This is the hand-out I created for a talk I gave at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. I’d like to develop these ideas into a fuller paper that creates a basic set of critical principles by which to discuss the widely divergent forms of digital literature out there. I’m revising the entire presentation for this and Free Space Comix, which I should post soon.

The pieces I discussed were Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], Christian Bök’s Eunoia, Stuart Moulthrop’s Pax: An Instrument, and Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter. Eunoia was included primarily because it was highly informed by information aesthetics without having any of the classic features that one associates with print works that play on tropes from electronic literature (the novels of Mark Danielewski, for example).

The “Holy Grails” that start off the talk are really my thinking through, and simplifying, the vast array of tropes that I see appear in various works of criticism about electronic writing. If there is a “telos” in the development of electronic writing — these are often alluded to in the criticism — it seems to be toward a few horizons, usually using as a departure point some notion of the “author” and the “page” (or book). The third “grail” is a more recent addition, due to the greater visibility of video games as possible forms of art (see my Manifesto for Video Game Developers).

My notion of “crisis” comes out of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (image above), so to this degree I was observing these works as “fiction.” Basically, Kermode reads narrative fiction, particularly novels, as setting up moments of anticipated “apocalypse,” which it can either satisfy or betray during the course of the narrative. It is during these crises that one can situate oneself on the narrative timeline, knowing where one is in relation to the “arc” of the story.

Since, indeed, most of the works I discuss are not narratives in a conventional sense — and do not have the sort of teleological drive that narrative fictions have — these crises must be replaced by something else. I took a few shots at what these could be, though I’m quite sure these seven categories are not the right ones. I was being a bit superstitious with my numbers here — 3, 7, then 1 — and might have fudged in trying to get everything all Pythagorean.

I introduced a new genre of writing for object-based environments, the “Surrealist Fortune Cookie.” It’s briefer than a “lexia,” something that could be reshuffled and reconfigured endlessly without losing its charge. In the talk, I quoted a few lines from John Ashbery’s 37 Haiku as examples. My contention was that databased bits of text that are to be reconfigured algorithmically are most successful when they have elements of the surrealist haiku (or fortune cookie) as they are fragmentary (but can stand alone), enigmatic (more question than statement), and narrative (but without a closure).

After introducing these basic concepts, I then went through the four works listed above and tried to evaluate how they operated in terms of the grails, the crises, and finally, in terms of the “surrealist fortune cookie.” Of course, the relationship of each of these works to the concepts varied greatly.

Language as Gameplay: From ‘The Oulipo to the Jew’s Daughter

handout, 2/12/08

The Holy Grails of Electronic Literature

1. Writing Without the “Author”: To write a piece that can be read several different ways – none predetermined by the “author” – which will provide distinctive, compelling reading experiences each time – that is, displacement of the “author” onto the algorithm.
2. Reading Beyond the “Page”: To write text for an environment that serves a textual function at nearly all times while maintaining the illusion of a dynamic, three-dimensional, processed space that is moving as far away from the “page” as possible.
3. Writing/Reading as Gameplay: To create a programmed object that serves equally as a piece of literature and which also serves as a “game” with all the “fun” implied in such a title — that is, to in­corporate the user completely into the world of algorithm and the world of the screenspace.

Seven Varieties of Crisis

1. Crisis of ESCHATOLOGY — we are not sure where, in the standard narrative paradigm, poetic paradigm, or essayistic (syllogistic) paradigm, we are located nor can we, for the mo­ment, imagine the end.
2. Crisis of SIGNIFICATION — something has occurred in our understanding of conventional relationships between word and thing, or even letter and word; language seems to be becom­ing pure inscription and “non-referential.”
3. Crisis of SYMBOLISM — something seen to have a merely contingent value is seen to have a role in a symbolic universe.
4. Crisis of SUBJECTIVITY – the narratological “I,” whether of third or first person, has shifted.
5. Crisis of GENRE – we have slipped from a narrative event to a poetic one, or more criti­cally, from a non-fictional, documentary mode to one that seems colored by the imagination of an “author.”
6. Crisis of MORALITY – something in the flow of words has forced us to question our own place in the social network due to the “danger” of assimilating these words into our experi­ence – i.e., will I choose to “own” this reading experience or not?
7. Crisis of AUTHORSHIP – something in our reading has suggested a shift from a largely au­thored universe – hence a conversation with another responsible individual – to a largely al­gorithmic one — a conversation with a (“schizophrenic”) robot.

What is a Surrealist Fortune Cookie?

A “Surrealist fortune cookie” is a single sentence that would touch off same element of the various “crises” noted above — a non-trivial reading experience that is brief, open-ended, and yet acquires the enigmatic (permanently “revolutionary”) quality of a Surrealist object – straight out of the world of the Comte de Lautreamont, who wrote of the beauty of “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”

http://aphasic-letters.com/noise/

Noise! 2010 is a one-day, marathon event, featuring a staggering array of artists and works including performance, sound, moving image, language, and culinary craft.

This year, curators Caspar Stracke, Danny Snelson, and Tianna Kennedy contribute an exciting and expansive approach to the event’s theme—mapping signal innovation, distortion, and destruction from the historical avant-garde to contemporary media art practitioners.

Noise! 2010 will mark the conclusion of free103point9′s organizational residence at the Ontological; join us on Saturday, June 26 to celebrate what has been an extraordinary partnership since 2006. Noise! 2010 is presented in association with the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator.

It was only after I began working with Robert Coover in the Brown Literary Arts program in 1998 that I remembered my father commenting years earlier on Coover’s book Pinocchio in Venice; as a foremost Scholar of the Pinocchio story and its appearances throughout history in literature and media, he was impressed with Coover’s handling of the archive.  My father went on to write about Coover’s treatment in a co-authored book, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States.

RC_AI consists of texts composed by myself and Dr. Thomas J. Morrissey, my father, along with several generative algorithms and loose grammars in collaboration with a substantial portion of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice. The panoramic text is a printed array (approximately 380,000 pixels long – or 422 feet) of variable content generated by parsing through approximately 1/2 of Coover’s novel using the author’s name as a search string.

RC_AI was created specifically for ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate the Electronic Literature Organization conference and arts program. The overall event was in part a celebration of Robert Coover who will soon retire from teaching. RC_AI was performed in the auditorium of List Art Center at Brown University with my father on June 4, 2010.

The piece was performed in a session with another performance-based piece using generative content by Scott Rettberg & Rob Wittig (see Scott’s recent Robert Coover Infinite Lit Crit) and further Coover-specific responses from Roxanne Carter and Joe Tabbi.

For RC_AI, I utilized tesseract, an open-source tool for optical character recognition, and then created a system for text processing using python’s natural language toolkit. As this is my first experiment with both tools, the implementation is basic: the former accounts for bad spelling, the latter for poor grammar (as though the puppet sold his schoolbooks for a tree of ass ears).

RC_AI is currently an occasional work, perhaps a work-in-progress for a later time.

Tested in firefox 3.5x & 3.6x, Safari 4x & Chrome 5.0x. Once panorama loads, click on spine title to begin & work will run automatically for 7-9 minutes.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey
wings by Claire Ashley

The Living Newspapers is a live installation consisting of pairs of ‘museum visitors’ seemingly engaged in pedestrian conversation. These conversations are actually comprised of real-time data harvested from the social networking environment, Twitter. The performers in The Living Newspapers act as subtle embodiments of the collective voice of social discourse.

The Living Newspapers takes place each Tuesday-Sunday from 11:00 – 1:30pm and again from 2:30 – 5:00pm with pairs of performers in rotating shifts. The project is revealed as a performance twice daily, in the middle of each shift, when the performers transform into two winged figures. The image constructed is based on The Winged Figures of the Republic, a New Deal era sculpture permanently installed at the Hoover Dam.

The Living Newspaper was a genre of socially engaged theater funded by the federal government in the 1930′s. The plays were constructed from factual information on culturally pertinent topics (such as the syphilis epidemic or the economic plight of farmers) and were were often designed to educate or mobilize their audiences. This contemporary re-imagining of the form is driven by a computer program that constructs dynamic dialogue from cultural chatter. The texts, gleaned by thematic searches or geographical proximity, are received by the performers through discretely worn earphones connected to a networked mobile device.

The piece is performed by: Holly Abney, David Alcalde, Sarah Archer, Joseph Belknap, Sarah Belknap, Doro Boehme, Maggie Cappelletti, Chris Cuellar, Chelsea Culp, Carla Duarte, Karen Faith, Elizabeth Furani, Alexine Haynes, Joshua Kent, David Kodeski, Tet Keong Lee, André Carlos Lenox, Evan Lenox, Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Abina Manning, Lauren McCarthy, Remington Messinger, Jennifer Mills, Jenna Rieker, L. Ruby Sage, Edmund Sandoval, Ali Scott, Colin Self, Molly Shea, James Smith, Edward Thomas-Herrera, Carolina Wheat

Hide and Seek is curated by Tricia Van Eck.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey will discuss this work as part of Art as Event, a panel talk at the MCA Theater on March 13, 2010.

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Timestamp
24 hours of networked writing

an online exhibition and live writing event launching Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009 @ subitopress.org

http://streamflowconditions.subitopress.org

~Beacons~
John Cayley (CA)
Roderick Coover (US)
Ian Hatcher (US)
Mez Breeze (AU)
Jose Carlos Silvestre (BR)
Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (US)
Rui Torres (PT)

code poetry ~~ code proper ~~ ghosts in the network ~~ river expeditions ~~ edges of chaos ~~ immersive horizons ~~ eco-poetics

TIMESTAMP: ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT DECEMBER 5th @ 4:35pm UTC-7 [MST*]

Beginning at 4:35pm MST (sunset in Colorado, physical location of Subito Press) on December 5, 2009, the artists of the online exhibition, Streamflow Conditions, will perform online for 24 hours through networked writing, live coding, streaming video, or other means.

[ *use this to translate into your timezone:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ]

curated by Judd Morrissey

The Dance

For my first netpoetic project, I will address certain aspects of data-driven poetic work. Rather than attempt an exhaustive approach that considers the different ways in which electronic writers inhabit networks cannibalizing, channelling, and remixing data sources, I will take a localized approach, writing largely from my creative practice over the last few years and through some recent/current projects. I do this, on the one hand, because it is simply what I know at the moment and perhaps may stimulate ideas or conversation (for others and myself as I catalog and move forward). I also attempt this out of the feeling that practice-based dialogue is an under-engaged element in the discourse of e-lit (but one beginning to unfold here at netpoetic).

The main works I will discuss are The Last Performance [dot org], which began in 2007, and The Precession, an early work-in-progress. These are collaborative and interdisciplinary works that exist on-screen as well as in performance and installation contexts. They borrow aesthetics and techniques from varied histories including constraint-based literature, process-driven performance, and database art. Thinking through them, I will consider topics such as constraint, collaboration, structure, location, and scale. In a later section, I plan to cite some pieces created by students with whom I have worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This netpoetic contribution will unfold over the course of several entries with the first one coming soon and others coming as they come. A potential 6-fold outline looks like this:

Part I: Constraint, Structure, and Scale

Part II: Location and Interruption

Part III: Performance and Other Front-ends

Part IV: Works by Younger Colleagues

Part V: Hacking the Night Sky

Part VI: Exercises for Cadets

Links:

The Last Performance [dot org]

The Precession (early w-i-p)

“Electronic Literature (in Performance)” by Scott Rettberg

Review of The Last Performance* by David Grubbs

*access, unfortunately, restricted