“Psychedelic Pie” is a psychedelic video with a psychedelic sound-track, created from materials found on the Web. You can see the video on YouTube  at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS4Wpx5QKXc, or on my site at http://edwardpicot.com/psychedelicpie.mov. Attributions: backward guitar and psychedelic viola by Robinhood76; psychedelic percussion by Satoration; sitar by Kaiho – all from www.freesound.org. Morning traffic timelapse by MegaTokkie, YouTube. Blackrock Sunrise (community video); London Underground (community video); and Haleakala Sunset by Mike McCabe – www.archive.org.

Also new: my review of “The Last Collaboration” by Martha Deed and Millie Niss. The review can be seen on the Furtherfield site at http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration, and the book itself can be seen at http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/lastcollaboration.html. Millie Niss was a writer and new media artist who died in November 2010. Martha Deed is a poet and psychologist, also Millie’s mother and long-time collaborator. “The Last Collaboration” is about Millie’s last days in hospital. It’s acutely insightful, and it’s also a significant work of art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Edward Picot

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

*

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

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

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

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

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