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

The following was written as a manuscript for a speech, so it has to be spoken or heard or at least imagined as being spoken and heard.

I wrote this text for the international poetry workshop fundamentals of poetry.

What is happening when I speak? What do you hear when I speak? You can understand me (I hope) but you also hear my Austrian accent. You will know that I am not a native English speaker. So there’s meaning: You know what I am talking about. But there’s more. You can hear where I come from. You might hear that I speak German as a first language. You can hear my gender, you can hear if I am tired, you can hear if I am bored or nervous. You might hear my educational or social background. You might hear something about my personality.
Some of these properties you would even be able to hear if you would not understand a single word of English. My voice communicates more than just the meaning of the words.

Sound

Foreign languages or accents help us focus on the acoustic qualities of language: because we don’t understand what has been said or because we hear a language spoken with a foreign accent we suddenly become aware of them. Something seems to get in the way between the words and our brain trying to make sense of everything we hear. When we were children we used to play a language game called b-language. The rules were simple: each vowel was substituted by the vowel then a “b” and then the vowel again. By modifying our speech that way we hoped to be able to communicate information without enabling our eavesdropping parents to understand what we were talking about. What we learned as well was the fact that we could use language as a material that could be reshaped by cutting it up into pieces, which were then reordered. But what is the smallest meaningful acoustic unit? Or what is the smallest part of language that we are “allowed” to work with creatively? Traditional poets would say that it must be the word. The Dadaist-inspired sound poet would not go beyond the syllable and the Lettrist (and we ourselves when we were children) would vote for the letter or the phoneme. However, from the 1950s onwards, poets like François Dufrêne or Henri Chopin used electronic devices to go far beyond that last frontier of language. Chopin started to experiment with his voice recorded on tape, manipulated the speed of the recording, added echo effects, implanted microphones into his body and used multiple tracks to create acoustic palimpsests from smaller and smaller fragments of speech or voice recordings.

sound example: Henri Chopin

There is, however, a natural limit on how small an acoustic unit we can work with. Human perception can only recognise sound events as single acoustic units that are longer in duration than 10-20 milliseconds. Recordings of sound that are shorter than this boundary seem to fuse with each other.
On the other hand this effect of fusion can be used to create sounds from tiny snippets of audio recordings by putting them in sequence or layering them on top of each other. Because they are too small to be discerned, the sound grains create a new sound.

sound example: granular synthesis (time stretch)

In the previous sound example all sound grains were placed in an ordered sequence but this is not the only way to structure the snippets of course. When we choose to take a more random approach we get clouds of sound:

sound example: granular synthesis (cloud)

Or we could choose to order them more sparsely in regular patterns: then we create rhythms. Before I go on talking about rhythm I’d like to mention the missing link between sound and rhythm. When sound artists and engineers started to experiment with tape recorders they soon discovered that they could alter the finite tape reels into infinite loops. In that way, they could create never ending repetitions of a sound recording that blurred the boundary between recognisable words and pure sound.

sound example: kette (onophon)
link to onophon

Rhythm

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch sdtuy at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist
and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can
sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey
lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The human brain is capable of making sense of the words in the above paragraph by neglecting the shuffled letters as long as the first and last letter of each word remain in the original position. However, if I read the same paragraph, or tried to accomplish a re- ordering of recorded speech in the same manner, you would understand almost nothing. As in all acoustic disciplines, timing is an essential property (musicians of course know that) of language. It is so in common language and it becomes even more obvious in poetry. You can easily hear if the author of a poem breaks the meter (willingly or unwillingly).
But I don’t want to talk on about Iambic pentameter or other poetic forms that you are certainly well aware of. I’d rather refer to a more general definition of rhythm: Rhythm is the “movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions” (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary II, Oxford University Press)
Whereas, in Europe, poetic rhythm traditionally referred to the meter, to a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables, repeating phonemes and pauses, other cultures offer different views on rhythmic language structure. People along the Congo river found a way to communicate across the waterway by drumming the tones of their language. They extend everyday words to more complex phrases which, together with the tonal qualities of their language and a known context, form complex patterns that can be distinguished to transport simple messages:

sound example: Talking Drums

In south India, musicians traditionally went in the other direction. Instead of imitating their spoken language by drums, they invented a large set of syllables called Konnakol for the composition, communication and performance of drummed as well as spoken rhythms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another non Eurocentric view on rhythmic language is provided by American black culture, which we are familiar with through Hip Hop and Jamaican Dancehall. A less known variant of swift rhythmic speaking is rooted in the tradition of livestock auctioneering in the US Midwest. The auctioneer repeats numbers and filling words in an extremely fast sequence, in order to sell cattle or horses:

Click here to view the embedded video.

These examples show that the combination of rhythm and language can lead us far beyond the usual verse, especially with the introduction of electronic sound manipulation tools that can extend these ways of creating rhythm by adding a plethora of new possibilities. One of the most important is the possibility to create and use multiple tracks recorded from the same sound source. The Dadaists were the first to write “Simultangedichte” that were intended to be read by multiple voices at the same time. Henri Chopin extended this idea to the tape machine and created layers and dense textures of his own voice only by recording his vocalisations over and over again. Contemporary recording technology enables us to record tracks or small snippets at the click of a mouse, or at the tap of a finger on a smart phone. Those recorded sounds can easily be arranged into complex compositions and rhythms. In this way, a single sound of half a second’s duration could be used to create polyphonic arrangements lasting for hours.

sound example: one of my own pieces (pakgn)

A New Kind of Poetry

In the above sections, I made you listen to some examples for how sound and rhythm could enhance and extend poetic or even non-poetic language. Before the advent of computer technology, poets had to either be musicians themselves or work with other musicians in order to make use of these “sound tools”. Today, this technology is literally in our hands when we take out our smart-phones or open our laptops. There is no longer any need (if indeed there ever was any) for instructors to tell us (as my music teacher told me) that we are not talented enough to play musical instruments. You can open the program or “app” and start recording your voice, manipulate it and arrange it to create poetic compositions that could not exist in books or on paper.
The support of traditional musical instruments has enhanced and influenced poetry ever since antiquity by reinforcing, as well as requiring, rhythm and meter. New technologies could play a similar role: for the first time, we have full control over a huge set of sonic and temporal parameters of recorded and performed language, and this could foster a completely new kind of poetry, one made up of emotion, information, language and sound.

If you know of a current student or recent graduate whose work you would recommend, could you either send a link to Alan Bigelow at eabigelow@gmail.com or encourage them to submit to The New River, also via the same email address? Also if you could pass the word on this, that would be terrific…

The deadline for first-round submissions is late February, 2011. For previous issues of the journal, please visit http://www.TheNewRiver.us

I’ve been working on a project based on my courses on electronic literature. I’ve been teaching it for over five years now, and am getting a sense of the texts that I use. However, I always feel like I’m building the class from the ground up every time, so I thought it would be cool to collect my materials into some sort of “anthology” to have on hand.

I also wanted to create a user-friendly, brief introduction to the field for people not in school, or who have no access to such a class. There are numerous places to find criticism and writing related to electronic literature, but they often contain such a huge amount of text that the newbie would not know where to start. Consequently, they are often very academic in discourse level, which is alienating to someone unfamiliar with the jargon.

This collection is intended to be for students, not my fellow artists and academics, but I hope there is something interesting to find in here for you as well. I’m sure we all have different approaches — for instance, I assign exercises in Scratch and Wix, which won’t be reflected in this list, and I tend to stay away from historical readings or computer science — and I’ve prowled several of your syllabi and websites in the creation of this list. So this can be seen as a continuing conversation.

This is a “freeware” anthology in that I only limited myself to works that were already available on the web. In a few cases, this might be in the form of bootlegs — sometimes it’s hard to tell what has been approved, since not everyone uses a Creative Commons license — but I limited myself to pieces that don’t require special privileges or subscription costs. (In one case, the essay works on my iPad but not laptop; in another, I thought it was freely available but it was not, but I’ve kept it in anyway since the author’s a friend of mine.)

I hope to edit a book to sell on Lulu for cost that will include primarily excerpts from the works, along with editorial glosses. The model is the “Documents in Contemporary Art” series, which are readable in a few days, as opposed to the often mammoth books on digital culture published by MIT (much as I like them).

The website that I am creating for this anthology will contain the essays in .pdf form (reset, since many of these pages are nearly illegible), a .pdf of the edited book with my editorial commentary, a page of videos I often use when teaching, a “ten week course” that is a series of essays, links and assignments based on my course, and other materials such as a bibliography, via Amazon’s “listmania” feature, of electronic literature books.

This is not a complete overview of the state of the field, or an attempt to create a “canon.” If the image here is skewed or flawed, it’s only because it’s meant to be a launching pad for an independent investigation of the genre, either as a scholar or artist. The fact of the matter is, there isn’t a whole lot of great writing on the works themselves — more of the e-lit writing is about its theory and potential — so I tried to include what I could. If you know of better deep readings of a particular e-literature piece, please let me know.

Inspired by the New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, this selection is a mixture of theoretical texts, creative works, manifestos, critical readings, interviews, Wikipedia articles, encyclopedia entries, lists, blog posts, and other miscellany. It only includes work that can be included in a book (or a .pdf). Any feedback you have is welcome!

MythWatch.org, a new digital story, is at MythWatch.org

This one takes a little time to load, so please be patient!

Also, in case you missed it, “This Is Not A Poem,” released a few months ago, is available at This Is Not A Poem

For other stories, both new and old, please visit webyarns.com

Many thanks for your interest!

]]> http://netpoetic.com/2010/07/feralc-_s1e1-session-2-secondary-char-summary_/feed/ 0 http://netpoetic.com/2010/05/previously-on-feralc/ http://netpoetic.com/2010/05/previously-on-feralc/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 22:30:22 +0000 netwurker http://netpoetic.com/?p=1313

That House

[...over in #feralC Twitterland theres lots-a-foamin': @Miss_Stressa is incommunicado. @HUD_B is trying to help @QReada + has worked out how to decipher his/her QR code(s). @shadowmcclone is taciturn as usual. @gossama game chats 2 Shane Hinton and is concerned about the absence of @Miss_Stressa. @jr_carpenter also chats to @gossama about her suspicions that @Miss_Stressa may have been swallowed by that house she's fascinated by [House of Leaves-style].  @QReada is having a hard time of it + reveals communicating isn’t pleasant: “THIS HURTS”. @pupa_mistress has delayed Session 5 due to “technical difficulties”…[to be continued]

A heads-up: the 7th issue of Hyperrhiz, “New Media Subversions,” is now online, guest-edited by Davin Heckman and Hai Ren.

Featuring

• essays from Davin Heckman and Hai Ren, Neil Hennessy, Brian M. Reed, Benjamin J Robertson, Andrew Klobucar, and Brett Phares
• With gallery works by: Neil Hennessy, Nicholas Knouf, Angela Ferraiolo and Mary Flanagan, Jason Nelson, and Brett Phares
• And a very fine review of Matt Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms, by Dene Grigar.

Hyperrhiz considers submissions on a rolling schedule; our next deadline is August 1st.  We’re now accepting scholarly essays as well as standalone net art/e-lit.  Hyperrhiz is peer-reviewed, ISSN’ed (is that a word?), and is shortly to be indexed in the EBSCO Art & Architecture database.

Free cybernetic implants.

Cheers,
Helen J Burgess
Editor

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.