Reading the Wind

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^⏴Marginnote gloss1⏴Jhave Johnston’s lyric approach to temporary trajectories, perpetual calculus, and paradigm extinctions puts us on notice that we face headwinds of every kind drawn forward, as we are, by something beckoning at the limits of legibility.

See the full commentary
— Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink (Dec 2014) ↩

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

^⏴Marginnote gloss2⏴E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line LeMieux
— Dibs (Feb 2014) ↩