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1. Reading the Drones: Working Towards a Critical Tradition of Interactive Poetry Generation

   Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode.

   Kriss-Andre Jacobsen - 04.10.2013 - 11:14

2. Exopoiesis and literariness in the works of William Gibson, Mark Z. Danielewski, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph

   Over the last two decades, many recent forms of electronic literature have revealed a strong aptitude for hypertextuality and hypermediality. Meanwhile, we have assisted to the progressive emergence of innovative examples of print fiction that may be defined as «writing machines»,1 because they strive to incorporate the aesthetics and the symbolic forms of the electronic media. These kinds of narrative are often characterised by an "autopoietic" potentiality, since they often tend to include a multiplicity of media sources while preserving the autonomy of their literary function. As Joseph Tabbi observes: «Defining the literary as a self-organizing composition, or poiesis, is not to close off the literary field; instead, by creating new distinctions such a definition can actually facilitate literary interactions with the media environment».2 At the same time, some examples of print and electronic 'writing machines' are also characterized by an «exopoietic function».

   Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:08

3. A Humument app by Tom Phillips as a work of liberature: between text and embodiment

   In my paper I would like to propose reconfiguration of “literariness” through the concept of liberature formulated by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik (Bazarnik, 2005), updated to some extent with the theory of affordances (Norman, 1990, 2004). The term which according to Bazarnik (2005) denotes a transgenre where content (text) and its medium form a whole, seems to offer rich theoretical possibilities – especially if “literariness” is to be conceived also as a media-specific, embodied yet emergent and contigent phenomenon (Hayles, 2002). However, the concept of liberature - set from the ouset as both a theoretical tool against a form/content dualism and means to study multimodality of a literary text – still offers an interesting proposition when it comes to instances of e-literature developed for touch screen devices. A particularly interesting example to illustrate such interrogations is The Humument App by Tom Phillips. It is a part of the ongoing project coming from the artist known, among others, from his cooperation with Peter Greenaway on TV Dante.

   Rebecca Lundal - 17.10.2013 - 18:47

4. (Electronic) Literature and the (Post)human Condition

   Electronic literature exists in a perpetual state of flux, due to its reliance on digital technology; with the rapid progression of processing power and graphical abilities, electronic literature swiftly moved from a reliance on the written word into a more diverse, multi-modal form of digital arts practice. The literariness of early electronic literature is manifest: the work was primarily textual, the centrality of reading paramount. The current crop of electronic literature--with its audio-visual, multimodal nature--calls into question the literariness of this work, however, as is evidenced by this year's call for papers. I propose that this ambiguity as regards literariness and written textuality in electronic literature disadvantages the field, in both academic circles and in the search for a wider reading audience. If electronic literature as field is to assert and validate its position within the greater literary tradition, links between electronic literature and past literary achievements need to be uncovered and illuminated.

   Daniela Ørvik - 19.02.2015 - 15:49