electropoetics
Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking: The Disruptive Potential of Electronic Literature
In this contribution to her co-edited collection, [Frame]works, Saum brings to the digital humanities both makers and theoreticians, gnosis as well as poiesis, school teachers as well as research professors.
Gardening E-literature (or, how to effectively plant the seeds for future investigations on electronic literature)
In the course of her wide ranging review of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature, Anna Nacher offers a glimpse into "semi-peripheral avant-gardes" that are more open than other fields of digital culture to decolonization and not restricted to the Anglophone world.
Appealing to Your Better Judgement: A Call for Database Criticism
On the database itself as a cultural and textual artifact, a site where reading and interpretation combine with quantitative methods.
Something there badly not wrong: the life and death of literary form in databases
Returning to his 2010 essay, “Electronic Literature as World Literature,” Tabbi extends those arguments in light of community built scholarly databases that have since emerged and in contrast to an uncritical tracking of “views, citations, downloads and occasional shared themes” (not to mention an increased precarity of authorship, where one’s scholarly work is basically given away).
For digital practices to be literary, Tabbi argues, our selections need to circulate within various institutional, academic, curatorial, and cultural structures – each of which is devising its own set of relations to the digital. This essay aims to initiate those ongoing conversations and evaluations in the field of born digital, electronic literature. In so doing, Tabbi suggests how acts of close reading can bring scholars into closer contact with one another and also activate the databases where e-lit archives are presently stored, read, curated, and mined for verbal and perspectival patterns. (Which have been described, in broad outline as a kind of distant reading.)
“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding the E-lit Garden
Berens asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature, like earlier avant gardes, began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization, but are not the same thing; and why decolonization efforts are urgent in the context of pandemic and protests supporting Black lives and racial justice.
Smart Technology Instead of Blood and Soil
A critique of Third Generation, web based electronic literature from a first generation maker and author of "The Moving Word" (2000), Janez Strehovic.
Image from Olia Lialina's Ann Karenin Goes to Paradise
Pitching the Poem-essay: Subversive Argument in the Work of Charles Bernstein
Circularity, performativity, authorial intervention, digressions, interruptions, collage, segmentation, prolific examples, line breaks and humor: Hazel Smith brings each of these approaches and stances to bear on Charles Bernstein's poetic essays and essayistic poetry. In the spirit of which, Smith presents her own essay in parallel sections. The main column advances her critical argument, while the second discontinuous column presents a "Deep Text" generated by Roger Dean, who applied the computer platform Python to word sequences from Smith's first column.
image: Charles Bernstein
Is Third Generation Literature Postweb Literature? And Why Should We Care?
Alex Saum-Pascual on e-lit's relocation to platforms with massive user bases, and the beauty of meh.
Grappling With the Actual: Writing on the Periphery of the Real
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."
Screen Capture in Digital Art and Literature: Interrogating Photographic, Interface, and Situatedness Effects
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.