. Consistent with language that emerged early in the development of the "web," I elaborate a vocabulary of running threads, folds, and textures rather than links and hotwords. The conceit of weaving, which was adopted as a visual metaphor in the early electronic book review interface design by Anne Burdick (ebr 2.0), has since developed (through the contribution of site architect Ewan Branda) in ways that affect the form and content of the journal, to the point where no single genre - criticism, fiction, poetry, advertising, visual arts - is ever presented apart from the others. Even the email messages announcing new material on the ebr site are a combination of pseudo-spam and poetry. ebr is not the only literary web site to have achieved a long-term online presence, though it is certainly one of the longest running. But where most established journals on the Internet have reproduced themselves by occupying ever more specific niches within the overall media ecology, ebr has remained open to the promise of media multiplicity. A look at the development of the interface, from version 1.0 in the year 1995 to the current, year-old version 4.0, reveals how the multiplicity of literary expressiveness can drive interface development, rather than the alternative where (in interfaces not designed with literary values in mind) expression is made to conform to categories and constraints imposed by commercial technologies.

German net literature had an early and very public start through competitions organized in 1996-8 by the major newspaper Die Zeit and IBM, but was declared dead or stillborn immediately afterwards. Consequently, net literature became a subject of controversy between artists, theorists, and literary critics from which not only a strong community evolved but also a literary system. In this system, competitions served as public, peer-reviewed mediators for net literature and became an important feature of “post-processing.” Since the end of the 90s however, German net literature became slowly invisible. The lack of public awareness of net literature is common to many countries. Post-processing is a key for public visibility and according to Siegfried J. Schmidt et al. an important component in a literary system. In search of reasons for the state of invisibility of German net literature, I analyze mechanisms of post-processing in our community, which I regard as a literary system. This descriptive synopsis is the first paper in an upcoming series that opens up questions towards the role of peer-review, public reception, and artists' community-building.