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1. The Aesthetics of Materiality in Electronic Literature

   According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

   However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:39

2. Aesthetic Autonomy and Sensuous Appearing: Two Questions in the Aesthetics of Digital Poetry

   In this paper I would like to consider the aesthetics of digital poetry with reference to ideas of aesthetic autonomy and sensuous appearing.
   The notion of autonomy, whether of the art-work or of a mode of experience with which it is associated, has been central to the historical development of the idea of the aesthetic itself. Andrew Bowie defines it as ‘the idea that works of art have a status which cannot be attributed to any other natural object or human product’ (Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 2). It is an idea which has been seen as ideologically driven, as when Terry Eagleton suggests that ‘the idea of autonomy – of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining – provides the middle class with just the ideological mode of subjectivity it requires for its material operations’. Yet Eagleton also argues that aesthetic autonomy can provide a ‘vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thinking’, implying that it has potential for avant-garde or critical purposes (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 9).
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 16:05

3. Marking Transition: the Work of Neal von Flue

   For any regular Internet user, the hyperlink has become ubiquitous, almost rendered invisible
   through the frequency of its use. Trails in hypertext are meticulously laid out through the
   seemingly endless streams of data, connected by links imagined as points of intersection in the
   web. Links are used for reference, for navigation but also extensively in creative production, to
   fashion hypertextual narratives and images. It is in this realm of electronic literature, both visual
   and textual, that the function of the link shifts from the commonplace to a carrier of aesthetic
   potential.

   This presentation examines the aesthetic activation of the hyperlink as both an indicator of
   transition and site of transformation. It is a brief exploration of the hyperlink as a signifier, a
   mark both on and in the 'surface' of the digital text, through a close case study of two works by
   hypercomic creator Neal von Flue.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 13:54

4. Played by Hyperfiction. Modes of Reading Megan Heyward's "Of Day, of Night"

   How do we read digital literature? I want to approach the topic by studying how electronic literature prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the preconditions for reading electronic literature. I argue that electronic literature might be considered as a text game, in Wolfgang Iser's sense, and that different work prefigures different attitudes towards reading. The attitudes regarding reading, or modes of reading, I will focus on the semantic orientation of reading, aesthetic enjoyment, a mode of gaining experience, and absorption of the reader.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:59

5. The Aesthetics and Practice of Computational Literature

   While aesthetic practices in photography, film and music have undergone significant transformation due to the affordances of computational tools, the practice of creative and critical writing has remained largely unaffected. As programmable environments further populate the cultural environment it is increasingly important that we understand the ways in which those designed specifically for literary contexts may serve to challenge traditional notions of the writing endeavor. Our paper will provide a brief historical framework for the emergence of generative literary writing practices, a description of a new authoring environment (RiTa) for use in both the production and teaching of digital writing, and an analysis of specific concepts—including layering, materiality, authorial intent, constraints, and distributed creativity—that the use of this environment meaningfully engages.

   (Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 22:13

6. Programming Literary Flow

   "Flow" is the movement of eyes and bodies through museums or city traffic, through instructional diagrams or branching narratives, through hypertexts or games. What is flow in electronic literature? While comics scholars have theorized linear flow (e.g. closure, trails) and hypertext scholars have theorized multilinear flow (e.g. transclusions, links), this exploration of flow in elit considers flow as a total experience or simultaneous visible landscape, beginning in the visual design tradition of flowchart art. Bill Barker or Martijn Englebregt's beaurocratic infographics, Jason Shiga or Chris Ware's narrative diagrams, and Simon Patterson or Dorian Lynskey's subway map art remixes all posit narrative as an experience occuring within a visible landscape of controlled traversals. In digital arts, this situated experience is best exemplified by performers using flow-control programming. How might the metaphors and software tools of flow-control used by audio livecoders and video jockey mashup artists (e.g. PD, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer) serve electronic textualists (e.g. Yahoo! Pipes)?

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 11:51

7. The Heuristic Value of Electronic Literature

   What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?
   Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.
   Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:
   - narrative in narratology;
   - text in linguistics and semiotics;
   - figure in rhetorics;
   - materiality in aesthetics;
   - grasp in anthropology;
   - memory in archivistics;
   - literariness in literary studies…

   Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:
   - an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;
   - a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

   Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:51

8. UbuWeb, the archive and the gallery

   As a seemingly limitless and comprehensive resource, UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) has put together a map of the past hundred or so years of ‘experimental’ writing, film, video, and sound art. It resembles the archive in its breadth and depth, in its relentless collecting, in its inherent totalizing tendencies. My argument is that UbuWeb, while not an ‘archive’ per se, does have a cataloging logic, though it is not apparent, and that its specific logic is based on the commodification of the artwork and the effects of that commodification on its exhibition. To understand that logic, I want to situate UbuWeb at the latest point in a series of discontinuous institutions and discourses that have all taken the ‘artwork’ as their object.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:13

9. Relocating the Literary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Material and Mental Environments

   In two essays, "Toward a Semantic Literary Web" (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and "Electronic Literature as World Literature" (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature's present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe's and Marx's unrealized call for the formation of a world literature "transcending national limits"), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another, and renewed, revised, or renounced by later generations).

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 10:40

10. The Ethos of "Life": digital writing and the temporal animation of space

    When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.

    We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.

    Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 15:05

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