electropoetics
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.
Data-Realism: Reading and Writing Datafied Text
Pold and Erslev explore third-wave electronic literature -- a practice situated in ¨social media networks, apps, mobile and touchscreen devices, and Web API services” (Flores). At the next conceptual level, however, literary practices of this kind unavoidably take part in representing and reconstructing the metainterface - a space of data collection, standardization, commodification and redistribution that, for better or worse, is our context for a contemporary data realism.
Poetic Deformance and The Procedural Sonnet
Taking his cue from the first line of Lady Mary Wroth’s 17th Century sonnet sequence, “In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?” Corey Sparks locates readers in a contemporary, procedural sonnet at the intersection of electronic literature, digital edition creation, gaming, and literary poetics. Sparks includes a photo of a reconstructed medieval labyrinth, taken at St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork, Ireland during his attendance at the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization conference.