Managing Editor Anna Nacher recollects the past — and sketches out the future of ebr.
ebr’s upcoming anniversary (its 30th) prompts celebration and inspires memories. The latter are increasingly imbued with anxiety accompanying a peculiar version of “archive fever” that results from supposedly self-archiving – yet never really archivable - internet of platforms. (Look what has recently happened to Twitter, our one-time academic darling.) This anxiety may be related to the paradoxical effect of digital media described by Wendy Chun - the fact that “the digital has proliferated, not erased, media types; what has become the analog is not the opposite, but rather the ‘ground’ of the digital”, with the consequence that “rather than making everything universally equivalent, the digital has exploded differences among media formats.” (Chun 139). So insofar as media types and formats are proliferating, the digital databases and archives are battling the flow of time measured in particular formats and platforms passing into obliteration. Ever more hard work and care is needed to document early digital culture, as vividly demonstrated by the community of practice coalescing around the key actors in the field, such as Rhizome and its Net Art Anthology, The Next led by Dene Grigar and the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University, and the ELO-associated initiative of CELL The Consortium on Electronic Literature (not to forget the ELMCIP Knowledge Base which is currently transforming into a database more closely related to the goals of Bergen's Center for Digital Narrative, as well as archives regional or local in scope and form, such as the initiative to document e-lit from Latin America, Lit(e)Lat, Multilingual African Electronic Literature Database & African Diasporic Electronic Literature Database (MAELD & ADELD) or initiatives to collect electronic literature in India that resulted in an edited volume in English and Bengali (Menon, Shanmugapriya T, Jopseh, Sutton 2023).
I would argue that ebr – being one of the oldest open-access peer-review venues – can be considered, first and foremost, as a longstanding form of “experimenting in and with academic publishing” (Adema 2024). At the same time – with its variety of conversational forms and commentaries surrounding electronic literature artworks – it also functions as the “living archive” of the community of practice known as electronic literature. In my use of the concept of community of practice rather than genre or form of digital writing, to some extent I follow Scott Rettberg who in his essay described the field of electronic literature both as a "large corpus of creative work and an ever-growing body of critical and theoretical scholarship" (2009) but also as a significant community effort. However, I propose shifting the understanding of electronic literature primarily as relational, dialogic and not object-oriented, in all its various instances of generations (Flores 2019, Berens 2019) or waves (Ensslin et al. 2020). It basically signifies increasingly socially engaged e-lit, with a plethora of discussions around race, gender, ableism, and uncomfortable legacy and consequences of colonialism.
A bit of the localized, contextual and anecdotal background. I don’t remember when I first encountered ebr and, frankly speaking, on what occasion. But it certainly was in the ancient times of an “other” internet, at the stage of its development that in retrospect feels like a glimpse of freedom. It has been documented with a research project, carried out with the abundance of care by Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied and their students at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe). In 2009, when the results were finally published as an edited volume entitled simply Digital Folklore Reader, we were already nostalgic and ready to celebrate, as Cory Arcangel put it in his Preface, “beauty and importance of gifs, glitters, backgrounds, construction signs, and tracker compositions” (7). In general, at the time the volume rescued from oblivion “just some of the things that might have been missed in the fast paced Internet evolution.” (7).
Yet, for someone located in Central Europe in the early and mid-00s, both the glimpse of freedom and “the fast paced Internet evolution” has resonated with complex undertones. My own memories of the time when I was pursuing a doctoral project at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków are patchy at best (different social realities, different academic system, different… everything). But one particular, very well embodied sensation will stay with me forever. For the entire time of my PhD program, all four years of it, my connection to the Web (an essential resource for someone based in a small town in southern Poland) required some physical labor. The connection was so unstable that many times a day (sometimes a few times per hour) I had to squat under the table to access a wire connecting my computer to the telephone socket on the wall and perform a few maneuvers to physically disconnect and reconnect the wire. Only then was I able to reinstate a precious connection (that was still too scarce to download any sophisticated visual content). A tech person from the then major internet provider, Telekomunikacja Polska (formerly a national communication provider, now privatized for quite some time) was of no help. He (pronoun is not a coincidence) decisively stated that the connection should work as it was a then brand new standard of ISDN, or what we called at the time “digital connection”. Yet, the connection consistently kept failing. Much later, upon switching to a newer protocol of ADSL that allowed for splitting the data and phone signals, it turned out the previous connection had been set up entirely wrong since the very beginning by the very same tech person. Either because he did not have enough knowledge or was lacking some skills, I never got to know. But it was not the first occasion to teach me distrust of ‘tech bros’. And not the last one, sadly.
So it was a different age, different social reality, and different Internet, when for the first time I was able to access ebr, which immediately became a revelation. On a par with a few other outlets allowing free access to a quickly expanding theoretical field, such as Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s CTheory, Rhizomes, Hyperrhiz or Culture Machine. It is difficult to believe now, but at the time none of the Polish universities offered access to major academic journals and as doctoral students we simply could not afford any of the individual subscriptions. Research grants were scarce and digital culture was by no means a research area priority in any discipline, especially in the humanities. Long before the advent of shadow libraries, and almost 10 years before tragic case of Aaron Swartz, every time SAGE Publications offered some period of free access, with other doctoral students from my peer group we would sit for hours in front of our computers and just download, download, download in a collaborative effort, sharing our time and tech resources. Some of us had even access to the first ‘broadband’ internet. It got the user-friendly name, Neostrada (as opposed to earlier standards, known exclusively under technical terms of ISDN or ADSL).
Such a branding strategy in itself could be considered a symptom of a shifting landscape, with the Internet framed as every day entertainment rather than crucial academic or technical resource. There came the generation of very young users to whom Neostrada was the very first experience of the internet. They became known as “Dzieci Neostrady” (“Children of Neostrada”, a local equivalent of Millennials). The stories of the first publicly available dial-up connection of mid-90s sounded to them like the Middle Ages. Back then, a widespread generational prejudice about Children of Neostrada was that here comes a generation devoid of any basic skills in digital literacy – as opposed to ‘us’, who proudly knew how to install the first email client called Eudora and configure the dial-up internet connection, and even able to decipher the chances of successful communication based on the minutiae of the sonic cues signaling that connection was about to be established. And that was long before the internet of platforms.
What I described above – to some extent anecdotally – was, in short, the landscape in which I was accessing the oldest open-access sites of intellectual fervor surrounding (then) new media. From today’s perspective, with eyes attentive enough to such seemingly minor and technical details and with the usual toolbox of critical theory, one could already see the contours of corporate platform capitalism being shaped with ostensibly entertaining and celebratory practices of that relatively early internet culture. Internet culture that was at the time at a key juncture in its history, in terms of the rapidly broadening user base, in words of Cory Arcangel again, “the distribution breakthrough provided by the internet.” (7). Back in 2003 the very idea of digital pedagogy in the conditions of our classroom was extremely limited, due to obvious technological reasons (another unsolicited memory of embodied practice: when I started my first academic position in 2006, for at least 5 years I was carrying in a bag my own laptop, far from state of art, almost 3-kilogram Acer, to be able to present anything to my students at the time, which inevitably resulted in some lower back problems). Yet, Laura Sullivan’s ebr article on digital pedagogy of resistance and her broadened critique of hypertext resonated strongly (even though that resonance was more intuitive than grounded in actual practice yet). I took to my heart especially the observations “oppressive roles of technologies of cyberspace cannot be forgotten by progressive pedagogues who hope to utilize these technologies for ends more liberatory than those envisioned by transnational capital.” (Sullivan). Granted, being relatively well-versed in French philosophy, Roland Barthes’ “galaxy of signifiers” (Barthes 5) and poststructuralism, I would appreciate liberatory nature of inherently “writerly” nature of hypertext, but I could not forget that computers indeed often were used in education “to reinforce a cognitive psychological model and the logic of consumerism.” (Sullivan).
ebr has always been a meeting point for conversations, to paraphrase Joe Tabbi (Tabbi 417). Most recently, Lai-Tze Fan explained the sense of introducing the editorial glosses, meant as a robust system of editorial intertexts, both pairing maintaining historical hyperlinks intact and making them “visible and recognizable as something more than a scholarly citation or set of tags, hashtags, and keywords.” (Fan). It is not even a half step before start of the celebratory year that I am invited to indeed step in as a new Managing Editor for ebr, after over half a dozen years when this position was so fruitfully, successfully and skillfully (and with so much dedication) fulfilled by Will Luers, who shares his insights on the process in the interview for the Off Center podcast series showcased in this issue. Following his footsteps, I would like to be able to contribute to maintaining the space, where the conversations on electronic literature and digital culture meet, much in the spirit of experimental publishing meant as a socially engaged fostering of diverse communities. Because maybe right now, someone in a far less privileged part of the world – geographically and socially speaking – strives to get that connection working.
Works Cited
Adema, Janeke. “Experimental Publishing as Collective Struggle. Providing Imaginaries for Posthumanist Knowledge Production”. Culture Machine. Journal of Cultue and Theory, vol. 23. https://culturemachine.net/wpcontent/uploads/2024/09/CM23_Adema_ExperimentalPublishing.pdf Accessed: Oct. 1, 2024.
Arcangel, Cory. Preface. Digital Folklore by Lialina and Espenschied eds., Merz& Solitude, 2009.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. trans. R. Miller. Blackwell, 1974.
Berens, Kathi. “Third Generation Electronic Literature and Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance in the Materials”, Electronic Book Review, May 5, 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/c8a0-kb67.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions. Software and Memory. The MIT Press, 2011.
Ensslin, Astrid and Carla Rice, Sarah Riley, Christine Wilks, Megan Perram, Hannah Fowlie, Lauren Munro and K. Alysse Bailey. ““These Waves …:” Writing New Bodies for Applied E-literature Studies”, Electronic Book Review, April 5, 2020, https://doi.org/10.7273/c26p-0t17.
Fan, Lai-Tze. “ebr historical intertext”, Electronic Book Review, November 5, 2023, https://doi.org/10.7273/7xwn-0h05.
Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature”, Electronic Book Review, April 7, 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/axyj-3574.
Lialina, Olia, and Dragan Espenschied, editors. Digital Folklore. Merz & Sollitude, 2009.
Rettberg, Scott. “Communitizing Electronic Literature”, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 3 no. 2., 2009. https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000046/000046.html Accessed Oct. 1st, 2024.
Menon, Nirmala, Shanmugapriya T, Jopseh, Justy, and Deborah Sutton, editors. Indian Electronic Literature Anthology. Indian Institute of Technology – Knowledge Sharing in Publishing, 2023. https://iitikship.iiti.ac.in/site/books/e/10.57004/book1/ Accessed: Oct1st, 2024.
Sullivan, Laura. “Resistance Through Hypertext: ACTing UP in the Electronic Classroom”, Electronic Book Review, November 6, 2003, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/resistance-through-hypertext-acting-up-in-the-electronic-classroom/.
Tabbi, Joseph. “Relocating the Litterary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Material, and Mental Environments”. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, edited by Joseph Tabbi, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.