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Reading Digital Cultural Objects
Editorial note to Dichtung Digital #40 introducing papers by Braxton Soderman, Davin Heckman, Eduardo Navas, John M. Vincler, Martina Pfeiler, Nele Lenze, Roberto Simanowski, and Scott Rettberg.
Patricia Tomaszek - 06.05.2011 - 13:54
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Performative Reading: Attending The Last Performance [dot org]
The Last Performance [dot org] by Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffrey, the Goat Island Collective, and more than 100 other contributors, is a work of database literature that exists in a number of different manifestations online, in performance, and in museum installations. The work-in-progress was initiated in 2008. It was composed using a constraint-driven collaborative writing process that invites user contributions. In this essay, Scott Rettberg considers the difficulties of attempting a close reading of this type of electronic literature, and suggests some strategies for attentive reading, driven by close reading of fragments of the work and awareness of how the work functions as a computational and narrative system.
Patricia Tomaszek - 06.05.2011 - 14:01
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Inside Outside the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics
Developing meaningful approaches to criticism appropriate to new modes of cultural production is among the most pressing problems facing the humanities scholars today. This essay discusses digital poetry as a method of revealing defaults in a technical age. It begins with a general definition of the default, followed by a close reading of Jason Nelson’s This Is How You Will Die (2006) and David Jhave Johnston’s Interstitial (2006) as works that challenge default settings: practically, by opening up the space for criticism within digital practice, and philosophically, by engaging with questions of mortality. Through these poetic works, I trace a path through larger social and philosophical questions about technology via Heidegger and the contemporary discourses of technoscience and posthumanism. I conclude with a discussion of the “black box” as a metaphor for an unresolved knowledge of the human between the technical and the poetic.
Patricia Tomaszek - 06.05.2011 - 14:16
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Electronic Literature and the Mashup of Analog and Digital Code
This essay examines the complexity of contemporary electronic literary practice. It evaluates how electronic literature borrows from, and also influences, the reception of the textual message in other forms of communication that efficiently combine image, sound and text as binary data, as information that is compiled in any format of choice with the use of the computer. The text aims to assess what it means to write in literary fashion in a time when crossing over from one creative field to another is ubiquitous and transparent in cultural production. To accomplish this, I relate electronic literature to the concept of intertextuality as defined by Fredric Jameson in postmodernism, and assess the complexity of writing not only with words, but also with other forms of communication, particularly video. I also discuss Roland Barthes’s principles of digital and analogical code to recontextualize intertextuality in electronic writing as a practice part of new media. Moreover, I discuss a few examples of electronic literature in relation to mass media logo production, and relate them to the concept of remix.
Patricia Tomaszek - 06.05.2011 - 15:17
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Dichtung Digital 40
This edition reflects upon the need of techniques to approach the ongoing upheavals taking place in today's technology-driven production of (literary) art. The contributions assembled here all discuss ways of reading cultural objects created with digital media. The objects of interest are: a computer game (Soderman), a performance of a work that houses and visualizes its literary artifacts on a website - a huge database of texts by different authors (Rettberg), default settings and electronic poetics in an age of technological determinism (Heckman), literary artifacts in between book and programmable media (Vincler), story-telling in the Gulf (Lenze), and signs in a culture of mashups (Navas). In a time when cultural objects in digital culture reconfigure the reception of their addressees, it is important to develop not only a proper understanding of the impact of these ruptures on literary communication but also an interpretation of the presented moves into the scope of scholarly discussion. Such an engagement calls for what Roberto Simanowski proposes in his contribution: "digital hermeneutics."
Patricia Tomaszek - 06.05.2011 - 18:42
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Cross-Referenced E-Lit and Scholarship: The ELMCIP Knowledge Base
The ELMCIP-Knowledge Base (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice) provides researchers, students, and a general audience of electronic literature new ways of accessing existing scholarship in the field. With a special focus on cross-references, the relational database documents the field of research and creative practice in electronic literature. While focusing on the display of social entities and geographical roots, connections between actors and works in the communities field become visible. The strength of the database lies in the variety and cross-referenced nature of record types that feed the database: author, creative work, critical writing, event, organization, publisher, and teaching resources are being documented and referenced. In this talk, I will present suggestions how to integrate the ELMCIP-Knowledge Base into regular writing, research, and teaching practices.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 13:25
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Written on the Body: An Interview with Shelley Jackson
The interview focuses on the role of the body in Shelley Jackson's work, in particular in her distributed narrative project "Skin," which was tattooed on the bodies of volunteers around the world, one word at a time.
Scott Rettberg - 21.05.2011 - 10:13
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Memory and Motion: The Body in Electronic Writing
Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs explore the new materialism of the corporeal body in electronic writing and online environments. They argue that electronic environments have a strong relationship with affective modes of communication highlighted by their appeal to sensory novelty through technological innovation—new media platforms proliferate the potentials for combining visibility with aural and tactile modes. Their essay argues for a new materialism in electronic culture, one that has serious implications for the way that we understand memory.
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)
Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 11:17
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Why Digital Literature Has Always Been “Beyond the Screen”
Andrew Michael Roberts demonstrates that digital literature has always been beyond the screen. In many of the practices and framing ideas of electronic literature, he identifies recurrences of key conceptions of modernism and postmodernism such as literalization, enactment, difference, movement, etc. Nonetheless, as he argues, literature is embracing new forms of expression influenced by the evolving mediatechnological possibilities and the increased involvement of the recipient’s whole body.
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)
Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 13:02
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A Town as a Novel: An Interactive and Generative Literary Installation in Urban Space
Balpe's essay details the conceptual background and implementation of his 2005 project Fictions d’Issy (Fictions of Issy) -- a generative narrative project installed in public spaces in the town of Issy, which included both narrative generated by Balpe's system and SMS contributions from passers-by.
Scott Rettberg - 24.05.2011 - 11:15
