about
Rationale
Electronic poetry is one (among many) culturally appropriate tools for
generating knowledge about the human self. Its unique character can
only be understood, obviously, through an understanding of its media
specific strengths and weaknesses. These strengths and weaknesses tend
to spin on the same axes. The most stunning unique quality circulates
around the question of technics (referring both to “technique” and
“technology,” as a particular way of responding to human life as a
series of “problems” with “solutions” that can be known, improved, and
transferred through empirical means.)
Electronic Literature, as a form that was born quite consciously as a
response to emergent technics (both hardware and software), opens up
the door for literatures that can reveal something to us about the
nature of the technical system. It can force us to think critically
about technics and it can offer the possibility of more efficient
technics.
As someone who writes about technology, this is the crux of electronic
literature: Is human intelligence indispensable? Or is it obsolete? To
be fair, the deck is stacked in our favor for the time being.
Computers have limited creative talents. I want to believe that the
best works are the expression of minds that could and would create in
other media. Even if the medium itself tends towards exceptional feats
of technology, at some level, there is a human intelligence behind the
creation (although the individual artist can claim less and less of
that glory). And, even if the artist’s genius plays only a
complementary role, I feel that this adds a significant human element
to distinguish it from a purely technical creation.
In the process of writing down these thoughts and working towards an
assignment, I suppose I have revealed a great deal about my underlying
concerns. I arrive to the scene of “electronic literature” as a
student of popular culture. Convinced of the merits of Barthes and his
followers, I like to insist that all communication is “text,” and that
text includes all the signs that are used to make meaning. Against the
inertia of past print technologies, the early popular culture scholars
insisted that images, sounds, gestures, etc. all contained meanings,
denotative and connotative, inflected by their context, theoretically
nested many times within multiple systems of meaning. The result is
that “poetics” has always, for me, included a broad range of
communicative acts and accidents, which have become increasingly
archivable via print and new media technologies. New Media criticism
began in the field of popular culture studies avant la lettre through
the study of semiotics. Such criticism has become ordinary to me.
So, to get to the point, I cannot show anyone how to write “Electronic
Literature.” I can only present a few proto-critical concepts and
exercises which can do what scholars in my field have done before me:
Argue for an inclusive definition of text. Thus my exercise will focus
on non-alphabetic aspects of text: Context, time, structure,
atmosphere, and audience.
This activity will require people to select an existing work and
re-envision it with the other components in mind. Not to write a poem…
but to think about these elements as features of writing. Features
which were once spoken for by an alphabetic print culture, but which
now have been opened up by new technologies and techniques, and which
have returned poetry to its origin: A living, performed enterprise,
dependent on the hope that human experience is defined by its
singularity.
In short, the focus is on the presence of the piece. Not in some
authorial, authentic, theoretical sense, but in terms of something
that can happen to a person as they encounter a text. This has always
been possible with print—but now it has become a little more open and
a little more possible, if nor no other reason than it is less
constricted by the relatively narrow range of possibilities of
alphabetic texts.
The Exercise:
Ingredients:
At least 6 participants (myself included). This body should consist of
theoreticians, artists, and students. [I might boost this number to 9
or 12, but at this point I’d like to keep the ratio the same so that
we get a good mix of perspectives.]
An online forum (Blogging software with password restricted comments
would probably work well for starters).
Server space to host any hypermedia works that result.
Duration:
5 or 10 weeks, depending on mutually agreed upon schedule. Each
portion of the exercise should take no longer than an hour or two for
each participant to complete. In addition, participants should allow
time to respond to their partners’ postings.
As the symposium progresses, we would each get a chance to comment and
respond to how others answered the question. At the end, we can see
what we have. Some people might have creative pieces, others might
have essays. We could also use the exercise as a springboard for
further collaborative work.