netpoetic.com

“Cordite 36: Electronica has been a fascinating and challenging issue to put together. It contains forty new poems, fifteen spoken word tracks, a dozen features and, for the first time, a selection of multimedia or ‘e-lit’ works. Bringing together these disparate types of content raises an interesting question for Cordite as an online journal. Have we finally broken through that invisible barrier between ‘text-based journal’ and ‘online journal of electronic literature’?

In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to help organize – alongside Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens – the first ever electronic literature exhibit and reading at the MLA Annual Convention in Seattle, WA January 5th through the 7th. The exhibit in particular, which is formally supported by the MLA, marks an important moment in the establishment of electronic literature – another pivotal point at which the field moves further into the center and away from the margins. I’m hoping it’s a moment marking the subtle shift from “electronic” or “digital” literature to just, well, literature.

From January 5th through the 7th at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609, visitors will have the opportunity to view/read/interact with: e-literature from the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two; historically significant works such as those by bpNichol and those published by Eastgate; locative works such as Kate Armstrong’s “Ping;” formally experimental works such as David Jhave Johnson’s “softies;” multimodal narratives such as Christine Wilks’ “Underbelly;” literary games such as Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year“; and mobile works such as Mark Amerika’s “Immobilité.” These are just some of many different modes of e-literature that will be on display. The complete list of works is available on the exhibit website.

Also, on Friday January 6th from 8pm to 10.30pm, there will be an MLA off-site reading of electronic literature at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave  Seattle, WA 98122-2419). If you are in Seattle in early January, please make sure you stop by as it’s a rare treat indeed to have the opportunity to hear these extraordinarily innovative writers read together: Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesebrink, Jim Andrews, Erin Costello and Aaron Angello, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott, John Cayley, Ian Bogost, Brian Kim Stefans, and Kate Armstrong.

Announcing a collection of poetry generated interactively with computer programs: Gnoetry Daily Volume 1! It includes:

• N-gram generations (word-based and character-based) * Diastic readings * Cut-ups * n+7s * template generations * codework transformations
• metaphysical speculation, startling juxtapositions, profane ranting, unpopular political perspectives, and moments of great (though possibly incomprehensible) beauty
• our favorite poems from the past several years of the group blog Gnoetry Daily
• creative Foreword by C.T. Funkhouser (of “Prehistoric Digital Poetry” fame)

All for the low low price of FREE. Get the pdf file, and follow our continuing adventures on Gnoetry Daily and our Chapbooks page!

Since I don’t want to post an ad without any additional content, I’ll now consider the question: how should we refer to the act of generating text poetry using computer tools and algorithms?

This becomes a question because there are at least four traditions of computer poetry generation:

• The Poetic tradition – people like Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman, who are primarily interested in writing good poetry. They may use the term aleatory and draw from the Surrealist, Language, Flarf, and Conceptual traditions.
• The Oulipo tradition – influenced by the French academics/practitioners who are interested in novel constraints and methods of automation. They may use the term combinatory and potential, and frame the use of corpora as a constraint (i.e. only using a certain set of words.)
• The Programming tradition – recreational “hackers” and professional programmers whose goal is developing interesting programs, e.g. the developers of Travesty, Dissociated Press, Racter, and JanusNode, as well as computing pioneers such as Lutz and Stratchey. They may use the term stochastic, and focus on the types of algorithms and interface affordances involved.
• The Research tradition – both scientific and literary theoretic academics who are exploring issues in language and cognition. Scientific approaches may use terms such as poetry generation (following the more general “natural language generation”) and may think of poetry generators as a long-term project towards modeling the creative process by determining which parts can be automated. Literary theoretic approaches may use terms such as appropriation and uncreative.

People can be in more than one category to different degrees, and all of these have valuable contributions to make. But because these different traditions emphasize different histories and different aspects of the activity, they are likely to continue to require different names for the activity.

But maybe the best approach is ludic; roll 6-sided dice 4 times and consult the following expression:

(((1d3)(post-,avant-,'pata-))
 ((1d6)(computational,digital,procedural,appropriative,stochastic,aleatoric))
 ((1d3)(poetic,lyric,verse))
 ((1d3)(generation,production,authoring)))

so rolls of (4, 3, 1, 2) would get you “avant-procedural poetic generation”, for example!

Hi, everyone–

After a long hiatus, here are two new digital stories from webyarns.com…

“Pangram (The Quick Brown Fox)” plays with the concept of a pangram and provides a hypothetical back-story to the most widely-known example of the form.

The second story, the “ABCs of UFOs,” is the purported website of a UFO investigation team. I hope (at a time when laughs are sorely needed) that you find it humorous. Explore and enjoy.

You can find both these stories, and others, at webyarns.com

Rememori is a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters.

Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

I began creating Rememori about a year ago, when my father was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s Disease but still living at home, being cared for by my mother. I finished the work a few days ago, coincidentally just as my father moved from a hospital ward into a Nursing Care Home. On the face of it, the main reason why it’s taken so long to make is because I took time out to work on other projects. During that period my father had a third massive stroke and the prognosis didn’t look good. So for a while, I think I was reluctant to return to the piece. I’m glad I did. There can be no happy endings in situations like these but, now that we have him settled in our preferred Care Home, there’s a sense of respite. I think the work reflects that, certainly in the later stages of the game.

Although drawn from personal research and experience, Rememori is not factual nor biographical – it’s a playable poem or poetic game created in Flash. For facts that speak of a wider context, here’s a quote from the Alzheimer’s Disease International’s World Alzheimer Report 2009:

An estimated 35.6 million people worldwide will be living with dementia in 2010. This number is estimated to nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030, and 115.4 million in 2050. Much of the increase is clearly attributable to increases in the numbers of people with dementia in low and middle income countries.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

Chapter 2: Clement Greenberg, Modernism, The Theory of Computation and Computer Art
by Jim Andrews
Godel’s and Turing’s work as the culmination of Greenberg’s modernism of self-referentiality or consciousness of the art itself within the art itself.

Chapter 1: Computer Art and the Theory of Computation
by Jim Andrews
I’m posting the chapters of a book I’m writing on computer art and the theory of computation. An artist-programmer’s philosophy of computer art.

Aleph Null Color Music
by Jim Andrews
Color music described, and how to play Aleph Null as an instrument of color music.

Aleph Null
by Jim Andrews
Aleph Null is a new online interactive, generative work of visual art. Programmed in JavaScript using the HTML 5 canvas tag.

Banned Production: Cassettes, Crypts and Beavers
by Gregory Whitehead
Notes on cassette culture by one of the greats of that movement.

New Media Writing Prize 2011
by Christine Wilks
The deadline was midday on Monday 31 October 2011.

Recently I stumbled upon an odd but thrilling little publication from 1966 called Astronauts of Inner-Space: An International Collection of Avant-Garde Activity which includes – according to the front cover -  17 manifestoes, articles, letters, 28 poems and 1 filmscript. The collection is so astounding that I had to make a pdf of it – available here, if you’re interested. And why should you be interested? Because it documents a rare moment when media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan are not just influencing but are actively in dialogue with artists, painters, poets, filmmakers, from the avant-garde of the early 20th century to the mid-1960s.

Look at the table of contents and you’ll see that McLuhan’s piece, “Culture and Technology,” is nestled among contributions by pioneers of Dada such as Rauol Hausmann to pioneers of computer generated poetry Max Bense and Margaret Masterman; it’s also included along with essays and poems by “typescape” poets Franz Mon and Dom Sylvester Houedard, work by cut-up master William Burroughs, and even the more bookbound Robert Creeley.

In this single collection, we not only get a sense of McLuhan as engaged with poetics but we see the poets as writing thoroughly activist media poems. They are even activist in the sense that McLuhan was imagining when he wrote in his Astronauts of Inner-Space contribution that “…if politics is the art of the possible, its scope must now, in the electric age, include the shaping and programming of the entire sensory environment as a luminous work of art.” Politics as art and poetry; art and poetry as politics.

“A tall thin old man comes backwards slowly and carefully through the glass door, carrying a metal stepladder in one hand, and in the other a small pot of paint and a small brush. With an air of methodical tidiness, he leans the stepladder against the front of a left-hand stall, stands the pot of paint next to it, places the small brush sideways across the exact centre of the top of the pot.”

The fifth part of a hyperfiction based on visits to churches in the City of London. Part 5 takes in the following:

St Andrew Holborn
Christchurch, Newgate Street
St Vedast-alias-Foster
St Anne and St Agnes

To view the London Churches project, go to www.londonchurches.org .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com – personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk – The Hyperliterature Exchange

Below are abstracts for the papers that Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink, myself, and Mark Sample will present at the January 2012 MLA Annual Convention in Seattle. We’re all delighted to find that our session is part of the Presidential Theme on “Language, Literature, Learning.” Our papers could certainly change between now and then, but for now…here is the shape of our panel. Hope to see some of you there —

*

It is remarkable that in just ten years, since the publication of the first book on electronic literature (Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001), e-literature has firmly established itself as a thriving field. However, all too often, readings of e-literature (or digital-born writing that makes the most of the capabilities of its medium) take the form of accounts of what appears on the screen, with little attention to the material context of the writing – whether its hardware or software. Or, conversely, such readings point to how e-literature reminds us of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Instead, this panel takes up Katherine Hayles’ injunction for “media-specific analysis” of e-literature by focusing on the defining role of the interface in particular. Our argument is this: personal computers from the 1980s as much as the latest multitouch devices are finally revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that frame what can and cannot be written. Further, e-literature often deliberately works against or draws attention to the strictures of digital writing interfaces and so it is an ideal site to explore this tight inter-connection between writing and writing interface. All four presentations, then, try to shift the definition of “interface” outside its conventional usage (in which interface is usually defined quite broadly as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to digital writing/media from the last twenty years to mean the layer between the reader and particular computer platforms which allows the reader to interact with a literary text.

As an example of this approach, Dene Grigar’s paper opens our panel with a detailed discussion of the exhibit “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions” (now installed at the University of Washington). Grigar looks specifically at the major technological shifts in affordances and constraints provided by early computer interfaces and the ways in which e-literature writers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s worked with and against these interfaces. For example, she discusses the command-line interface of the Apple IIe – which was released in 1983 – as an example of an interface that exemplifies an ideology wholly different from the now dominant Graphic User Interface. Thus, the command-line interface also makes possible entirely different texts and entirely different modes of thinking/creating such as that exemplified by bpNichol’s “First Screening” from 1984. Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink then offer a co-presentation in which they move the discussion into the 21st century by focusing on works included in the recently published Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two – an online anthology that highlights and preserves exemplary e-literature from 2001 – 2010. This collection features a stunning variety of interface choices in works of animation, generation, augmented reality, gaming, hypertext, AI-based interactive drama, interactive fiction, poetry and video.

Strickland and Luesebrink focus in particular on e-literature whose interface requires the reader’s bodily movement as a fundamental component as well as those texts whose reading calls for a knowledge of code as well as a familiarity with network forms such as the database, personal home page, Frequently Asked Questions list, blog, listserv, commercial website, wiki, or email. Thus, while they acknowledge the interface defines what is or can be written, Strickland and Luesebrink demonstrate that the interface also creates the reader.

I, Lori Emerson, will then take a slightly different approach in thatI argue recent e-literature by Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson represents a broad movement in e-literature to draw attention to the move toward the so-called “interface free” – or, the interface that seeks to disappear altogether by becoming as “natural” as possible. It is against this troubling attempt to mask the workings of the interface and how it delimits creative production that Judd Morrissey creates “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text. Likewise working against the clean and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson’s hybrid poem-videogame self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written interface while deliberately undoing videogame conventions through nonsensical mechanisms that ensure players never advance past level 121/2. As such, both Morrissey and Nelson intentionally incorporate interfaces that thwart readers’ access to the text so that they are forced to see how such interfaces are not natural so much as they define what and how we read and write.

Finally, Mark Sample provides a close-reading of one work in particular that in fact takes advantage of the “interface free” multitouch display: released just in the last year, “Strange Rain” is an experiment in digital storytelling for Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) designed by new media artist Erik Loyer. As dark storm clouds shroud the screen of the iOS device, the player can take advantage of the way in which the multi-touch interface is supposedly “interface-free” – the player can touch and tap its surface, causing what Loyer describes as “twisting columns of rain” to splash down upon the player’s first-person perspective. In the app’s “whispers” and “story” modes “Strange Rain” unites two longstanding tropes of e-literature: the car crash – the most famous occurring in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1990); and falling letters – words that descend on the screen or even in large-scale installation pieces such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (1999). Sample argues “Strange Rain” transcends the familiar tropes of car crashes and falling text, reconfiguring the interface as a means to transform confusion into certainty, and paradoxically, intimacy into alienation.

[I've completed my Third Hand Plays run at the SFMoma Blog Open Space. I curated 11 new works of digital literature for the series and wrote 12 illustrated blog posts outlining my idea of the "comedies of separation." I've been asked to contribute a piece to the series of new e-lit but just haven't had time to make anything. Anyway, below is my earlier post about the series and a chronological ordering of the posts themselves.]

My Third Hand Plays column at the SFMoma blog Open Space is chugging along. I’ve been granted an extension, which means two new works in addition to the nine already posted. I’ll cap it with a new piece by yours truly if I ever find time to create it.

The artists so far, from something like six countries: Daniel C. Howe, Alan Bigelow, joerg piringer, Alison Clifford, Erik Loyer, Benjamin Moreno Ortiz, Jhave, Christine Wilks and a certain sleepless dynamo named Jason Nelson. Forthcoming are new works by J.R. Carpenter and David Clark. It’s a great, eclectic bunch and it’s been great to work with them! I think this method of doing “career recaps” could be a model for future writing about e-lit artists, especially as there are so many now with large bodies of work.

The texts that I post on Tuesdays concerns something I call the “Comedies of Separation,” which are basically varieties of text/code interaction that I see as the “simples” underlying much of what we do in electronic literature. You’ll have to read my introduction to get a better idea of what I mean. I’m basically looking for a rudimentary vocabulary with which to discuss properties that exist in larger, “cumulative” works (such as Stuart Moulthrop’s “Pax: An Instrument,” which has many components).

Underlying the series is an attempt to link works of e-lit to art and literature that either predated the explosion of new media art in the past decade or that respond to the ubiquity of digitization in our culture. I’m hoping that these writings, along with a longish essay that will appear somewhere if the editor ever gets back to me, will form the outline of a sexy book project that I will propose, oh, somewhere, maybe MIT or your mama. It would be much expanded, less chatty, more based on theory and philosophy, but accessible and, I hope, illustrated in color.

The Posts

1. An Introduction to the Comedies of Separation
2. The Comedy of Subjection
3. The Comedy of Dysfunction
4. The Comedy of Reduction
5. The Comedy of Exhaustion
6. The Comedy of Recursion
7. The Comedy of Simulation
8. The Comedy of Duplication
9. The Comedy of Association
10. The Comedy of Automation
11. The Comedy of Encryption
12. Putting It All Together: The Comedies of Separation

The Works

1. “Scrape Scraperteeth” by Jason Nelson
2. “Repeat After Me” by joerg piringer
3. “Something” and “Telescopio” by Benjamin R. Moreno Ortiz
4. “Out of Touch” by Christine Wilks
5. “TYPEOMS” by Jhave
6. “Big Cradle” by Erik Loyer
7. “Palimpsest” by Alison Clifford
8. “The Quick Brown Fox …” by Alan Bigelow
9. “automatype” by Daniel C. Howe
10. “Struts” by J.R. Carpenter
11. “Bodies of Water” by David Clark

“The elements of the dinner-parties which Mrs Lennox gave, were beauty, men, and pedantic conversation. They talked in a sensuous way outside, lashed themselves when they were alone, and squandered their capabilities in the drawing-room.”

Concluding the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South – abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. Margaret spends some time in Cromer. Dixon is either dead or blue. We finally learn what happened to Frederick; Mr Thornton is in difficulties; and his mother has had wind.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

I’ve just completed my first JavaScript work using the new HTML 5 canvas tag. It’s called Aleph Null. It’s a generative, interactive work of visual art. It launches on turbulence.org from NYC.

Aleph Null is best viewed by the light of a full moon. Or near full moon. Same with the set of stills I made. I mean they do like a bit of darkness.

If you’re using a PC, I’d recommend Chrome to view Aleph Null. At least on my machine, Chrome provides the smoothest performance. Firefox provides a similarly high framerate, but is a bit jerky from time to time. Internet Explorer kind of sucks. On the Mac, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari seem to be fine.

Aleph Null is my first piece with the new HTML 5 canvas tag which requires no plugins and works in all modern browsers, including mobile phones. It’s exciting to have such a canvas to work/play with in a public technology that is not at the mercy of a corporation’s business plan or its continued existence. Such must be the future for net art; it isn’t feasible to rely on corporations to support tools indefinitely, whereas technologies developed in the public sphere stand more of a chance of at least achieving their logical growth and form from their potential.

Aleph Null is color music. Colors are tones. Notes are tones. Music is tones moving in time. This is color tones moving in time.

It takes practice to tease the really good stuff out of it. It’s like an instrument that way. Or a game in which the goal is to experience color music and create visuals you like. It’s like hunting the Snark, beauty or butterflies. Unlike most instruments, Aleph Null will play something whether a person is playing or not. But it benefits immensely by a human player. It knoweth not beauty, is but the instrument of thine own incandesence.

First, a request. Part of the recent Australian National Poetry Week celebrations included an article about how us proles aren’t appreciating poetry enough. (you know, apart from slam poetry, and rap, and poetry shared on the internet among friends… we ought to be reading more REAL poetry, the kind that counts!) Anyway, part of that article included the observation that:

“Some blame generations of teachers for being afraid of verse, while others decry the trivialisation of poetry via such things as online poetry generators. All of these suggestions have some validity, probably operating in combination, and it has to be said that we are the poorer for it.”

So my request is: can someone point me to an article that more fully argues this point about online poetry generators trivializing poetry? I’m sure there must be articles about this out there, but for some reason a google search for “poetry generators trivialize poetry” isn’t helping me. My main purpose isn’t to ridicule this argument, but to understand it better and hopefully to ensure that it’s not true in my own work.

Second, an announcement. We’ve been furiously trivializing poetry on Gnoetry Daily recently, using our culture-impoverishing poetry generators to explore topics such as the September 11 attacks, the Christian Bible, software for phonemically analyzing text for poetry generation, infinite Socratic dialogues, and the ontological and epistemological value of programming. We use a combination of word- and character-based n-gram generators, template generators, diastic readings, n+7s, cut-ups, codework transformations, and more, with a variety of levels of interactivity and editing. We’ve been joined by some new poets and generators recently, and we’d love to hear what you think about our work.

I didn’t mean to bleg and spam and run, so I’ll finish with the only thing I know that can make up for it… MATH! Yeah, you heard me, math! I’ve been working on using set theory and algorithm notation as a basis for developing a taxonomy of computer poetry generators, and I’m starting with Theo Lutz’s classic 1959 “Stochastische Texte” algorithm as a case study for analysis. After the cut is the latest version of what I have so far. If you don’t like it… either tell me who’s been talking trash about poetry generators, or check out what’s been going on at Gnoetry Daily!

(more…)

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP), a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation, seeks submissions of electronic literature from European writers and practitioners for its upcoming anthology. We are looking for innovative literary works by European authors that take advantage of digital media and computation.

Submissions will be accepted from April 12 to September 30, 2011.

ELMCIP involves seven European academic research partners and one non-academic partner investigating how transnational and transcultural creative communities of practitioners form within global and distributed communication environments. Focusing on the electronic-literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP intends both to study the formation and interactions of that community and to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe.

The anthology will provide a sample of Europe’s diverse electronic-literature practices. It will include around thirty works along with teaching materials from educators interested in electronic-literary practices. The anthology will be published online and on a cross-platform DVD.

All content will be offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 License allowing the disc to be installed, duplicated, and shared by individuals, libraries, and educational institutions. The intent is to provide educators, students and the general public with a free curricular resource containing a variety of examples of electronic literary works.

http://elmcip.net/story/call-works-elmcip-anthology

During the fall of 2011, an additional call for pedagogical materials will be distributed, partially based on the works chosen for the anthology.

Selection Committee:

• Simon Biggs, Edinburgh College of Art
• Yra Van Dijk, University of Amsterdam
• Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology
• Jerome Fletcher, University College Falmouth
• Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä
• Talan Memmott, Blekinge Institute of Technology
• Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen
• Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen

Editors:

• Talan Memmott, Blekinge Institute of Technology
• Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology
• David Prater, Blekinge Institute of Technology

A screencast video walking through the process of submitting a work is available on the call for works at the ELMCIP site or http://vimeo.com/22296413

“Extraordinary Discourse” is the latest project of Canadian audio and new media artist Jack Saturday, previously best known for an enormous sound-collage called “The World Owes You a Living” which was self-published on 6 CDs back in about 2005. His technique is to harvest thousands of short sound-bites from the infosphere – from pundits and commentators, from interviews with ordinary people, and sometimes from films or TV shows – then stitch them together into king-size sound-quilts. As the title “The World Owes You a Living” suggests, there is a polemical slant to his work: he’s a millenialist who believes that there is plenty of wealth to go round and that we could all be leading fulfilling and meaningful lives, but that society has been rigged to keep both wealth and self-fulfillment in the hands of a priveleged few. His work is full of both visionary hope and libertarian outrage, but it’s also full of artistic inventiveness, kaleidoscopic variety, humour and fun. “Extraordinary Discourse” takes the form of a series of podcasts – twenty-nine to date – built on an even larger scale than “The World Owes You a Living” and incorporating all the material from that earlier project. Check them out. His is a voice well worth hearing, particularly right now.

http://extraordinarydiscourse.blogspot.com/