Ambient Art and Electronic Literature

Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, 2004

Literary Studies in the Digital Age, 2013

¶ 1 This essay is part of the third iteration of the anthology. Since public review and commentary help scholars develop their ideas, the editors hope that readers will continue to comment on the already published essay. You may also wish to read the draft essay, which underwent open review in 2017, and the project history.

Poetics Today, 2010

Electronic literature is not just a "thing" or a "medium" or even a body of "works" in various "genres." It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson, foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a long-standing ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by David Damrosch (2003: 5): "not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading . . . that is applicable to individual works as to bodies of material." The model for such constructions may be not the global literary commerce envisioned by Goethe and adopted by Karl Marx, not the romantic tradition of poets as world legislators, and not the current model of a "world republic of letters." The model adopted in this essay, rather, is the literary practice of writing under constraint, developed long before the Internet but suited to its computational impositions and gamelike literary presentations. Instead of a canon of works preserved solely by the power of institutions, the essay presents a freestanding network of authors as precursors to, and models for, this potential world literature, namely, the Oulipo.

International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, 2024

With the advent of Electronic literature in the new millennium, the field of literature experiences a significant upheaval. In order to mark the beginning of a new age in literary expression, this study will investigate Electronic writing as a "curtain raiser" genre. This study explores how Electronic literature challenges conventional ideas of textuality, authorship, and reader interaction by examining its features, forms, and consequences. This research examines how Electronic literature influences modern literary discourse by utilising a variety of multidisciplinary viewpoints, such as literary theory, digital humanities, and cultural studies. The works of important authors, such as Chris Joseph, Mark Z. Danielewski, Kate Pullinger, Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, and Brian Kim Stefans, offer conceptual foundations for comprehending the distinctive characteristics of Electronic literature and its connection to more general cultural and technological changes. This paper demonstrates how the spirit of exploration and creativity in the digital age is embodied in Electronic literature. It is also evident that Electronic literature enhances and challenges our knowledge of reader-author connections, interactivity and storytelling. This study attempts to shed light on the relevance of Electronic literature as a trailblazing genre that influences the literary landscape of the twenty-first century by examining its consequences within the framework of modern literary theory and cultural studies. By looking at these issues, the research advances our knowledge of how digital technology may change the way that literature is expressed and how storytelling is changing in the new millennium.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2014

Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its means. 'Electronic' refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an 'end' of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, ends justified by means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. 1 We will move on from 'end(s)' to means, to media, and finally -as we shall see -to medium. 2 We understand that 'electronic' in 'electronic literature' -now indisputably one end of a field of serious play for the theory and practice of literature -refers metonymically to computation and all its infrastructure: hardware, software, interface & interaction design, networking, and today also, since at least the mid 2000s, to a particular de facto historically-created world built from all of this infrastructure within which most of us now 'live' for a considerable portion of our lives, our cultural and, predominantly, our commercially implicated, transactional lives.

Exploring the Digital Turn, 2018

With the recent studies on bibliographical code and its contribution to the understanding of the text (McGann, McKenzie, McCloud, Werner), the issue of the writing materiality and technology has been transferred to digital media. The awareness that there is yet another signifying factor in the production of the meaning makes McGann, Landow, Drucker, Hayles, and Kirshenbaum explore the newer codes that produce an electronic or digital work. Most ordinary readers of digital literary texts remain at the screening level (Aarseth) and miss the architecture behind the flat surface of the computer screen. I argue that by applying the reading skills acquired for printed texts to digital works, readers lose a rich experience and the complex understanding generated though sensorial channels, intellectual endeavor, and constant experimentation with several layers of the work. I contend that the terms naming literary digital experiences do not reflect their complexity. I propose the term "experiential reading" to define the experience of digital works, and the term "experientors" to name the people engaging in the exploration of such works. Derived from the Latin verb experiri (to try, to test, to experience), "experientors" and "experiential reading" better reflect current reality. Exploring John Zuern's poem "ask me for the moon" from the Electronic Literature Collection-Volume 3, I will demonstrate that experientors need an adequate education to make sense of their experience, the same way literature students rely on critical theories to interpret a printed text.

2017

Why a paper on digital (or electronic) literature? Writers who are recognized as print writers, such as the French novelist François Bon,1 have been experimenting new literary forms on the Internet. In some respects, the Internet appears as an artistic laboratory or as a vast creative workshop.2 However, literary creation with and for the computer was not born with the Internet; it has been around for several decades. “Digital literature”, “electronic literature”, or even “cyberliterature”: the terminology is not fixed.3 Its authors aim at conceiving and realizing works which are specific to the computer and the digital medium by trying to exploit their characteristics: hypertext technology, multimedia dimension, interactivity... The productions of digital literature were of course not born ex nihilo. Genealogy lines can be traced which are acknowledged by the authors themselves: combinatorial writing and constrained writing, fragmentary writing, sound and visual writing.

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers? Beyond its artistic and literary value, we can point out its heuristic value. Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned, such as narrative in narratology, text in linguistics and semiotics, figure in rhetorics, materiality in aesthetics, grasp in anthropology, memory in archivistics or literariness in literary studies. Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences: - an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves; - a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.