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

#feralC’s Series 1|Episode 1 Session 3 Transcript is now live here.

]]> http://netpoetic.com/2010/07/feralc-_s1e1-session-2-secondary-char-summary_/feed/ 0 http://netpoetic.com/2010/06/currently-on-feralc/ http://netpoetic.com/2010/06/currently-on-feralc/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:31:02 +0000 netwurker http://netpoetic.com/?p=1377

[new clues/images up at #feralC] *prepare 2 lunge_tumble after @Miss_Stressa in2 sepia+lead_grey terraced bunnyholes* http://netwurker.net/

[LET THEM EAT CACHE]

[currently on #feralC]: @QReada does indeed go “feral” + starts spouting cryptic comms: “[THE WROTE WRITES ROTTINGS ON THE WALL]” + “[LARGE CHARCOAL BLACK DOG WITH SNOW WHITE SAND OOZING EYES]” + “[LET THEM EAT CACHE]” + “[SMALL SUEDE TAN CAT WITH SANDPAPER CLAWS]” etc… @pupa_mistress warns @QReada 2 stop but 2 no avail + @QReada is now suspended from the #feralC study…[2 b cont].

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]

Announcing: _feralC_ – A Socumentary

_feralC_ is a socumentary* which is textually driven by the interactions of five Twitter chars [primary characters or entities] and their Pupa Mistress (PM). The PM initially functions as a Twitter based information hub for the interactions between the chars and other contributing entities (such as yourself). These additional contributing entities, or secondary chars, may or may not be biological-based: please note that Synthetic individuals may contribute to the project’s tweet flow. Please play nice with the Synths.

Inquisitive #feralC Chars in Action

As the five primary chars are unveiled, “audience” members are encouraged to participate in the project’s flow by following and responding to each individual char via Twitter. If you are tweet-responding, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag. And be warned: if you choose to actively participate you’ll be drawn into the narrative flow – including episodic summaries posted at netwurker.net. If you don’t want your input to be incorporated in this fashion, please message the PM directly or via her email.

If engagement isn’t high on your list, feel free to absorb the feralC Tweet list and/or blog entries and contribute via comments instead. For more comprehensive information on how to participate, please visit the Instructions Page:

“_feralC_ uses Twitter as its principle story-telling medium. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s the official glossary and a basic explanation…

The _feralC_ story develops as the 5 primary chars [characters] chat and interact through their tweet dialogues:

• Gossama
• Hud Ballardrina
• Shadow McClone
• Miss Stressa
• Quentin Reader

The story unfolds via live Sessions where both primary chars and secondary chars [see below] engage with each other. These Sessions normally last between 1 – 2 hours. Check the Welcome Page for regular updates regarding Session times. Each Session is monitored and recorded by the Pupa Mistress – a “Behavioural Augmentologist” who oversees the chars through her Twitter stream [you can also follow her updates through this RSS Feed]…Pupa also analyses and summarises char [inter]actions via various blog posts featured on the Welcome Page: these are categorised by Series, Episode and Session numbers…

As _feralC_ is dynamically designed to incorporate audience responses, the developing story will also be shaped by you and others who choose to participate [you're "secondary chars"].  Primary chars may also respond sporadically to you – the secondary chars – outside scheduled Session times, so don’t be shy in responding through replies at any time. In order to become part of the dialogue and contribute to the storyline, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag if contributing via Twitter. If you’re not a Twitter user you can still participate via comments on this blog [please still include the text "#feralC" in your comment if you're directly addressing or responding to a char] or email the PM with questions or contributions.

#feralC Chars

An easy way to passively follow all 5 chars and their collective dialogue is to regularly check in with the _feralC_ Twitter list found here. You can also search for updates on the project via Twitter by typing in “#feralC” into the Search bar. There are various clues peppered throughout the project that are designed be pieced together to develop the story. Please actively question the chars and openly speculate regarding how these elements fit and shape the storyline. There’ll also be elements that you’ll encounter during _feralC_ that incorporate Augmented Reality and QR Code technology.

Please be patient while the story unfolds: the project is designed to progress over the long term. Most of all, be curious, search for clues and enjoy delving into the _feralC_ world: the chars [well at least *most* of them] don’t bite…”

Commissioned by: Arnolfini. Hosted by Alias Frequencies.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

* “A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

Andrei Gheorghe's poem made of rhyming tweets

Here is the author’s description:

“The Longest Poem in the World is composed by aggregating real-time public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. It is constantly growing at ~4000 verses / day. You can see more verses by clicking the three dots at the bottom (• • •) Made by Andrei Gheorghe.”

It’s interesting to read a bit of this. And if you reload it, it changes. So perhaps it is being added to top-up rather than bottom-down.

The almost-perfect Twitter longest poem in the world. Shoot me now. No, wait; it has not quite unfurled.

We read at edition.cnn.com that “Gheorghe said he doesn’t consider his work art. “It was just a random idea that popped up and I played with it. And it is what it is.”" Gheorghe is a web developer from Romania.

I expect it is art. There are all sorts of different types of art. From pop and viral to esoterica. This is definitely viral. And possibly pop. And definitely computer and net art.

It’s a really good code idea. Random tweets one after another would be dismal, but tweets with the same syllable count that also rhyme, why, they twitter quite delightfully, as it turns out.

Here we have a feed-based piece that saves Twitter from itself. It’s doing something interesting with a very odd database.

When I read it on Friday afternoon, it was all about people getting ready for the weekend.  A poem in rhyming couplets that may chronicle the time but is continually atwitter with the buzz of the moment. Remarkable.

Wallace Stevens said that poetry is a matter of making silk purses out of sows’ ears. I don’t know how silky this one is but surely it’s made of almost a hundred percent sows’ ears.

And how would you implement the idea? You’d need a rhyming dictionary (like this one). That is stored on the server. It isn’t downloaded to the client. All the writing happens server-side. It isn’t clear what language the server-side processing is done with. PHP or Perl or ASP or Java or whatever. The rhyming dictionary would probably have an API for that language. So that you could, say, send the dictionary a word and get back all the words that rhyme with it. Or you could send the dictionary two words and get back a yes or no as to whether they rhyme.

If it was a good rhyming dictionary, you could also send it a word and get back a number. This number would be a label for the set of words that rhymes with the word you sent. So you get the same number back if you send, on different occassions, two words that rhyme. And you get different numbers back if, on different occassions, you send two words that don’t rhyme.

Rhyming is an equivalence relation.  It partitions the set of words into disjoint sets. Each of the sets in the partition is made up of words that rhyme with one another.

Of course you also need access to lots of current tweets. I’m not sure how this would go. Would this be limited to a set of your friends or what? Anyone have a sense of how that would go?

If you wanted to make it so that each two tweets in a rhyming couplet have the same number of syllables you have to be able to count syllables in a word. In English, that’s usually a matter of the number of vowel clusters. For instance, ‘beautiful’ has 3 syllables and 3 vowel clusters: ‘eau’, ‘i’, and ‘u’. There are exceptions to this rule, such as ‘estuary’, which has only 3 vowel clusters (‘e’, ‘ua’, ‘y’) but 4 syllables, or ‘one’, which has 2 vowel clusters but only 1 syllable, but the rule works broadly enough to be of use.

So for each tweet, you have a few pieces of info.

1. The tweet itself.
2. The URL of the tweet. 
3. The number of syllables in the tweet.
4. The last word in the tweet.
5. And all the words that rhyme with the last word in the tweet.

Alternative to 5 would be the number label for the set of rhyming words, if the dictionary had that feature (discussed above).

Given two tweets, to determine if they can make a couplet, you compare item 3 in each tweet to see if they’re the same. And you compare item 4 to make sure they’re different (so you don’t rhyme x with x). And you compare item 5 to make sure they’re the same or that the one word is in the set of the other word.

If that pans out, you write the couplet to the poem, which is maintained on the server. Top-up. In other words, when you add a couplet to the poem, you add it to the top of the poem.

And when somebody visits the site to look at the poem, you feed them the most recently generated couplets.

by Jim Andrews
vispo.com

For this third in a series of ten posts on digital literature, I asked myself, as one would interrogate a terror suspect, Why do you write digital literature?

At first, I choked (it was a kind of psychic water boarding), and then I came up with this….

(1) Because I like it.

I like the excitement of an empty Flash page waiting to be filled. I like the challenge of starting something new, and hoping it will be different than anything I’ve done before. I like playing with text, images, and audio, looking for ways to synthesize them into a single, cohesive whole. I like the puzzles of code, the goal of lower load times, the fickleness of browsers and portable devices…

Sure, I curse at the ceiling, tear my hair out, and contemplate suicide when things go wrong. But mostly I’m happy, and, as it is with so many writers, that’s enough.

(2) Because I feel special. No kidding, I do. There’s something about working in an emerging art form (and yes, digital literature is an emerging art form), exploring the undiscovered territory where the signposts are mostly the ones you put up. And you put them up not for others, but for yourself so you know where you’ve been, and how to get back, so you can go someplace else. For sure, it’s a kick, marching among the avant-garde….

For years, I wrote traditional text fiction, lost among the many, and now I find myself among the few. Somehow, that’s reassuring.

(3) I’ve got to write something, don’t I? and…

(4) If I stopped now, what would I do with my time? I’ve tried tarring roads, teaching (I still do that), grave digging, nude modeling, parking cars, ghost writing, driving a tractor, fixing fences, giving blood, donating sperm, collecting trash, life-guarding, illegal merchandising (years ago), library shelving, writing specifications for the Gallup Poll, selling Italian ice, changing bedpans, washing dishes, salad prep, cutting grass, delivering newspapers, delivering flowers, grocery bagging, and so on, but none of it works.

There is no substitute. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work.

(5) It’s expected of me. Yeah, I know, not too many people are out there reading digital stories for the web–it’s not high on their To Do list. But there are some who read my (and other digital writers’) work on a fairly regular basis, and after the first few years, they expect us to produce. It’s not a written contract, and it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece every time, but it has to be something so they can drop in, take a quick look, and be satisfied that, yes, the world still turns. The sun still rises and sets in Buffalo, Portland, Sydney, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Rome, Bergen, Barcelona….

You name the place, and the sun rises and sets. The seasons change, the watch ticks, the world turns.

(6) Because digital literature is an art form that I enjoy reading. My policy as an artist/writer (one which is sometimes difficult to adhere to) is never write anything I would not want to read myself. I tell it to my students, invest its importance with biblical resonances, and expect them to follow it.

My hypocrisy does not extend so far as to exclude myself, but it’s no problem, because for me, digital literature is the thing. I am constantly reading it, studying it, bookmarking it, creating it, and talking about it with anyone who will listen. I’ve taught it, curated it, performed it, published it, and copied it. I admire it, hate it and, in the end, there is only one word that sums up my relationship with it: obsession.

Do I always write what I would want to read? Yes, unless, for the moment, I’m someone else.

(7) Because text is not enough. For years, I wrote stories for the static page, relying on print to say it all. I had fun, worked hard, and had some success, but in the end, it was a wall which I wailed on so many times, it was impenetrable, I lay broken beneath it. I was a wreck, and looking for a way out, and digital literature was it. Maybe one day I will go back…

(8) Because I only have seven reasons so far. Which is to say, I don’t need a reason….

(9) Because I don’t have a hobby, and although digital literature is not a hobby for me, if I did have a hobby, there might not be time for digital literature. My time would be taken up with, well, you name it: knitting, golf, drinking….

(10) I want to be rich, and digital literature is the only way I can imagine to make it happen. This tells us two things: one, my imagination is so deficient, and my awareness of real-life economics so lacking, that I could laugh (or cry); and two, I am a fiscal romantic, one who, in the face of all the facts, denies them with the ferocity of a hedge fund manager.

By which I mean, digital literature may soon make money for its authors. In 2007, of the year’s 10 best-selling novels in Japan, five were originally cell phone novels. Sure, they may not be exactly what we consider to be digital literature, and they’re still ultimately selling as hard-cover books, but they were originally read on cell phones, and by LOTS of people. Cell phone novels (or keitai shousetsu) are already being serialized for money. If Japanese authors can do it, why can’t we?

So, why do I write digital literature? It’s not for money, it’s not because I’m bored, and it’s not because I want to be famous…. It’s because, for now, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet. There is also open call for papers (deadline Oct. 15, 2009).