electropoetics

Alex Saum-Pascual on e-lit's relocation to platforms with massive user bases, and the beauty of meh.

Like many of the "Artistic Reflections" featured in the Cork 2019 e-lit conference, Carpenter's opens out from her own web based works to a "post-digital world, in which invisible layers of data inform our daily thoughts and actions; a post-human world, of vast oceans and ceaseless winds."

Christelle Proulx argues that screen captures in art and literature projects introduce three different effects on the representation of online world and its relation to offline world. The spatiotemporal specificities of the images produced are first considered through the photographic as a category of thought, then the importance of location is interrogated via the situated knowledges of Donna Haraway (1988) and concludes on the interface effects of this kind of imaging practice.

Working with a custom-coded, automated-art-system of their own devising, Australian digital artists Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato have now archived a literary corpus for future study in what they have called The Library of Nonhuman Books. Yet it remains uncertain whether human scholars will visit Donnachie's and Simoniato's virtual library. Seeing as how "there are no human ‘typewriters’ now, how can we be sure there will still be human ‘readers’ in the future?"

In this keynote, presented at the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Cork, Ireland, Anne Karhio highlights the importance of electronic literature as no less peripheral in its own construction of social, cultural, networked communities and material geographies. By looking also at recent scholarship on digital infrastructures, media archaeology, and new materialist approaches to communications technology, Karhio delineates changes that emerge from the margins, "from experimentation and risk-taking that questions established conventions, and canons, and flickers at the border of the actual and the imaginary."

Given the longstanding but limited readership for North American, Euro and Scandinavian e-lit, will Latin America succeed in carrying its experimental and avant-garde approaches to a general e-lit audience? Claudia Kozak's expanded keynote for the 2018 ELO conference in Montreal, titled "Mind the Gap!", explores some first forays in this direction: practices that might hearken back to Puig and Borges in print; Omar Goncedo, Eduardo Darino, Erthos Albino de Souza and Jesús Arellano in the era of mainframes; and (not least) fan fiction over pretty much the entire span of literary writing.

Image: Omar Gancedo, IBM (1966).

A conversation at a heightened level of intensity, ranging from the aleatory tradition of Emmett Williams, Jackson Mac Low, and John Cage, through post-Poundian poetry and its Chinese influences, kinetic poetry or programmable media where the poem itself is performing, not just the poet. Attention is also given to the Internet as these two literary artists knew it for a very brief moment, before Google and Facebook, circa 2004, "figured out that everybody needed an account."

This review of Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, co-edited by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, is itself a collaboration between Virginia Kuhn and Betsy Sullivan. Both approaches, to the review and the book here under consideration, capture the importance of community in creating and sustaining the art of Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press.

Bouchardon and Petit defend the concept of digital writing and the teaching thereof. We can accept that digital writing exists, with its specific properties and tensions, but can it be taught? Specifically, the pedagogical dimension of what is known as "digital" writing, the authors argue, would do well to follow a study on the relationship between writing and computer science that was sponsored by the Picardy region : PRECIP, PRatiques d'ÉCriture Interactive en Picardie (interactive writing practices in Picardy).

Are digital practices ever going to transform what it means to create, circulate, read and preserve literary works? Bouchardon sets out ten ways that might happen.