The Electronic Literature, How, When, Where

The term Electronic Literature (EL) is already obsolete, just as the term contemporary art. The obsolescence of words depends on the changes that the content of their meanings are undergoing. These contents change in the light of the technical-logical progress. Their own form changes giving ultimately rise to new signs and signifiers. New concepts generate new interpretations.

The change of technological processes introduces new types of communication and of social relations. These changes weaken the rules of linguistics. The content and the meaning of words change, as well as their own signs that are used to define the EL and to describe what comes from it as an end: politics, social philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, business, and business ethics. The works that are produced through the EL undergo changes and have an outreach that involve a dialogue on an augmented art synchronically developed on a augmented reality perceived through the use of new technologies.

The OLE (Officina di Letteratura Elettronica) has focused its initial research on the study of aesthetic and ethical changes due to new technologies, and on the relation between these changes and the definition of contemporary art. This paper will highlight the boundaries within which the EL as it is defined in the previous paragraphs, turns out to be, indeed, the true contemporary art. This introduces a series of changes, and sometimes of deletions, in the contemporary system of art. How will words such as “business”, “conservation”, “work”, “public”, “use”, “collecting”, “museum”, “restoration”, “author”, “exposition” change and/or disappear in this system? How will the EL develop with these broader meanings? The multiple forms of writing introduced by the use of new methods of communication – not only the interpersonal ones, that is between man and man, but also between men and objects, objects and objects – offer multiple literatures, some of them robotic and some also independent from human thought.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)