electropoetics

MLA Chernoff closely examines Rachel Zolf's intentionally unreadable suite of transmedial poetry, Human Resources (2007), in order to discern a digital poetics of appropriation that carefully grapples with the problematics of historically exclusionary institutions like conceptual poetry and CanLit. They argue that behind the constraint-based, numerological practices used to create these strange poems lies a pragmatic – yet metaphysically-grounded – method of reframing the professionalization of creative writing and upending the neoliberal conventions of governmental grants.

This essay engages with the complex translation of materiality that occurs between Darren Wershler’s NICHOLODEON (1997) and its eventual digital incarnation as NICHOLODEONLINE (1998). Both of these works pay homage to the influential avant-garde Canadian poet, bpNichol. Beyond situating Wershler’s texts in a historical framework that moves from Nichol to the 'Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, Sean Braune looks at select metadata “clues” that Wershler left behind for the curious-minded reader (human and machine), as well as placing Wershler’s work (and Nichol’s by extension) in the context of theories of language that move from the human to the “tower of programming languages” that are described by Rita Raley and Friedrich Kittler.

Alois Sieben investigates how Jordan Abel’s Injun experiments—poetically, visually, digitally—with an anxiety-provoking limit to the settler-colonial gaze, rather than feeding this gaze a new representation of Indigeneity. Abel’s work is positioned within David Garneau’s history of Indigenous screen objects, in which something is held back from the settler-colonial gaze, a form of deprivation that exposes the blind hunger of this gaze, turning it back upon itself.

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (To be Played with the Left Hand) (2008) by Canadian artist David Clark is a web-based Flash creation that explores the life and works of Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this paper, we show how rhetoric and digital technologies join to visually express philosophical concepts. The idea of “visual music” has been previously addressed in various fine arts such as literature, film, painting, sculpture, and music itself. We argue that in electronic literature it is possible to explore this concept by means of what we propose to call “gestural melodic manipulation”, which is the interplay of semiotic units (e.g. videos, sounds, images, linguistic texts) that the reader can add to the narrative by means of interaction and manipulation. In Clark’s e-lit work, “visual music” triggers the literary characteristics of the text by exposing different discourses and diverse thematic through intertextual and intermedial practices.

In this riPOSTe-turned-essay, John Cayley reflects on “the perpetual problem of terminology” in the field of electronic literature.

Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan discuss the need for a Canadian digital poetics, as well as for an understanding of its past developments, present shifts, and future possibilities.

Carl Watts argues that J.R. Carpenter’s Entre Ville constructs Canadian literature as a unified, holistically understood entity that is both broadly accessible and fleetingly familiar. In so doing, Carpenter’s work aligns representations of Montréal with uses of new media, with the cross-cutting and mutually exclusive identities of the former mirrored in new-media poetry’s partial or conditional embrace of the formal possibilities of digital poetry.

In this conversation with ebr Editor Lai-Tze Fan, internationally acclaimed artist Caitlin Fisher talks through her origins, inspirations, and processes with a clear message: things can always be unlocked with more than one key and stories can always be told with more than one method. Fan asks Fisher about the 20th anniversary of These Waves of Girls at the end of Flash, the archival impulse of her stories from doll collections to hand-held museums, and the importance of creating tiny stories out of high technologies and giant institutional labs. Of the many lives Fisher has already lived and of her works to come, this conversation gives only a glimpse—a snap of the universe.

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays co-edited by Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH)––that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic.

Thinking about the ways in which critical infrastructure studies can allow us to engage in antiracism critiques and practices, Ryan Ikeda provocatively challenges the electronic literature community to address some of the symbolic and material structures that he argues uphold the field. To this end, Ikeda positions elit infrastructure as dynamic and generative sites of cultural activity, and attends, in particular to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, recent ebr discourses on decolonization, ELO fellowships, and literary historical genealogies, to examine how each constructs, affirms, racializes and extends power, privilege, and status to its members.