translanguage

Electronic poetry encompasses works very different from one another. Talking about electronic poetry as if it were just one creative form seems to be inaccurate. On the other hand the interest to be had in electronic poetry seems to reside exactly in the diversity which electronic poetry has to offer to its reader.
This paper will feature an empirical approach to electronic poetry. The aim of this paper is a two-fold goal. On the one hand it will study the “development” of electronic poetry, and our hypothesis is: the text is disappearing in e-poetry; and on the other it will compare e-poems written in different languages to see if there are differences of style in composing e-poetry.
By comparing some of the e-poems published in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 and 2 we will try to see if there have been any changes in creating electronic poetry in more than a decade (“Windsound”, by John Cayley was first published in 1999); and if yes how e-poetry has changed and is changing. The two mentioned goals are strictly connected since in the Second Volume of the Electronic Literature Collection 7 languages are represented by works, besides in English and French, in Catalan, Dutch, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Do different cultural backgrounds and literary traditions still affect the creation of a kind of poetry that for its medium seems to be global? And if so, how?
By using the descriptive approach systematic aspects of electronic poetry will be singled out in order to trace the changes in e-poetry. A hermeneutic and analytic work will also be done. Finally, by locating rhetorical figures, new media-figures, emerging aesthetic forms we will try to describe the new text puts forward by e-poetry.

(Source: ELO 2013 Author's abstract)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )