electropoetics
Gardening E-literature (or, how to effectively plant the seeds for future investigations on electronic literature)
In the course of her wide ranging review of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature, Anna Nacher offers a glimpse into "semi-peripheral avant-gardes" that are more open than other fields of digital culture to decolonization and not restricted to the Anglophone world.
Pitching the Poem-essay: Subversive Argument in the Work of Charles Bernstein
Circularity, performativity, authorial intervention, digressions, interruptions, collage, segmentation, prolific examples, line breaks and humor: Hazel Smith brings each of these approaches and stances to bear on Charles Bernstein's poetic essays and essayistic poetry. In the spirit of which, Smith presents her own essay in parallel sections. The main column advances her critical argument, while the second discontinuous column presents a "Deep Text" generated by Roger Dean, who applied the computer platform Python to word sequences from Smith's first column.
image: Charles Bernstein
Electronic Literature, or Whatever It’s Called Now: the Archive and the Field
A look at experimentation with crypto-machinic codes in Star Foster’s and David Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
image by flickr artist Art Hakker
The Anxiety of Imitation: On the “Boringness" of Creative Turing Tests
The authors speculate why some are bored by the goal of computational generation of "human-like" text. Inspired by Italo Calvino's alternative, minor strain in "Cybernetics and Ghosts," they argue that this kind of text generation provides an opportunity to destabilize as well as refine our sense of the differences between human and machine cognition.
The Digital Subject: From Narrative Identity to Poetic Identity?
Bouchardon and Mayer in this essay question the narrative model of personal identity – the idea of the self as a story – in light of contemporary forms of electronic literature.