Literary Aspects of the New Media Art Works by Jaka Železnikar and Srečo Dragan

E-literature dwells in the multi-media environment of the Internet, for which connectivity to other virtual and real phenomena is of the greatest importance, since it brings the literary components into close relations and interdependencies with languages of other disciplines. The visual languages of art and mass-media culture give shape and context to the literary content. Moreover, the programmability of e-literature references a wide variety of disciplines, e. g. logic, mathematics, computer and information science ... The social exchange and the performative character of communication is manifest especially in the projects that involve digital communities. The paper will present several e-literary projects by two established Slovene new media artists, in a time span of fifteen years of their exploration of the medium. Jaka Železnikar is a poet of e-literature. He writes literary algorithms and codes interventions into the user-browser communication. His e-poems involve words as well as they draw attention to the ways how we communicate with online content that is organized on the mainstream web 2.0 platforms. His poetic expression and activist observations are integrally encoded into the new medium of e-literature. Srečo Dragan is a new media artist whouses literary excerpts and practices of reading to build new models of techno-modified experiences. He focuses on the discursive potential of each medium as he constructs the integrated post-media projects that connect real-time streams of images, dialogic exchange of words, culturally coded communication schemes, online communication and networked mobile devices. The two authorial approaches, Železnikar's and Dragan's, emphasize two starting points that converge in the e-literature domain: while Železnikar brings together “traditional” literature and computer and web-based creativity, Dragan's textual works stem from his visual arts and conceptualist background.