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The Generative Literature Project & 21st Century Literacies
In Fall 2014 I taught a “special” version of my “Writing Electronic Literature” course. Throughout this class my students received an overview of established and emerging forms of Electronic Literature including hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive works, and digital poetry. Students read, analyzed, and composed a variety of emerging genres of Electronic Literature. Yet what was unique to this particular iteration of my E-Lit class was that my students contributed to a transmodal generative novel to be published in late 2015 by the academic journal Hybrid Pedagogy. The idea of a generative novel is one that can be traced to the OuliPo group (Ouvroir delittérature potentielle) in France. According to the OuliPo website, the generative writer is “un rat qui construit lui-même le labyrinthe dont il se propose de sortir” (trans. “a rat who builds the maze he wishes to escape”). In this understanding of art and literature, the idea of creation, especially literary creation, is one of wordplay and gameplay. Therefore, the generative novel is, in itself, a game – one of interplay between people, cultures, and institutions.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:21
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Bringing Scandinavian E-Lit in from the Edges
For centuries, Scandinavia comprised the “ends of the Earth” to continental Europeans. As A. E. Nordenskiöld’s 1889 Facsimile-Atlas notes, “Until the middle of the 16th century…geographers took no notice of what was situated beyond lat 63° N….” (54). Today’s e-lit map might look similar. Although Scandinavia produces many creative e-lit works, a relatively small number of critics have investigated them. It is likely that Scandinavian e-lit eludes most e-lit scholars because Scandinavian languages are less familiar than English, French, German, or Spanish. However, there are also a number of excellent works of Scandinavian e-lit in English. This talk will highlight some of these, such as Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum’s Radiant Copenhagen. Radiant Copenhagen is a closed-loop work that plays brilliantly with multiple timelines, incorporating visual and textual elements. The reader navigates a geomap of Copenhagen to read a multiplicity of articles about the capital city.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:25
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Archiving Electronic Literature Beyond its End: Archiving Nordic Works at an Academic Library, a Presentation of a Collaboration in Progress within the University of Bergen
How reliable are archives and databases of born-digital works of electronic literature when their digitally driven platforms are endangered by digital obsolescence and technological challenges, hacks, and by a lack of long-term maintenance after a funding period’s end?
Some of the databases within the field of electronic literature are no longer accessible due to one of the reasons mentioned above: the Cyberfiction Database (directed by Beat Suter) that featured German works that were published between 1996-2003 is down after a move from one server to another; ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Region (directed by Jill Walker Rettberg, 2004-06) was terminated after the project’s funding ended, and the ELO’s wiki-based archive-it database that was set up in 2007 for allocating works for archiving was hacked. The risks are also there for the (still accessible) Drupal-based Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, no longer funded as part of the ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, 2010-2013).
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:31
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Renderings: An E-Lit Translation Project
We report on Renderings, which focuses on translating highly computational literature into English. This has involved (1) locating literature of this sort that is written in other languages, (2) applying techniques that are typical of literary translation, (3) using programming and other Web development work to port and reimplement older works that are not easily accessed today, and (4) bringing literary and computational thinking together when the interaction of language and computing demand it. All four of these reveal cultural aspects of computational literature, including the one related to typical translation practices. The need to think in literary and computational terms as seen in (4) is particularly interesting, as is the search described in (1). Translators do not usually frame their search for work to translate as part of the translation task, but this is an explicit part of Renderings, which involves culturally specific investigations and considerations of different communities of practice.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:38
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Literary Experiments with Automatic Translation: A Case Study of a Creative Experiment Involving King Ubu and Google Translate
The habitus of the translator is in many ways different from that of the author, the translator being sometimes viewed rather as a background figure, and translation having the double status of both an art and a craft requiring specific competence. Thus, it would seem, the consideration of “electronic translation” or experiments involving translation within the digital field would require a specific approach. Alongside the fascinating question of the translation of electronic literature, another subject worth exploring are the relations between automatic translation, or technology-aided translation, and creative literary activity. The question posed in the paper is how such connections can prove fruitful for new ways of thinking about translation and literary activities. The 1994 Encyclopaedia of Mathematics entry on automatic translation informs us that “automatic translation of literature and fiction is both unrealistic and unnecessary.” This seems to be a frequent view, accompanied by a certain anxiety among translation professionals as to the threat of automatic translation “stealing their job” within their lifetime.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:42
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Translating E-poetry: Still Avant-Garde
The American poetry critic Marjorie Perloff undertook the task of rendering a solid theoretical framework to understand the evolution of the art of poetry after Modernism. Furthermore, she traced the evolution of “Postmodern” poetry, analyzing the most radical experiments including the digital poetry of the present. Based on Perloff’s perspective, this paper will observe the evolution of translation as part of the poetics of the American poet Ezra Pound and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. Following its transformation as a writing strategy, they understood translation as a process adjacent to poetry, though the incorporation of translation as part of their own work would be observed as unethical for many critics. Therefore, Haroldo de Campos coined the term “Transcreation” in order to refer his translations as an original work. Interestingly enough, the paradigm for this sort of writing is the Irish writer James Joyce, whose controversial piece Finnegans Wake introduced not only linguistic but also metaphorical and historical translation.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:46
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Digitising Ariadne’s Thread: Feminism, Excryption, and the Unfolding of Memory in Digital Spaces
Our contemporary digital age relies on the ontology of the hyperlink with its capacity to conflate time-space, which allows us immediate access to information in its varying forms of organization. The hyperlink brings texts, images, documents and modes of accessing information directly to our computer and mobile media screens, bypassing the old materialities and technologies for storage of cultural artifacts. Providing us with the fast convergence of information and cultural artifacts, it radically alters the manner in which we extend ourselves in time and space. Sybille Kramer argues that these changes are wrought through digital technologies that operate at the level of the subhuman and sub-perceptible level of the operation of digital code.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:49
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Female Voices in Hispanic Digital Literature
This paper explores four of the most engaging female voices in Hispanic digital literature, aiming at discovering the singularity of their proposals and attempting to find patterns that will disclose, or not, the existence of a female techno-cultural identity in the field. Through the analysis of the works by Marla Jacarilla, Tina Escaja, Dora García and Teresa Martín Ezama, contained in the corpus of Ciberia: Biblioteca de Literatura Digital en Español, we will delineate the diorama of female artists at the ends of digital literature. At the ends, not only because they come from the South, the periphery of main digital literature creation centers, but because they situate themselves in hybrid artistic territories, between contemporary art and digital literature. The main questions we want to formulate are: Can we identify a homogenous female techno-cultural identity in the field of Hispanic digital literature? Or are the works we have gathered single-handed attempts in a cultural vacuum? What is the space granted to gender discourses in the digital literature written by women? Do these creators share a common feminist intentionality or ideological imaginarium?
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:56
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Research and Practice in Electronic Poetry in Ireland
This panel focuses on the production and criticism of electronic poetry in the Irish context. The participants in this panel represent both practitioners and scholars of electronic poetry and poetics in, and from, Ireland. While critics have frequently commented on the relatively conservative poetic culture in Ireland, the various contexts of the production, reception and criticism of poetry disseminated via new media technologies in Ireland remain patchily explored. The emergence of a body of poetry disseminated in electronic formats also raises questions that go beyond questions of “Irishness” and relate to the wider topic of electronic poetry as a form of cultural production. What is the role of national culture in the emergence of electronic/digital literature, and how does this relate to its irreverence of geographical and cultural boundaries? What constitutes poetry, and what is read as poetry, in the multimodal contexts enabled by the emergence of new media? What is the role of the publishing industry and literary scholarship in the emergence, reception and evaluation of electronic poetry?
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:01
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Running Out of Time: The Strategies of Ending in Digital Fictions
Ever since the early theorizing of electronic literature, both the beginning and ending of these literary works has been seen as problematic issues. In the spirit of Umberto Eco’s “open work” (in English 1989), especially hypertext works were considered challenging to the closed nature of literary work – there may be several entrances to the work, but even more importantly, there is no fixed ending but rather, alternative, optional exit points. J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of Books or Books without End, a cornerstone in this field, provided a detailed analysis of M. Joyce’s Afternoon, putting much emphasis on its various endings.
If the early 1990’s theoretical discussion was mainly concerned with hypertext, the current electronic literature scene with its dozens of new modes of expression, technologies and genres, has grown used to the fact that most of the works do not offer a definite ending, but either a set of alternative endings, or, no obvious ending at all. The openness of dynamic ergodic literature has become such a naturalized phenomenon that there has not been much theoretical interest in the question of ending in electronic literature lately.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 11:05
