[…]I was having a lot of fun, even while holding in mind the turbulence that is surely coming for working artists, perhaps for large tranches of the arts themselves. In the end, I feel like I’m asking you to hate these images I made, because hating them is the right thing to do — as is hating the exploitative, amoral, dehumanizing technology that makes them possible. And yet part of me still wants you to look at them and like them and think they’re cool. I guess that makes me human. Coda It’s only fair that I confess. In the […]
[…]of a machine that easily mimics human expression. And yet, it is human language (not computer code) that is the primary method by which these tools take instruction and learn. As Scott Rettberg recently wrote in an AI writing listserv: “writing, interlocution, becomes the essential thing again.” AI technology and its cultural impacts are changing so rapidly that ebr editors are now opening the journal to more informal submissions for the machine-writing thread. Along with the traditional essay, we welcome blog posts, riPOSTes, reviews of AI art or AI tools, audio/visual media, transcribed conversations or interREviews, marginal glosses and experimental […]
[…]to literary traditions and contemporary aesthetics. It begins by describing the recent surge in critical attention to Italian e-lit, reviewing differing approaches of two recent essays that aim to reconstruct the history of the genre, which began with Nanni Balestrini’s works and Enrico Colombini’s Italian textual adventures. We also have two interviews from Rob Wittig that share a common focus on the experience of participating in collaborative storytelling–or “Netprov”. In Wittig’s interview with Johannah Rodgers, Johannah describes her involvement with Netprov, beginning with her participation in the Monstrous Weather netprov at the 2017 Electronic Literature Conference in Porto. She discusses […]
[…]of the works; it is precisely the medium that is missing. Patti does not need to examine source codes or identify different types of “interfacial media figures” (Saemmer) or “dysfunctionalities” (Ryan); the writers’ skills are read-only skills. Does all this mean that Patti’s essay is not recommended? Absolutely not (who would dare to advise against Dante?) for at least two reasons. The first is that Patti has provided a compelling analysis of the ideology of literary forms and a timely reinterpretation of Italian “open works” in relation to popular culture and society. The broader spectrum of theoretical and ideological influences, […]
[…]as much in that environment. But in that project I ended up composing some messages in Morse code — there are several Morse code translators on the Web — and then getting responses back in Morse code from people I’d never met and whose messages I was only ever partially able to translate and understand because, at that point in time, there were virtually no automated Morse Code to alphabetic language translators. I like how Morse code looks and I think a lot about coding and communication in my work so to have other people pick up these threads from […]
[…]than all of us!’ I love that spirit. And I loved how you and Mark were open to whoever you were working most closely with on a new netprov. You did it with Claire and me, you just said — the next netprov is you two! You two just run it! That’s how we did All Time High, right? You gave support to it, but you were also: ‘this is your show now.’ That was really cool. The invitation to play netprov is always open. Whenever I, or anyone else, says, ‘Gosh, I don’t know how much time I have […]
[…]would happen that would take place within the context of the pandemic living room setting. We were working really hard to try to conceptualize and execute and it never quite got there. But it was fun to think around. Rob Wittig 21:48 I would encourage you not to let that go. I think there are a lot of possibilities there! In Your Living Room with a Wrist Band! Claire Donato 21:59 We never could quite figure out what it was. We had the net artists. Net performance artist Molly Soda made a webpage for it. The game part of it […]
[…]of imaginations”. So, is the poem enacting an anxiety of the speaker, afraid that the mic is not working, concerned that use of a traditional form (whether it be the prosaic bullet point or the more flowery sonnet) will fail to switch on the hearing of the audience? If so, what does the speaker want us to hear? The only clue we can reliably follow from “Emergent Emergencies” and the other four bullet point poems is the end-stopping of each line which suggests that meaning is at best discontinuous, and that propositions may prove false or misleading guides. A line […]