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  1. "No Preexistent World": On "Natural" and "Artificial" Forms of Poetry

    Peter Gendolla pursues a paradox accompanying the literary avant-garde from Romanticism to the most current electronic installations; namely, that they want to bring back the cold, dead culture into “natural” life and that they are doing this with the most advanced technological procedures. They become more and more “technical” with the impulse not only to dissolve the division of the genres but also to transfer art at least by way of literary means into “natural” forms of life; thus, they are continually developing new forms of aesthetic difference that have to be differentiated from either nature or culture.

    Scott Rettberg - 24.05.2011 - 11:43

  2. Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures

    Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 20.10.2011 - 08:50

  3. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

    In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:03

  4. Warfare and Conventionality: How avant-garde computer-generated text can be

    Computer generated text has been considered warfare carried out against conventionality and was accordingly tagged “cybernetic Dadaism”, which seems to be obvious given that most computer generated text is nonsensical. However, there are attempts to have the machine generate meaningful text ideally indistinguishable from text by a human. This is where the problem starts. If a machine aims to be as good as a human writer, can it still afford to do what a human writer may aim at: writing like a machine? Wouldn’t any idiosyncratic style – which might in conventionally generated literature be understood as avant-garde – be perceived as a failure of the program? In other words: Can literature be avant-garde (or rather: advanced) in both, its way of production as well as its style? The lecture will discuss the issue with a closer look at Michael Mateas’ and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama Façade.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:44

  5. Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature

    Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. One need look no further than the theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference, ‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’, to see this. Because our orientation is always forward towards the future, we are inclined toward a kind of myopia, and reluctance to look at the new through the lens of the past. With this orientation, there is furthermore a danger of placing too high a value on novelty at the expense of other aesthetic and ideological criteria. We see this in new media art discourse again and again. Turf wars regularly take place over ‘firstness’ – which designer was the first to use this technique, who was the first to integrate this type of programming into a new media artwork, etc. We are clearly in the midst of a global communication revolution that has changed the practice of daily life in far-reaching ways, and it is important to recognize, identify, and contemplate those aspects of our culture that are changing so rapidly.

    Patricia Tomaszek - 13.04.2012 - 15:34

  6. After 391: Picabia's early multimedia experiments

    This essay attempts to answer a simple question: why did Francis Picabia stop publishing 391? By October 1924, when the final issue was published, 391 was the longest running magazine related to dada and the burgeoning surrealist movement, and Picabia was well established as one of the premiere avant-gardists in Paris and beyond, with literary, artistic and personal connections to all the major players in the movements that had turned the art world upside down for almost a decade. What caused him to suddenly cease publication of his provocative (but well respected) journal?

    (Source: author's abstract.)

    Chris Joseph - 27.06.2012 - 07:34

  7. Digital Poetry Beyond Avant-Garde Readings: Proposing a Digital Lyric

    Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 17:10

  8. A Cross-Medial Close Reading of Swedish Digital Poetry

    In the work with my thesis on digital poetry I aim to highlight the following three axes

    1) A theoretical reflection considering language in interaction with the visual and auditory modalities as well as an investigation of the relation between language and technical media, using theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Friedrich A. Kittler.

    2) An analytical, methodical approach, which investigates digital works of poetry and their intermedial relations and effects of meaning.

    3) Putting into perspective the historical concrete poetry and avant-garde movements – primarily from Scandinavia.

    Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:44

  9. Intervista a Carlo Cinato

    In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

    (Source: Interviewer's abstract)

    Daniele Giampà - 12.11.2014 - 19:35

  10. ‘Grasp All, Lose All’: Raising Awareness Through Loss of Grasp in Seemingly Functional Interfaces

    From baroque proto-cybertexts to countercultural gestures by historical avant-gardes, there is a longstanding tradition of disruptive strategies used by artists at the interstices of societies’ demands for order, control, and functionalism. For the avant-gardes and their multiple artistic inf(l)ections, radical changes to the way sensory perception had come to be depicted since Modernism became a central part of their strategy. By placing an emphasis on the confluence between various arts and media, the innovative character of their proposals had much to do with the ways in which they were able to embrace notions that represented modernity, including concepts such as simultaneity, dynamics, motion, and the symbiosis between human and machine. In this manner, they sought to induce estrangement and defamiliarization by using seemingly functional mechanisms to raise awareness through the loss of grasp.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 24.05.2022 - 20:55