42 | 2012

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Communities/Commons: A Snap Line of Digital Practice
Glazier, Loss Pequeño (2012-12-20) , S. 1-11
“Communities/Commons: A Snap Line of Digital Practice” presents a brief history of digital poetry, from the perspective of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), Buffalo, and the international E-Poetry Festivals of digital literature, art, and performance (E-Poetry). The paper engages the discipline from various perspectives, considering its relation to historic contextualizing movements and institutional mechanisms. Determining a renewed vision of E-Poetry community, it is argued, are its exuberant origins: (1) the U.S. small press movements of the later Twentieth century; (2) the activities and philosophies of the Electronic Poetry Center; (3) its self-definition as more broadly-conceived than that of any specific category of digital literature; (4) the pre-existing literary ground of Black Mountain, Language Poetry, and related practices; (5) the vibrancy of the as-then-constituted Poetics Program at Buffalo, and; (6) a “symposium of the whole”, the continued emerging importance of enthnopoetic localizations to an eventual realization of contemporary poetics. Finally, a call is made for the field being adaptable and more generous with its frames of reference. Such a breadth of understanding, it is concluded, contribute to E-Poetry’s continuing vibrancy and to a wider vision of the possibilities for digital practice.
Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology
Roberts, Andrew Michael; Otty, Lisa; Fischer, Martin H.; Schaffner, Anna Katharina (2012-12-20) , S. 1-33
This article discusses issues arising from the relationship between practitioners in Electronic Literature and researchers in the field of Human Experimental Psychology, including the possible emergence of new communities that cross over this boundary. The introduction (1) considers the possible drivers of this process, including technology, interdisciplinarity and research funding policy, after first explaining the source of the article in an interdisciplinary project, Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition (2009-11). This project involved literary critics, psychologists and creative artists and studied works that combine (poetic) text with images, including digital poetry, concrete poetry, artists’ books, visual poetry and poetry-photographic works. In section 2 we discuss the concept of the “experimental” in aesthetic and scientific contexts, identifying the relatively universal model of the subject constructed through experimental procedure in Psychology and contrasting it with the radical idea of the subject implied by avant-garde aesthetic practice. We then discuss several examples of parallels between the methods of Electronic Literature and Experimental Psychology. Section 3 compares the flash works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and the psychological experimental technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Section 4 compares the visual poetics of digital poetry in the tradition of concrete / visual poetry (including John Cayley’s Translation and Jim Andrews’s Stir Fry Texts) with the manipulations of font and layout in psycholinguistic method. Section 5 compares John Cayley’s Lens, created in the virtual reality CAVE at Brown University, with the Mental Rotation test used in Experimental Psychology, referring to Cayley’s concept of the “phenomenology of the object”. Section 6 discusses in more detail a digital literary-visual artwork created for a single-screen 3D simulator, and commissioned as part of Poetry Beyond Text. Tower, by Simon Biggs and Mark Shovman, explores perceptual and cognitive processes in reading and is described as an “immersive 3D textual environment combining visualisation, speech recognition and predictive text algorithms”. It is here used as a case study for the interaction of digital poets / artists with psychologists and psychological findings, drawing on material from interviews and discussions with the artist and programmer involved, in particular Biggs’s interest in third-order cybernetics. The discussion deals with the construction of value around the concept of “interactivity” and the construction of the reader / viewer / subject. The conclusion (7) considers possible models for the relationship between creative practice in digital media and Human Experimental Psychology, addressing the conflict or convergence of ideological and epistemological values and assumptions.
Editorial: Electronic Literature Communities, Part 2
Rettberg, Scott; Tomaszek, Patricia (2012-12-20) , S. 1-3
Growing up Digital: The Emergence of E-Lit Communities in Spain. The Case of Catalonia “And the Rest is Literature”
Castanyer, Laura Borràs (2012-12-20) , S. 1-20
Starting with the famous last words of Hamlet “and the rest is silence”, I would like to introduce Catalan e-¬lit communities and their experience of digital literature. The Hermeneia Research Group has been one of the pioneers in the field in Spain and has been developing many different activities for the last ten years. Lately it has been promoting a public debate in Literary Societies on Digital Literature (Premis Octubre in Valencia (2009), Catalan and Castillian Association of Writers (AELC/ACEC), Spanish Society of Comparative Literature, Alacant (2010) etc.). Certainly, the celebration of the e‐poetry festival 2009 in Barcelona was one of the big events that supported this open debate on that matter. In this paper there is a special space for one of these activities, which – for the last five years – we have been trying to encourage: creativity. The establishment of the international Ciutat de Vinaròs awards is one of these activities. These awards accept creations in languages that already have a tradition of electronic or digital literature, such as English, French or Portuguese, but they also serve to stimulate creative works in languages like Spanish, Italian or Catalan. These works are subsequently studied by the Hermeneia research group and at the same time in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, thus promoting an interchange between the areas of creation, teaching, and research.
Offshore of Writing: E-literature and the Island
Fletcher, Jerome; Somma, Lisa (2012-12-20) , S. 1-12
The broad aim of this paper is to contribute to a discussion on some aspects of the relationship between e-literature, spatiality and site-specificity. The context for this particular investigation is a major initiative for the establishment and development of an Academy of New Media and Digital Arts (see below) on the Italian island of Procida, one of the three islands that sit in the Bay of Naples. Within this initiative, e-literature as both practice and community plays a central role. One question which inevitable arises from the Procida project concerns the discrepancy between the geographical situatedness of the Academy on the one hand, and the dispersed nature of networked e-lit communities and of e-literature as a practice on the other. How will the relationship between site and network play out? The paper itself is designed to emphasise the spatiality of e-texts, in contrast to the more temporally structured nature of page-based narrative. It comprises a pattern of “insular” sections that are linked to each other, although this pattern is one among many possible patterns. In other words the “textual islands” are both isolated and inter-located at the same time.
Topdown Digital Literature: The Effects of Institutional Collaborations and Communities
Dijk, Yra van (2012-12-20) , S. 1-14
Contrary to what one might think, institutions play an important role in the production, preservation, and funding of electronic literature. Due to the absence of traditional gate-watchers like publishers and newspaper critics, the function of selection, distribution, and reception of this work has been taken over partly by anthologies, reviews and criticism that are produced in an academic climate. Artists need the necessary channels for preservation, distribution, and critical evaluation of the work, channels that have the power to create “cultural capital”. Even the production of work often takes place in an academic or institutional setting. Literary festivals, conferences and workshops form temporary communities in which planned collaboration takes place. This article addresses institutionalized and planned collaboration and its effects on the production, the presentation, and the content of digital literature.
Towards Network Narrative: Electronic Literature, Communication Technologies, and Cultural Production
Meurer, David M. (2012-12-20) , S. 1-19
In recent years literature and communication scholars, publishing industry commentators, and technology journalists have declared the death of print. Anxieties over the future of print generally, and the novel, literature, books and literacy more specifically have become commonplace in the mainstream news media, technology blogs, and academic discourse. Despite these claims, people may read more than ever – if we recognize a more expansive set of textual practices under the rubric of that term. Given the number of emails, text messages, status updates, image captions, RSS headlines, tweets, web pages, and comment threads that are processed in the digital everyday, our experience of the world is arguably more textually mediated than ever. Are these cultural practices compatible with prose narrative fiction? Are they capable of forming the basis for network narratives now and in the future? In this essay I explore the relationship between the novel and communication technologies and practices. I consider whether ‘born-networked’ prose narrative holds a place within the contemporary digital media ecology. I argue that it does, and that it must if there is lasting cultural value in the deep exploration of character, plot, and description that we traditionally associate with longer prose narrative fiction. However, establishing a place for born-networked narrative within contemporary culture requires substantive shifts in production practices in order to better accommodate additive participation. In support of this claim I introduce and compare examples of electronic literature and network culture in which collaborative cultural production practices challenge normative notions of authorship rooted in print production.

Browsing 42 | 2012 by Subject "digital literature"

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