electropoetics
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.
To Hide a Leaf: Reading-machine for a Book of Sand
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?"
Po/ética Trashumante y Resistencia en Dos Proyectos Digitales: de Negro en ovejas a Emblem/as
Elaborating on interspecies and translab experimentation. Escaja's interactive digital arts projects reclaim the notion of “transhumant,” a single term for nomadic practices that are shared by both the livestock and its shepherd. Both projects, Negro en ovejas (ovine poem) and Emblem/as, prioritize dislocation and nomadic multiplicity, which constitute a basis for resistance to and reconsideration of monolithic notions and canonical impositions.
Electronic Literature, or Whatever It’s Called Now: the Archive and the Field
A look at experimentation with crypto-machinic codes in Star Foster’s and David Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
image by flickr artist Art Hakker
The Anxiety of Imitation: On the “Boringness" of Creative Turing Tests
The authors speculate why some are bored by the goal of computational generation of "human-like" text. Inspired by Italo Calvino's alternative, minor strain in "Cybernetics and Ghosts," they argue that this kind of text generation provides an opportunity to destabilize as well as refine our sense of the differences between human and machine cognition.
The Digital Subject: From Narrative Identity to Poetic Identity?
Bouchardon and Mayer in this essay question the narrative model of personal identity – the idea of the self as a story – in light of contemporary forms of electronic literature.
Data-Realism: Reading and Writing Datafied Text
Pold and Erslev explore third-wave electronic literature -- a practice situated in ¨social media networks, apps, mobile and touchscreen devices, and Web API services” (Flores). At the next conceptual level, however, literary practices of this kind unavoidably take part in representing and reconstructing the metainterface - a space of data collection, standardization, commodification and redistribution that, for better or worse, is our context for a contemporary data realism.
Poetic Deformance and The Procedural Sonnet
Taking his cue from the first line of Lady Mary Wroth’s 17th Century sonnet sequence, “In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?” Corey Sparks locates readers in a contemporary, procedural sonnet at the intersection of electronic literature, digital edition creation, gaming, and literary poetics. Sparks includes a photo of a reconstructed medieval labyrinth, taken at St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork, Ireland during his attendance at the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization conference.
In Defense of the Difficult
Torres and Tisseli ask, isn't it ironic how, as we build machines that mimic thought and language in ever more persuasive ways, the very energy that fuels those machines is making us ever more stupid? Further, by resisting the proprietary technologies commonly present in 3rd generation e-literature, the co-authors advance the notion that being peripheral may actually be the role of e-literature.
At the Brink: Electronic Literature, Technology, and the Peripheral Imagination at the Atlantic Edge
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."