In fact, this existential debate does nothing more than transfer in the field of e-literature the highly disputed and far from settled issue in literary history concerning the claims that different national literatures lay on the work of bilingual authors – of those who at a certain moment and for various reasons changed both country and language. In other words, assuming that ‘x’ stands for a particular adjective of nationality, the general question runs like this: Is literature written by an x-author in a different language still x-literature? As the quoted example shows, the usual answer is negative.

The question that immediately follows opens to debate the relevance of this view in the case of e-literature, especially since even its standard definition treats language as secondary. (According to the definition offered by the Electronic Literature Organization, an electronic literary production is a ‘work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer’; K. Hayles, Electronic Literature, U of Notre Dame, 2008, 3).

Thus stated, the debate touches upon an unsolved dissimilarity between the definitions of print versus electronic literature from the point of view of the way in which the two of them position themselves with respect to language. While print literature is basically defined as a particular – and even as the most appropriate and complex – use of language: the aesthetic one, e-literature justifies its novelty not in terms of language but first and foremost in terms of its medial manipulation (even if for similar aesthetic purposes). Watching the text’s behaviour under various technical and programming constraints takes precedence over the minute exploration of its stylistic subtleties.

Instead of focusing exclusively on producing meaning by all means, the electronic text, once aware of its peculiarities – most of all of its instability – takes one step back and begins to play not only with meaning, but also with its own legibility. To quantify all the resulting variables would be difficult, but enumerating a few examples will suffice. When the text’s display time ignores the receiver’s reading speed, when the access to the whole body of text is limited either as a result of programming constraints or due to its exceeding quantity, when the text is reduced to a minimum or when it is a ‘recycled’ version of the ordinary usage of language, it is not a comprehensive but rather a conceptual approach that is demanded from the reader. Instead of making an effort to understand the text itself, the reader is supposed to analyse the strategies by means of which that particular interpretation is arrived at and to meditate upon the implications of the impossibility to put into practice the acquired reading or sense-producing habits. In such cases the language of communication hardly matters as long as the receiver is familiar enough with it to be able to recognize the actual aims of the e-text. There is no ineffable or untranslatable meaning that is lost in passing from one language to another or in preferring one language to another for the obvious reason of its wider accessibility simply because ‘meaning’ no longer resides in language (only) but (mostly) in the mechanisms of its production and manipulation.

Therefore, a phrase like ‘E-poetry in x-language’ might be too restrictive when used to refer to e-literature as it seems to reactivate the Romantic view on language which is a correlate of the idea of national literature still in use today. In this view, language is the incarnation of the spirit of a people, a change of language consequently involving the adoption of a different frame of mind as well. Literary studies still function on the basis of this premise which has been internalized to such an extent that it does no longer have to be overtly stated. While this seems to work well with print literature, the case might not be the same when it comes to e-literature, where the second phrase – ‘x e-poetry’ – in which the adjective of nationality points to a more permissive yet less precise categorization relying on a perspective which does not favour language only, might be preferable despite its imprecision and the fact that even in this diluted form some Romantic reminiscences surreptitiously return as well.

This extensive comment on a matter of labeling was meant to serve as an introduction to the presentation of a few works belonging to the Romanian group kinema-ikon, whose digital productions provide very good illustrations of the above mentioned issues. Thus, if one decides to follow the stricter, that is linguistic, criterion, the fact that these productions are representative of Romanian e-literature would be hard to prove indeed as the majority of kinema-ikon works resort to other languages than Romanian – mainly English and French. The reasons for this choice are obvious enough and they are either contextual – many of these works were presented at different international festivals – or more general – the need to address a larger public and to ease the contact with fellow artists from other countries. Nothing to do with the stylistic specificity of a certain language then. That is why applying this criterion might prove misleading in the final run as the reduction it operates overlooks the numerous cases in which the hard-core point of such productions is no longer a matter of what is said or written and how, but of exploring alternative expressive means. In fact, in a very peculiar manner, such works create an interesting balance between the two forms of employing the community-circumscribing term, in this case ‘Romanian’ and ‘in Romanian’. But the introduction has grown into a quite independent meditation which does not cover but partially the key aspects of some of the works I intended to put forth as examples. This makes it necessary to reserve them for a future separate installment under a different heading.

Next to The Knight from the Carpathians and Randevuul, Ready Media is one of the most important works produced by kinema-ikon during its mixed-media or transition stage (1990-1993) and the first to use a digital programme, consequently receiving the ‘official’ title of ‘digital work number 0’. It was publicly presented at the third annual exhibition – entitled MEdiA CULPA – of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 1995. The work does not survive in its initial form on the DVD anthology that accompanies the anniversary catalogue issued in 2005. Ready Media was the result of collective work and initially consisted, on the one hand, in a video rendering of a selection of pieces of news broadcast by the national television and, on the other hand, in a CD-rom collection of ironic-iconic comments on TV cliches displayed on a computer  monitor facing the TV screen. A series of posters representing green horses formed the background of this installation. One additional element of the initial presentation was a bottle of ‘Tzuika by Turtz’.

Ready Media

In its digitally reconfigured version the work was given an interactive form. The screen is divided into three vertical sections. The central part can be seen as the summary of the exhibition: at the top there is a short filmic sequence of the video and computer screens facing each other against the background of a wall covered in posters of green horses. A simple click activates immediately underneath the immaterial counterpart of the bottle of ‘Tzuika by Turtz’ which is placed over the figure of a broadcaster, very familiar to the Romanian audience of the 80s-90s. Each of the two lateral sections is further divided into three frames standing for different pieces of news that illustrate the two major (and probably solely) mass-media topics: ‘actiune’ (action) and ‘pasiune’ (passion). Depending on the ‘reader’s’ actions, these frames alternatively display the corresponding words and images.

The message of this work is quite explicit. The title pretty much says it all: as opposed to the avant-garde ready-made, which consisted in elevating a common object from a utilitarian to an artistic level, what ready-media does is to reduce ideas to ready bits of information, which require no further processing, and feed them into the public.

The linguistic component of this work is minimal: apart from the title, it is actually represented by three words and a phrase. The critical commentary on the adverse effects of media is implicit in the particular images chosen to exemplify these very few words. For instance, the word ‘action’ is illustrated by a series of images depicting scenes and instruments of torture.

Ready Media

However, the most ironic ‘comment’ is provided precisely by the image of the wall covered in posters of green horses – a visual and literal representation (inescapable for a Romanian public but which would be lost for a foreign audience) of a very common idiomatic expression in Romanian used as a synonym for ‘hallucinating’ or ‘taking unreal things for facts’ and always employed in a derisive manner: ‘to see green horses on the wall’. This is an instance when the use of a phrase like ‘e-literature in x-language’ becomes justified as the presence of those posters, which represent one of the main components of this work, and the comments they involve are of significant consequence for the overall meaning and would be totally overlooked or seem devoid of purpose in the absence of proper familiarity with the idiomatic structure of the Romanian language. What is also striking is the fact that the authors opted not for a linguistic, but for a pictorial rendering of the idiom, increasing that way the distance between its original form and its possible translations. For instance, the approximate English equivalent – ‘to chase a wild goose’ – despite a certain similarity, does not help identify the reference. At the same time, such techniques succeed in making more effective their criticism of the media’s false claims of objectivity. In other words (or images) what this works says is that what you ‘see’ on the TV screen is nothing more than ‘green horses on the wall’.

Nevertheless, such instances are rare. In most cases the chosen language has very little to do with an express intention to exploit its particular stylistic subtleties, therefore its use neither enhances nor diminishes the artistic effects of a certain piece. The range of examples is vast but I will limit the selection to two of the most typical situations: the use of minimal and predominantly informative linguistic structures (as in, for instance, mother nature. father knowledge) and the hybridization of language (as in Word for Word).

mother nature.father knowledge

Mother nature. father knowledge, produced by Linda Barkasz and Sergiu Sas in collaboration with Mihai Salajan and Rares Moldovan, is one of the five works which form the Vertigo project (2005) inspired by sub-culture and counter-culture movements. This project is an illustration of the ‘kf-art’ practised by a group of young artists from Arad (in a special Café_Club + alternative space for contemporary art) whom kinema-ikon met in 2004 and with whom they started a collaborative project. Out of the five pieces this is the closest to a literary model, albeit a popular one. It is a narrative that follows closely the tradition of SF stories and movies. The usual topics of   SF productions or, more specifically, of what is nowadays called ‘cyberfiction’ can be easily identified: the myth of the perfect technological society: ‘cyber-utopia’; the destruction of the myth: ‘cyber-utopia … failure’, ‘rebellion of the guardian cyber-angels’; the confrontation of races: ‘the Great Divide of the human race … The Watchers and The Disembodied Voices’; the model inhabitant and product of this society: ‘born from the sea of information’ and the change he goes though once he realizes that what he believed to be the (one and only) World is just a monad inside a larger sphere: ‘raised by artificial creatures’, ‘erased memory’, ‘disconnected from the netsphere’, ‘ran to the locked door that I knew was now wide open’, ‘escape … cyberspace … damnation’; the melange of theological and technological elements characteristic of this genre; the antithetic presentation of the feminine character: ‘born from a lotus flower’; the final ‘connection’ between the two main characters. Last but not least, the first five chapters of this work – each named after one of the five senses – suggest a sort of initiation process – ‘the quest changes you forever’ – consisting in the (re)humanization of the informational being that has escaped its ‘cyber’-prison. So much for the ‘cliches’ of the work.

mother nature. father knowledge

On the other hand, this mainly inferred and reconstructed scenario is prevented from becoming completely linear, explicit (and even valid) precisely by the way in which the linguistic structures are employed. As the above examples show, the text is minimal and broken. There are hardly any coherent sentences. The regular intervention of ellipses between keywords and phrases induces doubts as to the way in which they should be connected. Thus, ‘cyber-utopia … failure’ can be read according to the common pattern as ‘the failure of cyber-utopia’ but the lack of explicit syntactic connection between the two words leaves space for opposite and equally justified interpretations. Similarly, in ‘escape … cyberspace … damnation’ the connections multiply proportionally and the structure can be read either, most commonly, as ‘to escape cyberspace damnation’ or as ‘to escape cyberspace is damnation’ or even as ‘to escape in cyberspace from damnation’ and so on. Despite their scarcity and simplicity, these fragmented words and phrases can generate complex and different scenarios depending on the linking patterns supplied by the reader. The disconnected character of the text is mirrored by its manner of appearing on the screen: chunks of words flash up unexpectedly, in no particular order, as the mouse pointer hovers over the moving picture on the screen.

The same contrast between ‘recycled’ and subversive elements is noticeable in the case of the visual support of the work. The background consists in a series of photos depicting a Romanian cityscape, which is partially ‘conquered’ by a sort of spidery infestation agent that also clings to the main characters in a parasitical manner. However, the two ‘realities’ never really fuse. The contrast between the photographed images and the superimposed network drawings is so striking that it never enables the sort of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that such stories strongly require.

Word for Word

The second example is a poem by Andreea Bencsik published in Intermedia 12 (1997), the magazine issued by kinema-ikon during the third stage of its evolution – the digital stage proper (since 1994 onwards) – called ‘hypermedia’. The theme of the poem is the contrast between the overt and apparently unambiguous meaning of the most commonly used phrases of everyday language and the incommunicable actual matters that frequently lurk behind them: ‘Sometimes words have true meaning behind / inside word’. This is visually illustrated by the blurred words which overshadow the clearly written and outspoken phrases and which carry the actual meanings: ‘Ce mai faci?’ ‘Bine’ ‘Sufar’ (‘How are you?’ ‘Fine’ [overtly said]; ‘I’m hurt’ [covertly thought]); ‘What a cold weather’ ‘Yes, this is a cold day’ [overtly]; ‘What a stupid remark’ [covertly]. Even if the poem resorts to both English and Romanian phrases, the employment of the two languages is meant to illustrate a universal situation.

Mitzi Kapture La fusillade

hyper junk

Finally, there is a third class of works in which the relevance of the linguistic origin is progressively reduced to zero as a result of the distortions to which the text is subjected. For instance, Mitzi Kapture’s La fusillade (part of the collective project entitled Commedia del Multimedia, 1997) presents an OCR scan of a recognizable French text but distorted to such a degree that its perception cannot be called ‘reading’ proper. In an even more radical manner, another work of the Vertigo project, signed by Ivan Tolan, presents the reader not with a text but, as the title explicitly informs us, with ‘hyper junk’.

To sum up, in the digital realm classifications such as ‘e-literature in x-language’ or ‘x e-literature’ actually serve to measure the oscillating relevance of the linguistic component of such works and they have limited relevance themselves. There is thus the first circle of the ‘e-works’ whose choice of an ‘x-language’ really influences the overall meaning. (The only member of the kinema-ikon group who actually produced one volume of e-poems in Romanian is Romulus Bucur. But his extensive contribution to the kinema-ikon workshop deserves a separate treatment.) There is then a second category of works – ‘the x e-works’ – whose choice of one language or another has no direct or major effect on meaning. Beyond this second circle, one discovers the vast area of hybrid and illegible ‘textualities’ where meaning is no longer a matter of ‘natural’ linguistic structures and where the use of the term ‘literature’ seems to be only metaphorical.

Foursquare and its brethren (Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, and so on) are the latest social media darlings, but honestly, are they really all that useful? Sharing your location with your friends is not very compelling when you spend your life in the same four places (home, office, classroom, coffee shop). Are these apps really even fun? Does becoming the Mayor of a Shell filling station or earning the Crunked badge for checking into four different airport terminals on the same night* count as fun? I hope not. In truth, making fun of Foursquare is more fun than actually using Foursquare.

*The Crunked badge is for checking into four separate locations during a single evening. They don’t all have to be airport terminals. That’s just my own quirk.

Aside from the free chips I got for checking into a California Tortilla, the only redeeming value of these geolocation apps is that they offer the slightest glimmer—a glimmer!—of creative and pedagogical use. While some of the benefits of geolocation have been immediately seized upon by museums and historians—think of the partnership between Foursquare and the History Channel—very few people have considered using geolocation in a literary context. Even less attention has been paid to the ways geolocation can foster critical and creative thinking. So I’ve been pondering re-purposing Foursquare and its ilk in ways unintended and unforeseen by their creators.

Following Rob MacDougall’s call for playful historical thinking, I’ve been imagining what you could call playful geographic thinking. Let’s turn locative media from gimmicky Entertainment coupon books and glorified historical guidebooks into platforms for renegotiating space and telling stories.

Let’s turn them into something that truly resembles play. And here I’ll use  Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen’s concept of play: free movement within a more rigid structure.

In this case, that rigid structure comes from the core mechanics of the different geolocation apps: checking in and tagging specific places with tips or comments. What’s supposed to happen is that users check in to bars or restaurants and then post tips on the best drinks or bargains. But what can happen, given the free movement within this structure, is that users can define their own places and add tips that range from lewd to absurd.

This is exactly what Dean Terry is doing. Along with his colleagues and students at the Emerging Media and Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dean has been renaming spaces and making his own places. Even better, Dean and his group at the MobileLab at UT Dallas are not only testing the limits of existing geolocation apps, they’re building one of their own.

I’m not designing my own app, but I am playing with the commercial apps. And again, by playing, I mean moving freely within a larger, more constrained structure. For instance, within my dully named campus office building, Robinson A, I’ve created my own space, The Office of Incandescent Light and Industrial Runoff. Which is pretty much how I think of my office. And I’m mayor there, thank you very much.

Likewise, when I’m home, I often check into the Treehouse of Sighs. I have an actual treehouse there, but the Treehouse of Sighs is not that one. The Treehouse of Sighs exists only in my mind. It’s a metaphysical Hotel California. You can check in any time you like, but you can never be there.

Just as evocative as creating your own space is tagging existing spaces with virtual graffiti, which you can use to create a counter-factual history of a place. Anyone who checks into the Starbucks on my campus can see my advice regarding the fireplace there. Also on GMU’s campus, I’ve uncovered Fenwick Library’s dirty little secret. And sometimes I leave surrealist tips in public places, like this epigram in yet another airport terminal:

All of this play has led me to think about using geolocative media with my students. Next spring I’m teaching an undergraduate class called “Textual Media,” a vague title that I’ve taken to describing as post-print fiction. My initial idea for using Foursquare was to have students add new venues to the app’s database, with the stipulation that these new venues be Foucauldian “Other Spaces”—parking decks, overpasses, bus depots, etc.—that stand in sharp contrast to the officially sanctioned places on Foursquare (coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc.). One of the points I’d like to make is that much of our lives are actually spent in these nether-places that are neither here nor there. Tracking our movements in these unglamorous but not unimportant unplaces could be a revelation to my students. It might actually be one of the best uses of geolocation—to defamiliarize our daily surroundings.

I recently participated in a geolocation session at THATCamp that helped me refine some of these ideas. We had about fifteen historians, librarians, archivists, literary scholars, and other humanists at the session. We broke off into groups, with the mission of hacking existing geolocation apps for teaching or learning. I worked with  Christa Willaford and  Christina Jenkins, and as befits brainstorming about space, we left the windowless room, left the building entirely, and stood out near a small field (that’s not even on the  outdated satellite image of the place) and came up with the idea we called Haunts.

Haunts is about the secret stories of spaces.

Haunts is about locative trauma.

Haunts is about the production of what Foucault calls “heterotopias”—a single real place in which incompatible counter-sites are layered upon or juxtaposed against one another.

The general idea behind Haunts is this: students work in teams, visiting various public places and tagging them with fragments of either a real life-inspired or fictional trauma story. Each team will work from an overarching traumatic narrative that they’ve created, but because the place-based tips are limited to text-message-sized bits, the story will emerge only in glimpses and traces, across a series of spaces.

Emerge for whom? For the other teams in the class. But also for random strangers using the apps, who have no idea that they’ve stumbled upon a fictional world augmenting the real one. A fictional world haunting the real one.

There are several twists that make Haunts more than simple place-based creative writing. For starters, most fiction doesn’t require any kind of breadcrumb trail more complicated than sequential page numbers. In Haunts, however, students will need to create clues to act as what Marc Ruppel calls migratory cues—nudging participants from one locale to the next, from one medium to the next. These cues might be suggestive references left in a tip, or perhaps obliquely embedded in a photograph taken at the check-in point. (Most geolocation apps allow photographs to be associated with a place; Foursquare is a holdout in this regard, though third-party services like picplz offer a work-around.)

Another twist subverts the tendency of geolocation apps to reward repeat visits to a single locale. Check in enough times at your coffee shop with Foursquare and you become “mayor” of the place. Haunts disincentivizes multiple visits. Check in too many times at the same place and you become a “ghost.” No longer among the living, you are stuck in a single place, barred from leaving tips anywhere else. Like a ghost, you haunt that space for the rest of the game. It’s a fate players would probably want to avoid, yet players will nonetheless be compelled to revisit destinations, in order to fill in narrative gaps as either writers or readers.

The final twist is that Haunts does not rely only upon Foursquare. All of the geolocative apps have the same core functionality. This means that one team can use Foursquare, while another team uses Gowalla, and yet another Brightkite. Each team will weave parallel yet diverging stories across the same series of spaces. Each Haunt hosts a number of haunts. The narrative and geographic path of a single team’s story should alone be engaging enough to follow, but even more promising is a kind of cross-pollination between haunts, in which each team builds upon one or two shared narrative events, exquisite corpse style. Imagine the same traumatic kernel, being told again and again, from different points of views. Different narrative and geographic points of views. Eventually these multiple paths could be aggregated onto a master narrative—or more likely, a master database—so that Haunts could be seen (if not experienced) in its totality.

There is still much to figure out with Haunts. But I find the project compelling, and even necessary. The endeavor turns a consumer-based model of mobile computing into an authorship-based model. It is a uniquely collaborative activity, but also one that invites individual introspection. It imagines trauma as both private and public, deeply personal yet situated within shared semiotic domains. It operates at the intersection between game and story, between reading and writing, between the real and the virtual. And it might finally make geolocation worth paying attention to.

1. Unigrams

I’ll use Shakespeare as an example; either you’ll like it, or you’ll like that I’m shredding it.  So think of Shakespeare’s line:
“When I do count the clock that tells the time.”
It contains several words:
1. when
2. I
3. do
4. count
5. the
6. clock
7. that
8. tells
9. the
10. time
Computational linguists might call each word a unigram, as part of a language model.

I could generate my own poetry by rolling a 10-sided dice:
- if a ’3′ came up, I’d write ‘do’.
- if a ’9′ came up I’d write ‘the’.
- if a ’1′ came up I’d write ‘when’.
and so on.  After rolling the dice a couple times I might get something like:

do the when clock the when when that

Which sounds pretty incoherent, but this is just the first step!

2. Bigrams from a single line

Think of that line again:
“When I do count the clock that tells the time.”
It contains several adjacent pairs of words:
1. when I
2. I do
3. do count
4. count the
5. the clock
6. clock that
7. that tells
8. tells the
9. the time
Computational linguists might call these bigrams.

If I found a 9-sided dice, I could generate my own poetry again.
- For example, if an ’8′ came up, I’d write ‘tells the’
- The previous bigram ends with the word ‘the’.  So for the next word I’d look at those bigrams that begin with ‘the’.  There are two of these:
5. (‘the clock’)
9. (‘the time’).
So I flip a coin, and I decide on 5.
So far my poem is:

tells the clock

- Then for the next word I’d look at those bigrams that begin with ‘clock’. Unfortunately there is only one, ‘clock that,’ so I need to choose that.
- And after that, there is only one bigram that begins with ‘that’ (‘that tells’) so I need to choose that!
- And after that there is only one bigram that begins with ‘tells’ (‘tells the’) so I need to choose that.
- Luckily there are again two bigrams that begin with ‘the’ so I flip a coin and pick ‘the clock’.

So thus far my poem is:

tells the clock that tells the clock

which is bad, but at least makes a bit more sense than the unigram-generated poem.

But the sequence ‘the clock that tells the’ is lifted straight from the original line of poetry (a.k.a. the training data) because there weren’t a whole lot of options available.  This is the danger of using a small data set!  So let’s look at a bit more data.  At this point, using a computer programs helps.

3. Bigrams from Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Let’s take the entire set of Shakespeare’s sonnets from Project Gutenberg, and write a program to read the text file and break each line of poetry into bigrams as above.  There are a couple decisions we need to make when tokenizing (splitting the text into words) such as whether we should split things like “self-substantial” into two words or not, but the programming itself is pretty straightforward.

It turns out there are 11817 unique bigrams in Shakespeare’s sonnets which occur a total of 17534 times.  For example:
- “eyes are” is a unique bigram which occurs 2 times
- “fragrant rose” is a unique bigram which occurs 1 time
- “even to” is a unique bigram which occurs 3 times
and so on.

So let’s generate a poem!  How do we know where to start?  We keep a separate list of those words that begin a line of poetry!  Here is a list of the tokens that start lines in the Sonnets, along with the number of times they occur:

I 37, a 17, above 1, accuse 1, admit 1, advantage 1, after 2, against 10, ah 5, alack 1, alas 2, all 10, although 5, am 1, among 1, an 1, and 242, angry 1, anon 1, another 1, applying 1, are 3, art 1, as 40, askance 1, at 5, attending 1, authorizing 1, awakes 1, ay 2, bare 1, be 9, bear 1, bearing 2, beated 1, beauteous 1, beauty 2, beauty’s 1, because 2, before 3, beggar’d 1, being 4, beshrew 1, better 1, betwixt 1, beyond 1, blessed 1, book 1, borne 1, both 3, bound 1, breathed 1, bring 1, but 89, buy 1, by 14, call’d 1, calls 1, came 2, can 3, cannot 1, canst 1, cheered 1, chiding 1, clouds 1, come 2, comes 1, commanded 1, commit 1, compar’d 1, compare 1, consum’d 1, coral 1, could 1, counting 1, crawls 1, creating 1, creep 1, cries 1, crooked 1, crowning 1, cupid 1, darkening 1, dear 1, death’s 1, delights 1, describe 1, deserves 1, desire 1, desiring 1, despite 1, devouring 1, die 2, disdains 1, dissuade 1, distill’d 1, divert 1, do 4, doing 1, dost 3, doth 6, doubting 1, drawn 1, drink 1, drugs 1, dulling 1, duty 1, each 2, eat 1, either 1, enjoy’d 1, entitled 1, ere 2, eternal 1, even 10, exceeded 1, excuse 1, excusing 1, fair 3, fairing 1, farewell 1, featur’d 1, feed’st 1, feeding 1, feeds 1, find 1, finding 2, flatter 1, for 73, forgot 1, from 14, full 2, gainst 1, gentle 1, gilding 2, give 5, giving 1, gor’d 1, grant 1, great 1, growing 1, grows 1, had 2, hang 1, haply 1, happy 1, harsh 1, hast 1, hate 1, hath 6, have 6, he 7, hearing 1, hence 1, her 4, herein 1, hers 1, hiding 1, him 2, his 3, holds 1, how 21, hung 1, if 35, in 36, incapable 1, incertainties 1, increasing 1, injurious 1, intend 1, is 10, is’t 1, it 6, join 1, just 1, kill 2, kind 1, kissing 1, knowing 2, laid 1, lascivious 1, lean 1, leaving 1, leese 1, lest 6, let 10, lifts 1, like 8, lilies 1, lo 3, look 6, looking 2, lord 1, lose 1, love 4, love’s 3, loving 1, mad 2, made 2, make 6, makes 2, making 7, mark 2, may 3, me 2, methinks 1, might 1, mine 10, more 5, most 2, much 1, music 1, my 30, myself 2, naming 1, nativity 1, nature’s 1, nay 2, needs 1, neither 1, never 1, no 17, none 1, nor 24, not 10, nothing 1, now 9, o 47, o’er 1, o’ercharg’d 1, oaths 1, of 20, on 6, one 5, only 1, or 38, others 1, our 2, painting 2, past 3, perforce 1, pitiful 1, pity 3, plods 1, pluck 1, pointing 1, points 1, poor 1, possessing 1, potions 1, praising 1, presents 1, presume 1, prison 1, profitless 1, proving 1, receiving 1, resembling 2, reserve 2, return 2, revenge 1, richer 1, rise 1, robb’d 1, robbing 1, root 1, roses 2, rough 1, ruin 1, sap 1, savage 1, save 7, say 1, seeking 1, seems 1, self 1, serving 1, sets 2, shall 10, she 3, shifts 1, show 1, showing 1, simply 1, sin 1, since 15, sing 1, sings 1, sinks 1, sland’ring 1, so 47, some 7, sometime 2, speak 2, speaking 1, spend’st 1, spending 1, steal 1, stealing 2, still 2, stirr’d 1, straight 1, strikes 1, such 5, suffering 1, suns 1, supposed 1, suspect 1, swear 1, sweet 4, sweets 1, take 3, tan 1, tell 1, tempteth 1, ten 1, than 13, that 83, that’s 1, the 78, thee 1, their 1, theirs 1, then 33, thence 1, there 2, therefore 8, these 5, they 11, thine 4, think 1, this 8, those 7, thou 25, though 10, three 3, through 1, thus 8, thy 29, till 6, time 1, time’s 1, tir’d 1, tired 1, tis 3, to 78, to-morrow 2, too 1, towards 1, triumph 1, truth 1, two 1, under 2, unlearned 1, unless 4, unlook’d 2, unmoved 1, unthrifty 1, until 1, upon 7, use 1, uttering 1, vaunt 1, want 1, was 4, we 1, weary 1, weeds 1, weighs 1, were 4, were’t 1, wh’r 1, what 14, what’s 2, whate’er 1, when 57, whence 1, where 11, wherein 2, whereon 1, whereto 3, which 47, while 4, whilst 11, who 18, whoe’er 1, whoever 1, whom 1, whose 6, why 12, will 4, wilt 1, wishing 1, with 18, within 5, without 5, wooing 1, worthy 1, wound 1, wretched 1, yet 20, you 7, your 5, yourself 2

So in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the token “I” begins a line of verse 37 times; the token “how” begins a line of verse 21 times; the token “why” begins a line of verse 12 times, and so on.

Now let’s say we get a lottery machine, and wrote “I” on 37 of those little ping-pong balls, and wrote “how” on 21 of the ping-pong balls, and “why” on 12 of the ping-pong balls, and so on.  Then we draw out one of the ping-pong balls, look at the token on it, and put it back.  Let’s say the ping-pong ball we drew out said: “that”.  So thus far we have a poem that goes:

that

So now we can have our program look at the tokens that follow “that” in our corpus.  Here is a list of the tokens that follow “that” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
I 28,  a 1,  able 1,  affable 1,  all 1,  am 1,  art 1,  audit 1,  barren 1,  be 1,  bears 2, beauteous 1,  beauty 3,  before 1,  besiege 1,  best 1,  better 1,  blessed 1,  bond 1,  bosom 1, brightness 1,  by 1,  calls 1,  can 1,  cannot 1,  censures 1,  churl 1,  copy 1,  deep 1, did 2,  do 2,  doth 3,  due 3,  ease 1,  enfeebled 1,  eternal 1,  ever 1,  every 2,  eyes 1, face 1,  fair 1,  fears 1,  feeds 1,  fell 1,  fester 1,  fire 1,  flies 1,  flower 1,  followed 1, for 2,  fresh 1,  from 1,  full 1,  gainst 1,  gave 1,  give 1,  glory 1,  god 1,  ground 1, grows 1,  guides 1,  harvest 1,  hath 1,  have 2,  having 1,  he 3,  heals 1,  heart 1,  heaven’s 1, heavy 1,  her 1,  heretic 1,  hidden 1,  him 1,  his 1,  honour 1,  idle 1,  in 7,  ink 1, is 9,  it 2,  keeps 2,  languish’d 1,  leads 1,  leaves 1,  level 1,  liberty 1,  life 1, like 1,  long 1,  looks 1,  loss 1,  love 3,  love’s 1,  loves 1,  made 1,  makes 2,  man’s 1, may 1,  men 1,  millions 1,  mine 3,  more 1,  muse 1,  music 1,  my 6,  myself 1,  nimble 1, nothing 1,  offence 1,  on 2,  one 1,  other 1,  our 1,  over-goes 1,  pay 1,  pen 1,  pine 1, plea 1,  poor 1,  pour’st 1,  purpose 1,  putt’st 1,  receive 1,  record 1,  repose 1,  riches 1, right 1,  said 2,  same 1,  says 1,  seals 1,  shall 1,  she 5,  sin 1,  smells 1,  so 2, sometimes 1,  sorrow 1,  still 1,  struck 1,  sun 1,  sweet 3,  taught 1,  tells 2,  the 4, thee 1,  then 1,  there 1,  thereby 1,  they 2,  this 2,  thou 18,  through 1,  thy 2,  time 7, to 5,  tongue 3,  touches 1,  travels 1,  unfair 1,  use 1,  ushers 1,  vex’d 1,  vow’d 1, we 2,  wear 1,  weight 1,  well 1,  were 1,  when 2,  which 19,  wild 1,  with 1,  word 1, writ 1,  writes 1,  you 9,  your 3, yourself 1

So in our corpus, “that I” occurs 28 times, “that music” occurs once, “that word” occurs once, and so on.  So let’s say we get our lottery machine to pick one of these word, and let’s say it picked “loss.”  So thus far we have a poem that goes:

that loss

And so on, until we might get a line like:

that loss in youth doth appear and straight

which doesn’t make a lot of sense altogether.  But the first part does.  And since we’re humans, we’re in charge, so we can fix it!  First, let’s cut out the last three words, leaving us with:

that loss in youth doth

Then let’s re-generate the poem, starting with picking a word that follows “doth,” then a word that follows that, and so on.  This time around, we might get:

that loss in youth doth bear all things remov’d

which is better than before.

4. Conclusions

So let’s end for the moment.  To sum up:

• n-gram language models are things like bigrams and unigrams. They are built on training data.  They collect information about what words are seen next to each other, and how frequently those sequences of words are seen in the data.
• you can generate poetry by having a program select words from the n-gram language model.  You can use the frequency counts to make it more likely that a given word will be picked.
• if the line generated by sampling from a bigram model is coherent, it’s because each pair of words is coherent.  (i.e. the language model does not contain bigrams like ‘when when’)  However, this may not be enough to generate poetry completely algorithmically.  You may need to have a human author intervene.

There’s a lot more to n-grams, of course.  Wikipedia is a good place to start reading on it.  Otherwise, check out a copy of Jurafsky and Martin’s “Speech and Language Processing.”

Hope that was interesting!  later.

In fact, I would argue that to the extent “Carnival” is a “dirty” concrete poems par excellence, it now most effectively communicates to us in 2010 that the page, the letter, or the word is just as much a medium that we can read and write as computer software is. And, moreover, one of the ways in which McCaffery generates these tools is through hacking the page or the book in order to renew it, to turn it from a transparent carrier of meaning to an object that is meaningful in itself. That is, “Carnival”—a book experiment from the early 1970s—was made entirely by hand by, as Marjorie Perloff describes it, “placing masks on each of sixteen standard 81/2-by-11-inch pages, arranged in groups of four to make a square (or, strictly speaking, rectangle) measuring 44 by 36 inches. The sixteen pages were then perforated and arranged in sequential book form, accompanied by the Instructions, ‘In order to destroy this book please tear each page carefully along the perforation.’” But what is significant about McCaffery’s project is not just the physical size of the work, and it is not just the fact that one has to destroy the work in order to read it—it is that the typewritten text, the stamps, the various traces of writerly labor and the physical world (in the form of smudges or the slight bleed of ink) turn it into a work in which the surface is the depth and the making of the work is the meaning.

Similarly working explicitly against creating aesthetic objects that are seamlessly enmeshed in a slick, surface-level interface, digital poems that are “code-works” (after digital poets Alan Sondheim, John Cayley, and Mez Breeze) as well as works created by those in the hacker-dominated “demo scene” are also driven by a philosophy of making or, otherwise put, a belief in what designer and president of the Rhode Island School of Design John Maeda calls “dirty hands.” Writing for a blog for Harvard’s business school, Maeda declares “In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it’s six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, ‘2.0.’ Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands.” In this particular article Maeda was endorsing an approach to education and even a lifestyle driven by doing, by physically working with tangible materials (welding, sculpting, weaving etc.)–an approach nicely embodied by some of his early art works such as “Palm Paintings” from 2000 which were a series of boxes on which Maeda painted in a “mix of abstract styles” to then embed “a Palm computer in each of the computers and specifically program each one to visually ‘think’ about what the painting signified.”

But this sort of “dirty hands” approach can just as easily describe digital poems such as Mez Breeze’s “pro][tean][.lapsing.txts” which is an imitation of computer code (written in what she calls “mezangelle”) and thus the code is the poem, the visible, also primarily visual, surface text of the work (this in contrast to the way in which code is almost always the invisible, underlying layer which is responsible for make a different surface text visible). Once again, as with “Carnival,” the text is just as much about making visible the work of coding as it is about what the coding semantically communicates. And it can also nicely describe a whole range of recent open-source, community-driven artistic/cultural phenomenon such as the demo-scene, chiptune music scene, Maker Faire, or any of the burgeoning DIY electronics and robotics movements supported by companies such as Makerbot (a start-up company that creates open-source 3-d printers that you can by for $700-800 and put together yourself) or Arduino (an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments). While I think we can trace the impetus for many of these contemporary digital DIY movements to the arts and crafts movement as well as the growing prominence of artists books that took place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in reaction to rapid industrialization and mechanization—a movement arguably taken up once more by concrete poets from the 1950s and, via McCaffery himself, through the 1970s—the way in which the meaning is in the making as well as in an exploration of surface as depth now seems to be less about the grain of the wood, the binding of the book, the reworking of the physical page and more about how the meaning is in the code, the software, the programming, the circuitry.

Texts by mez breeze

3 June, 5pm-8pm
Reading Room in Arnolfini and online at
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice
contact common_practice on Skype to join the session
(next sessions: 24 June, 9 and 30 September)
Italo Calvino said ‘the storyteller explored the possibilities implied in
his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures
and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought
to bear’. It is by following this principle that common practice will start.

The first session will open with mez breeze’s mezangelle poems, written in a
blend of code and language, and we will be practising a simultaneous
reading/writing reworking of these texts to experience their language-code
operations during the event.

common practice is a reading group that uses Wiki and Skype to perform a
Calvino-style manipulation of texts. Through unpredictable cobbling together
of texts, poetry, people, code, language, Wiki, chat, conversations etc. we
will co-produce untagged and free style body/ies of knowledge.

The reading groups that make up common practice will take place in June and
September. You are invited to read, write, tinker with and intervene in the
literary and theoretical texts and poetry together with others through the
simple-to-use online tools. You can join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini
or online and via Skype (contact: common_practice).

common practice references the widespread and increasingly familiar activity
of using online tools in everyday to communicate, contact, work, socialise,
play, research, be entertained etc. The practice embodies the curiosity to
experience ways in which human and machine skills and abilities perform
together.

More importantly, however, common practice also refers to the fact that it
is done in common – together with others. Thus it is social space of
knowledge materialised through co-labour, codeworking and language. Anxiety,
concern and conflict might be part of the practice in the same way that
curiosity, hospitality and kindness are hoped for. This is practice in flux,
nomadic practice that exists in the common. Knowledge and experiences
generated during the session will be captured by its users.

common practice is a series of curated events initiated by Magda
Tyzlik-Carver, hosted by the Reading Room in Arnolfini, and online by
Department of Reading
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice and
project.arnolfini  http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/?t=5 .

Please bring your own laptop with wireless enabled to join the common
practice in the Reading Room. If you don’t have your own laptop, there will
be a common computer available to use by those without one. Wiki-page will
be also projected on the wall so it will be possible to follow the practice.

- MANUAL FOR THE COMMON PRACTICE SESSION -

In order to take part in common practice all you need is an account on Skype
and a connection to the internet for the time of the session. You can also
join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini at the time of the session. Please
bring your laptop with you.

The space of the session is a Skype-chat and a Wiki-page. The Wiki
(http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/Seisure) contains two
poems by mez breeze, each line marked by a number.

The Department of Reading Internet System (doris) connects the chat and the
pool directly. doris listens to the chat, records all entries and allows for
manipulation of the poems directly through the chat. In this session we will
make use of the module [getput]. This module consists of two commands,
namely [get], which allows to get any one of the lines from the poems
directly to the chat; and [put], which allows to put any entry of the chat
into any one of the numbered lines on the Wiki.

To get any line from one of the poems into the chat, write: “get 1″ or “get
6″ depending on which section you want to get the line from. The text will
not be deleted on the Wiki, but can be altered in the chat and replaced
later on by using the command “put”. In between the two poems is an empty
column that can as well be addressed by the commands [get] and [put] via the
related numbers – this will become operative during the session.

doris allows to modify, rewrite, edit or manipulate the poems with the
command [put]. To place any entry or rewritten line into the poems, write it
in the chat, then press ENTER, and then write: “put 1″ in the chat and press
ENTER again. This will place the entry in line 1 of the Wiki and overwrite
the previously given line of the poem. If you want to position an entry in
section 3 or 4 or 9 or any other, you need to change the number in the
command accordingly. For example, if you want an entry to be in section 4,
the command should be: “put 4″, etc.

There are some signs, so called markups, that allow for italic, bold and
coloured text. They can be used as well through the Skype-chat, simply in
writing them along with the related entry that you would like to post on the
Wiki. In order to set an expression italic, you would have to use two
apostrophes at the beginning and the end of that expression – like
”italic”. When it comes to bold, just use three apostrophes ”’bold”’.
It’s also possible to use colours in this reading session. The signs % is
necessary in this case, again one before the name of the colour, then one
after the name of the colour. Next comes the text and then comes another %
sign to stop the colouring. Like this: %blue%coloured-invisi.belles%.
The mark-up [[<<]] introduces a line-break.

You need to refresh the Wiki-page from time to time to see the changes.
Since the poems easily might interfere with the marks-ups as it plays with
quite similar signs, it can happen that you don’t necessarily get, what you
might have intended with an entry.

The aim of PO.EX’70-80 is to provide continuity to the Project “Portuguese Experimental Poetry – a CD-ROM of Dossiers and Catalogs” (FCT 2005-2008, Ref. POCI/ELT/57686/2004), which studied Portuguese literary experimentalism of the 1960s and created a digital archive with the most relevant magazines, catalogs and publications of that group of poets. Requests by several agents and recommendations from our consultants have led us to identify the need to extend the reproduction of Portuguese Experimental Poetry into the 1970s and 1980s. This new timeline will allow us to develop the studies and the collections already begun, now including visual and sound poetry, video-poetry, happenings, and cybernetic literature – all of which can be seen as extensions and renovations of literary experimentalism of the previously analyzed period. Within this framework, we will consider a connection between concrete and digital poetics.

The present project, characterized by its openness and free access to resources, will therefore continue the task of preserving a literary legacy which may be at peril. The following goals should be highlighted:

• To actively contribute to a better knowledge and dissemination of Portuguese poetry of the 20th century;
• to motivate new theoretical propositions and new didactic and research methodologies, by connecting theoretical investigation to the development of a hypermedia archive;
• to contribute to the preservation of literary documents that are fragile and rare;
• to freely distribute and disseminate experimental literary production in schools, universities and cultural institutions, creating the conditions and strategies for the use of new technologies in the production and dissemination of contemporary literature;
• to attain new and diverse audiences, by means of free Internet access to the resources, proposing literary readings by means of electronic media which students can understand and enjoy;
• to encourage the production of electronic literature by offering young writers the required skills and technical conditions for the use of digital tools and platforms in their creative processes.

It should be stressed that we aim to start, within the scope of this project, a Laboratory of Digital Writing, coordinated and supervised by team members. In this Laboratory we expect to offer adequate technical conditions for the development of artistic residences of poets and writers with an interest in multimedia and hypermedia digital platforms. The potential of programming languages as specific technologies for literary writing could be explored on a collaborative basis. In this way, we hope to foster the development of internal networks of production and digital literary creativity, documenting and later extending the process and its results, namely by means of an on-line publication platform.

More info can be found @ www.po-ex.net

imagine the moving picture without art, just as surveillance and
video-phone, etc.

now imagine the net without net art.

to many people, the latter is much easier to imagine than the former two
distopias. we have had literature for thousands of years and art has been a
part of the moving picture since near its start in the nineteenth century.
but net art has only been around since the early to mid 1990′s. about 17
years, at this point, this being 2010. and the net is often treated as a
spewing information pipeline that has to be managed and filtered for usable
practical information often of a consumeristic nature. shopping information,
banking info, calendar info, and so on. as an entertainment medium, it’s
mostly used for videos, online games, news, email communication, and so on.
not as a medium in which we seek out the art particular to the net. by ‘net
art’ i do not ,mean video or degraded print, (per se, although they can be
part of net art) but art specific to the net. that’s what i mean by net art.
art that requires an internet connection and lives and breathes through a
browser or because of its internet connection, if it’s a desktop program.

what we lose with there not being as prominent an art of the net as there is
of print and moving image is related to what we would lose were there not a
prominent art of print or art of the moving image.

some might object to that proposition. they might say that the net without
net art is no more difficult to imagine than the telephone without telephone
art. which is easy to imagine because the telephone hasn’t developed
prominently as a medium for art. which isn’t to say that there
haven’t been good telephone art projects. but name me five of them.

the telephone has developed as a medium primarily for conversations between
participating parties. we don’t dial up to listen to art, much. or
participate in an art project when we are actually on the phone. there’s
nothing to say we couldn’t. and perhaps we have, once or twice. still others
will say that the art of the telephone is the art of conversation. which
isn’t specific to the telephone but is certainly different via telephone, in
important ways, than it is face to face.

we imagine, then, a secret art of the telephone in which lovers and others
really digging each other engage. often not recorded but enjoyed and
remembered personally, just the two (or n) of them. a private art without a
prominent public face. though telephone conversations and recordings play
crucial parts, sometimes, in works of art for other media such as movies,
drama, and music.

telephone has not developed a prominent public art because it is so strong
concerning private conversations. the possibilities for dial-up telephone
art or interactive telephone art are completely overshadowed by the way we
typically use the telephone, which is not a public art use or even an
artistic use of any kind, for the most part. we have trouble with fiction
and pretend, often, on the telephone. the stakes are different than in
reading a book or watching art because of the element of trust and personal
disclosure. to say nothing of fraud, which we also are quite familiar with
from the telephone.

the net is quite different from telephone, of course. it is not overwhelmed,
currently, by live conversation. we have had many of them, over the net but
it is by no means all we do over the net. the types of activities we engage
in include writing, viewing visual information, listening to auditory
information, responding to visual, sonic and written information, and a
variety of media, interactive or not. the net subsumes several media at
once. all broadcast media. and some broadcast that has not and cannot be
broadcast otherwise. that’d be the net art and other net-specific
broadcasts.

the net also subsumes private broadcasting, narrowcasting. the
telephone–even all forms of radio–even the CB, eventually–can be
net-based. the network is the frequency or set of frequencies. and the
frequency or frequencies can be channeled around the world.

the net also subsumes certain dimensions of print culture. publications have
a net component or are entirely net-based. the range is quite broad. the web
site may simply be a desolate info booth, devoid of interest, or it may rock
the universe in every way. it depends on the involvement in the net the
publication has. artistically, financially, as a distribution mechanism and
as a serious medium in its own right concerning content, the presentation of
content, the definition of content, the media of it, the permanence of it,
and so on. is it meant as entertainment or reference information or
queriable service and/or store or news channel or personal blog or as a post
within a larger network of sites one communicates with?

also, individuals publish their work on the net. sometimes on their own
sites, sometimes elsewhere. on journals, the sites of other individuals,
into huge youtubish databases, and so on. the net is both about publication
and communication. broadcasting and interaction. we are struggling to
understand how this changes the nature of publication itself. and the nature
of communication itself.

one of the great powers of the internet is it’s ability to carry a broad
range of media and modes simultaneously or individually. by ‘mode’, i mean
its type of interactivities or lack thereof. by ‘media’ i mean sound,
visuals, text, and moving images.

it should be clear by now that the internet is going to play an increasingly
important role in broadcast, narrowcast and communication media. and in
knowledge storage and dissemination. and much else.

consequently, an art of the net poetentially becomes too broad and diffuse a
notion. the notion of ‘digital art’ is so vast it includes scans of photos
of one’s cat posted to flickr. there can be no art form called ‘digital art’
because ‘digital art’ is just any art that may even simply have been
digitized from analog and shoveled unreflectively to the realm of bits and
bytes. is ‘net art’, similarly, so broad as to not be a particular art form
in itself?

well, no, it’s not. different people look at it in different ways. my way is
to specify an art in which the internet connection is crucial. whether for
communication or the querying of databases (and the subsequent retrieval of
dynamic information), or for other decisions relayed or processed
meaningfully via the net. the art of the net is one of the most important
envisionings of the possibilities the net holds concerning broadcast and
communications media, publication, and the synthesis of media, arts,
communication, technology, and science. the art of the net, ideally, is
where we go to get and understand our most intense and fully realized
visions of these possibilities–even when the art doesn’t seem to be about
these things at all, sometimes. but of course we do not need to scratch too
deeply to understand that every painting is, in some sense, about painting,
every media work is about its medium, in some sense, to the degree that it
uses its media/um in media-specific ways. in its ‘rhetoric of media’, then.
and, more deeply yet, in its philosophy of media. stated or not. present or
implied or vacuous, a vacuum filled by the activity of the media/um all over
it like water over the swimmer.

net art encapsulates not only our deepest visions of the possibilities for
meaningful change via or partly because of the internet, but our deepest
visions concerning who and what we become via the existence of the net and
electronic networks more broadly. anything that involves important changes
in who and what we are and how we live and enjoy life and learn and
communicate and view and publish work is important for us to understand and
explore with passion–if for no other reason, then because to understand
these helps us know who and what we are becoming and maybe even already are.
and where we are going. and just what it means to be alive in this
particular age.

that is an important part of what we treasure about the art of the past. the
art of the past is one of our best ways of understanding life in the past.
we wonder if net art will enjoy that sort of status in the future because of
the issues of obsolescence of technology. will net art last long enough to
have that sort of use to futurity? or will it be continually of the moment?
firefly media of the moment that is burned quickly in the fire of
techno-time.

well, the jury is still out. certainly much, most, almost all will perish
and does so, so far, about every decade as browser technology changes and
networks expand into other, non-browser technologies and some protocols fall
out of use, eclipsed by brighter suns. but some net art persists. it takes
special engineering, often, a savvy knowledge of what’s a good bet to work
with and what isn’t.

the serious work will survive for some time. long enough to have that sort
of use to futurity. we’re just not sure how far that futurity extends.

but, you know, it’s never the thing beyond the grave that we want in this
life. except if it be peace or happiness or a like reward. and it is our joy
to find these in this life as we proceed. which is a way of saying that
whether net art now has a use to futurity later is not the only criterion to
measure its importance now. in fact, it’s a terrible criterion because we
don’t know the outcome now. the more important issue is what it does for us
now. and what it does for us now is help us understand the wired life now
and where it is going and how that changes us. and that’s important to
understand who we are.

which implies that if net art fails as an art form then we lack artistic
ways to understand who and what we are via the introduction of the internet
into our worlds. this, in turn, would imply a sort of telephone-like usage
of the media/um of the net, a failure of imagination in the presence of
overwhelming homogenization of discourse. or a fundamental unfitness of net
worlds to provide an environment that can support art.
permanence/impermanence of media is a consideration. but so is monetary
economy. let’s not forget that the monetary infrastructures that support art
as business are crucial to non-digital and digital art alike. the economies
of attention and valorization have strong ties to the monetary economies of
print, visual art, music, and so forth. the circles of ‘high art’ typically
have ties to the economic opportunities in the art. there is a sense in
which art has nothing to do with art but with marketing, public relations,
corporate or institutional sponsorship, friend networks, and other such
factors which–more than the quality of the art itself–determine the
standing of the art in society.

net art has not been particularly prominent in ecommerce. quite the
contrary. the idea is basically do what you love and the rest will follow.

it doesn’t necessarily follow, of course, with any financial reward. this is
a hurdle net art has to navigate by hook or by crook. currently it is a very
tough proposition. net art has been a follower in this regard. the artists
have not really developed good economic models. or have not followed through
on them, when they have been imagined.

i remember reading what a new york artist wrote about mail art. he said it was dead and wasn’t of much account as art. isn’t this sort of foolish attitude simply a consequence of mail art remaining at a distance from the galleries and a significant monetary economy? does his attitude have anything to do with the art itself or familiarity with it? not likely. the excitement people feel about art works or an art itself is often not about the art itself but the value of the art as commodity valorized, ie, marketed, in appealing ways. we like to think of art as the house of what really matters in life and relationships and thought and the meaning of life and the creation of beauty, truth, and justice. and it is, in important ways. but it is very much a house in this world, with all the troubles of other houses. will net art continue to exist as mail art does? basically outside the institutions? i think it’s fundamentally a question of whether it develops a significant monetary economy. it’s not fundamentally a question of the quality of the art itself.

another impediment to net art is the depth of art experience it can support.
what is the emotionally deepest flash work you’ve experienced? did it change
your life? art needs to be capable of being taken as seriously as
revelation. revelation and transformation are key aspects to our most
important art experiences. firefly media might do it, but not likely. what
is at issue here is the ability of net art to really help us understand who
and where we are, as opposed to merely our being given caricatures and
cartoons of existence–though they can be much more meaningful than we
usually admit. but, still, it’s possible for media to lose or never find its
way to our deepest experience. net art seeks its way to our deepest
experience via the wire to inner worlds, outer worlds, and their
interpenetration.

net art must succeed for the internet to be as significant a human venture
as print or cinema. for if it fails, that means we cannot really feel it and
think in it in the ways we associate with art. and these are important to
the ways we understand ourselves and the world, and come to be articulate
and expressive and formulate what worlds we want to make now and for the
future. the failure of net art would be a massive failure of imagination
that would give unto the forces of dullness an unbearable lightness of
media, too complete a capacity for forgetting, and a medium without an inner
world.

net art seeks the human in the post-human, the post in the human, the human
in the post, and the post-human in the post-human. to know what it is to be
human now, and wired. no net art means the wired is tired. a tired wired is
wired working for the man, is corporate complete, is shop till long after
you have dropped, is dronification wired to the grind of slaves, the energy
of slaves, the no poetry zone, no imagination but in products, no ideas but
in products, the triumph of consumerism and perfectly thoughtless media.

accordingly, net art is important to the well-being and futurity of any
possible wired world, and to our understanding of our current situation and
capacities, even, as fireflies of eternity.

so we see what we lose with there not being as prominent an art of the net
as there is of print and moving image is related to what we would lose were
there not a prominent art of print or art of the moving image. those
distopian possibilities seem very remote, as possibilities, because the
media have such rich histories attached to them that we see the very
existence of print and moving image implying the growth of the artistic
cultures that have grown up with the media of print and the moving image,
respectively.

will we have a similar sense of the richness of history of net art in a
hundred years time? i think it will be a history fraught with more changes
in the technology than we associate with the history of print or the moving
image. so it will be more fragmented a history, consequently. the net art
media species, as it were, will evolve and change and mutate in ways we
associate with hyperspaces. but it will have known histories, nonetheless,
contentious and mysterious, almost, as the present, for anyone who looks
closely into the fire at the contradictions of even the moment of art.

ja

http://vispo.com

To be a digital writer, it’s probably best if you like to write, or at least not hate it.  Then, if you can pull as many muses into your corner as you can, that might help: history, music, dance, astronomy, and art….

Patience is a virtue with digital writers, as you will have to explain what you do to a great many people who have never heard of it….

Having a thick skin and (again) more patience will help protect you from the slings and arrows of outrageous critics.  Critics love to criticize, and when it is something new and without precedent, they will laugh and grind it under their heels….

(2) Do I need to take a class in digital writing to be a digital writer?

Most of the digital writers working today teach courses they never took when they first started out.  A truism of the avant-garde: there are no teachers in your field, so you have to teach yourself, so you can become a teacher.

(3) Is it true that digital stories were on the web back in prehistoric times, when humans lived in caves?

This is totally true. Plato writes about it in his “Allegory of the Cave.”  Caves were a perfect place for projecting digital works, and cave dwellers were among the first to recognize this (before them, it was nomadic tribes, who used deer hide tents).

The web back then was less sophisticated than it is now–being constructed of stone, goat’s intestines, elk horns, and camel hair–but its reach was global, with fewer system outages and faster download times.

In the Middle Ages, this technology was lost, and only recently reconfigured through electronics.

(4) Are digital writers flesh and blood people, or are they virtual, like their stories?

It depends where you meet them.  If you meet them online, they are virtual, and their primary substance electrons and code…

If you meet them in the flesh, their virtuality plays second fiddle to the fact that, at any moment, they could bleed all over your favorite carpet.

(5) Is it easy to be a digital writer?

If answers were songs, try this (sung to the tune of “Yesterday,” by the Beatles):

Digital

All it takes is
lots of time

and what you make

may be fine
if going digital

is on your mind.

(And so on, with feeling…)

(6) Does it cost a lot of money to be a digital writer?

After you have made the initial investment in a good computer, some software, a sound recording device, and whatever other tools you need to make multimedia works of literature, the overhead is remarkable low.  It would be best (to build branding and reader loyalty) to have your own website, so add about $10 a year for the registration of a domain name.  Then add another $10 a month for server costs (provided you don’t go viral, in which case you’ll need a bit more than that).  Finally, if you use them, there’s the periodic cost for royalty-free images or audio files purchased online–most of the code you’ll need will be free–so tack on another $200 a year.  At these rates, your total for a year of publishing digital literature is approximately $330, which is cheap compared to most other businesses.

Since you won’t make much (or any) income, it’s money down the drain, but don’t worry: you can list it as a business expense on your income tax (I’d love to hear your conversation with the IRS agent).

(7) Can I make any money being a digital writer?

Let’s do the math:

Expenses a year (see #6 above):           $330
Income publications:                                 $0
Income readings:                                       $0
Income exhibitions:                                   $0
Work sold:                                                 $0
––––––
TOTAL:                                                 -$330

Your talent? Priceless.

(8) Is there a website where I can read some electronic literature, and learn about the authors who create it?

Do a Google search on “Electronic Literature” or “E-Lit” or “Hypermedia” or “Digital Literature,”  and here is some of what you get:

Born Magazine–http://www.bornmagazine.com

Chico.art.net–http://www.csuchico.edu/art/net/

CONT3XT.NET–http://www.cont3xt.net/

Digital Technology and Culture–http://digitaltechnologyculture.motime.com/

Drunken Boat–http://www.DrunkenBoat.com

Eastgate–http://www.eastgate.com

electronic book review–http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Electronic Literature Directory–http://eld.eliterature.org

Electronic Literature Organization–http://www.eliterature.org

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008–http://vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/elo08/media.html

Electronic Literature Organization Library of Congress/Archive-It Project–http://www.eliterature.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Electronic Poetry Center–http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/

FILE (Electronic Language International Festival)–http://www.file.org

furtherfield.org–http://www.furtherfield.org/

Grand Text Auto–http://www.grandtextauto.org/

Hermeneia: Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Group–http://uoc.edu/in3/hermeneia/cat/

Hypercompendia–http://www.susangibb.net/blog2/

Hyperrhiz–http://www.hyperrhiz.net

The Iowa Review Web–http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/

Java Museum–http://www.JavaMuseum.org

netpoetic.com–http://www.netpoetic.com/

newmediaFIX–http://www.newmediafix.net/

New River Journal–http://www.TheNewRiver.us

nt2–http://www.labo-nt2.uqam.ca/

Rhizome.org–http://www.rhizome.org

trAce archive–http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/

Turbulence.org–http://www.turbulence.org

Vispo–http://www.vispo.com

Word Circuits–http://www.wordcircuits.com/index.html

WRT: Writer Response Theory–http://www.writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

And the list goes on…

(9) Are digital writers happy people?

You can’t get much happier than a digital writer.  Because they practice in an emerging form, they have nothing to lose.  This makes them reckless, and beyond sadness.

(10) If I wanted to be a digital writer, how would I begin?

Read the FAQs above. If you have any questions, make up your answers.

An essay by the Vancouver poet, musician, scholar, and visual artist Kedrick James. With 13 of his intriguing visual collages (click these for bigger versions).

POET PIRATE NETBOT is related to Kedrick’s book-length “Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse”. One of the things he looked at was spam as a literary phenomenon. In POET PIRATE NETBOT, he looks at that and related things: how writing and education are changing and will continue to change in light of the avalanches of writing and media occassioned by the net and the digital, not just by the wide access the world’s population has to publishing tools, but by the presence of bots that write and process writings.

It’s quite a hopeful look, really, at what sometimes appears to be a devastating change to the literary, artistic, and educational landscapes. For although we see this continuing avalanche of writing and media changing the literary landscape, we also see people using the tools and bots to both sift through the deluge and create works of art that begin to sort through and synthesize what we have.

The visual images in the essay relate to this topic via their being made from google image search images (they’re not made with dbCinema). I visited Kedrick recently in Vancouver and saw the prints he and Olga Glukovska are making from these digital works. They’re doing screen prints of them. About 18″x24″ on thick archival paper and framed. These are not simply File>Print versions of the art, but are for the medium of print.

There’s more work on vispo.com by Kedrick : I did a piece in dbCinema on Kedrick’s thesis “Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse”.

Kedrick teaches English teachers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Cibertextualidades 3

The third issue of the academic journal Cibertextualidades has just been published by Fernando Pessoa University Editions, with essays on cyberliterature, digital culture and new media.

The organizers, Rui Torres and Sergio Bairon, have chosen to discuss the relation between Knowledge and Hypermedia, proposing a reflection about the conditions of knowledge production within digital media platforms. The articles selected for publication articulate different theoretical positions, negotiating the implementation of models of hypermedia reading in different contexts. Amid this diversity, it is possible to identify an interaction between human/social sciences and communication/information technologies which transform the way we perceive and produce literature, communication, and culture. There is also a common concern with methodologies for the use of hypermedia as a tool for the creation and the communication of science. In this sense, relevant academic hypermedia productions which question the modes of representation of both analytic and reflective thinking are reviewed and analysed.

This issue discusses typologies and taxonomies for the understanding of cybertextualities.

The articles, fully available on the UFP’s Digital Library, are all written in Portuguese, but I will provide here a translation of the titles:

• Production of knowledge in digital media, Rui Torres & Sérgio Bairon
• From verb to pixel: Interfaces of the poetic in hypermedia, by Débora Cristina Santos e Silva
• Flash script POEX: The digital recoding of the experimental poem, by Manuel Portela
• Is there a new ‘Cordel’? Imaginary, tradition and cyberculture, by Maria Alice Amorim
• Educating for hypermedia reading: Methodological challenges, by Fabiano Correa da Silva
• The zoon tecnologi.com: Emerging entity of the information neocyberestructure, by David Parra Valcarce
• The im@ge thinks: Quantic aspects of the cybernetic image, by Luis Carlos Petry
• The digital medium and media production, by Lawrence Shum
• Analysis of hypermedia language productions, by Arlete dos Santos Petry
• TECNOMPB: Conceptual taxonomy for a technocentric approach to cultural forms, by Sergio Basbaum, Ilana Seltzer, Lucas Meneguette & Lucca Vicente
• A meaningless encyclopedic-poetic attack in cyberspace, by Fabio Oliveira Nunes & Edgar Franco
• Randomness and the creation of new reticular structures, by Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri
• «Page»: The reconfiguration of communication design in digital culture, by Sofia Gonçalves
• What’s common between thesauri and ontologies, by Rodrigo de Sales & Lígia Café

Paper versions can be bought at Ed. UFP website.