electropoetics

Reflections on an emerging digital poetry whose primary theme is ecological loss, and personal reminiscence.

While defining the art object in a post-digital world, Maria Goichoechea de Jorge observes in media artists a nostalgia for an analogue craftsmanship; a rebellion against machinic perfection; and a resistance to forms of human creativity that propel us into an ever more profound symbiosis with our technological lifeworld.

Building on the work of Souvik Mukherjee (2017), T. Shanmugapriya and Nirmala Menon (2018, 2019), Samya Brata Roy identifies emergent elements of a multimodal E-Lit tradition in India.

For Saint Augustine, biblical scripture was indispensible to his being able to finish the final draft of his life story. Hemingway advocated stopping midway in a sentence, to ensure a fresh start tomorrow. For us today in the age of algorithmic governance, our stories are more likely to be generated continuously through the words of others using Google search, autocomplete and the algorithm’s statistically-informed guess. In this article, Fernanda Mugica explores the real time writing in charly.gr’s Peronismo (spam), from 2010, a visual poem that combines music and text; Matías Buonfrate's “No poseas un miedo” (2020); and Argentine poet Francisco López Merino's C0d3 P03try.

Literary forms seen as tools of mind transgressing the field of the literary and repurposing digital media so that they are capable of refocusing cognition in beneficial ways – these are the lines of thought shaping Kyle Booten’s analysis of algorithmic co-writers. To be able to respond to both challenges, it is proposed that researchers rigorously and systemically study how digital tools are being creatively used and repurposed, learning from models that have emerged within the mainstream Human-Computer Interaction research.

In a study that traverses more than half a century – going from e-lit precursor Christopher Strachey’s M.U.C. Love Letter Generator (1952) to Michael Joyce’s experimental hypertext afternoon: a story (1990) to Kate Pullinger’s data-driven touchscreen work Breathe (2018) – Rettberg (University of Bergen, Norway) situates experimentation with digital interfaces in a longer tradition of innovation in literary and scholarly production. She also argues for the central importance of such experimentation in the ongoing development of both electronic literature and the digital humanities, suggesting that speculation in the design of digital interfaces can help preserve and extend the interpretative and intuitive aspects of Western literary and scholarly traditions, while also bringing the limitations and exclusions of such knowledge systems into focus.

Jin Sol Kim and Lulu Liu interview the Decameron 2.0, a Canadian collaborative made up of professors and artists who are inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague narrative The Decameron (1348-1353) to develop creative works during and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

FEATURED ARTIST: In this essay, Caitlin Fisher reflects on the ideas, processes, and approaches that have shaped and influenced her work in digital storytelling and electronic literature for over 25 years. She invokes theorists like Borges, Haraway, and Aristotle and critical concepts of hybridity, string theory, hypermedia, and spatial narratives to illuminate readers about the simultaneous timelines, continuity, and forking paths that run through the river of her work.

Nacher, Rettberg, and Pold offer a curatorial statement about the COVID E-Lit Exhibition--one of the many exhibitions held at the ELO 2021 conference. This Exhibition in particular, they explain, focused on reactionary, reflexive, and recovery-based art in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This except from Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives explores the popular and open-source digital storytelling platform Twine. Authors Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop discuss the history of Twine as well as existing works and possible projects.