In his video-poem "Reading the Wind," Dave (Jhave) Johnston identifies the current environment for electronic literature, and in doing so, claims the impossibility of knowing its future.
This series of short interventions were made at the “Futures of Electronic Literature” discussion at the bi-annual Electronic Literature Organization conference in 2012. Titled “Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints,” the conference took place at West Virginia University in Morgantown on June 20th to June 23rd. The contributors were organized by Stephanie Strickland to offer suggestions on how to improve the organization as it attempts to re-define its mission in a shifting cultural, economic, and technological landscape. Ranging from the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical, the following nine short statements were made by a group of emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
This video documents a presentation
developed for the ‘Future of Electronic Literature’ panel
at ELO 2012: Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints
June 20-23, 2012
Morgantown, WV
The video was made in 2 weeks prior to conference using 123D.
Voiceover was partially improvised at conference, then re-recorded afterwards.
[Text voiceover from video]
I have no idea
What the future
Will really bring
I have no idea
What time sings
People and cats
Laptops and tools
Writhe as they evolve
But temporarily
I know how I am
Saying my non-saying
The future is not,
Cannot, and will not
ever be
Known
Remembered
Or forgotten
Knobs
murmuring
To themselves
Make more sense
Telling the future
is like
Reading wind
Plush rushed delirious
Overwhelmed
Matter muttering to itself
Obsolete before it
Even begins
Wrinkled at birth
Intuition turbulence
temporary trajectories
perpetual calculus culture
All results
Are input
Again
Climate change is accompanied by …
Device change
Infrastructure instability
Paradigm extinction
gliding down into the silence
of absolute information
Historians walk upwind
against time
Seeking patterns
In the smog of gestures
The tailing ponds of words
(gleaning from the air
scents of resonance
organism motion)
(is the machine an animal yet?
Is the animal, a machine?)
Float with the wind:
lighter than air
cling to nothing
No more mastery
No more apprentices
A universe of babies
As Hayles of cyborgs
Form committees
To discuss literature
In feathered networks
Of fragile labyrinths
Agile labile rage fragrant rags of flesh
Fading specks
Packet signs
Sporadic horizons
Crucial tangents sprout
Deft hydroponic
Drone ready
Augment implacable
Drifts
A white beach ball
Crushed under technology’s truck
Bodies forming wet works
Porous spaces sharing
Perception
Tilting moist
warped words
Enter taste
Crones bend time
Praise density
And it is enough
To be moles
Roiling thru the wet
While at the limits
Of legibility
Something that is almost us
Is beckoning
The world is not flat
It is folded
Undulant reckonings
And as the shroud of nano-lit
Falls off the coffin of authorial intent
We recognize it never existed anyway
Autonomous cells
Inside
The infinitely small muses
Collapse all certainty
About origins
Collapse into
meta-stable instability
Cruising raw devotion
Toward the utter annihilation
Of doubt
Shy slugs
Caressing their
Dreams as
Entropy entails
A taxonomy of (ir)reverent
obsolescence
The goal being
To give up wht is
Already for given
The sea changes
The light changes
Love changes
Life changes
Me changes
Sight changes
Cove changes
Ripe changes
Themes do not change
Death does not change
Embrace
Techno ephemera
The book was
Lazarus, computers
Are quarks
& I am always signing in or out
Down or up loading
Waiting or sitting
While
progress bars
Process products
Conflated speech
reaches inside
Itself
The only organization
Worth living for is love
The curved feature detecting
Rupture of ratpture
Folding Vulvic & lucid
Slowly around
Time
Compused?
Opal foog confuters
Proliferature
Syllables crumple under
Leashed loax lozenge rack
Flax server dos assacks
Questions
A bound
Breeding round