electropoetics
Towards Minor Literary Forms: Digital Literature and the Art of Failure
In this keynote address to the 2014 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Illya Szilak highlights the power of "minor forms" in digital literature. Through a wide-ranging survey of works, Szilak identifies the tendency for "failure" in electronic literature as its most powerful feature: its capacity to deterritorialize the parameters of discourse and expand the potential of subjectivity in the process.
Beginning with “The Image” in How It Is when translating certain processes of digital language art
In this essay, John Cayley builds upon a critical legacy that reflects intensively on the process of literature in an age of machine language. Building on a legacy that includes ebr classics like “The Code is not the Text” and many points in between, “Beginning with ‘The Image’” points to the difficulties of translating a procedural code-based text that “finds” its substance in the repository of text known as the World Wide Web.
Poetry and Stuff: A Review of #!
In this essay John Cayley reviews Nick Montfort’s #!, a book of computer generated poetry and the code that generated it. Exploring the triangle of Montfort’s programs, the machines that read them, and the output presented for human readers, Cayley situates the experience of reading and writing as intrinsically virtual, powered by its sustained potentiality, rather than its definitive comprehension.
Convergent Devices, Dissonant Genres: Tracking the “Future” of Electronic Literature on the iPad
Salter's "Convergent Devices, Dissonant Genres" assesses the implications of the iPad for the state of literature. Looking at "traditional" approaches that re-mediate print for digital devices, "enhanced" approaches which add "special features" to extant texts and forms, pre-tablet eliterature re-experienced in the new environment, and finally the creation of original apps with literary qualities, Salter's work is a critical document of the impact a single interface can have on the development of literary culture in the 21st Century.
Futures of Electronic Literature
E-lit authors Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink organized a panel on the "Future of E--Lit" at the ELO 2012 conference, allowing emerging and early career authors to articulate institutional and economic, as well more familiar technological, developments that constrain and facilitate current practice. The panel papers were released in ebr in March 2014. Luesebrink and Strickland followed up with comments on the papers, offering a "progress report" on the future of the field. The individual responses are available as glosses on the essays and in full here.