Electronic Literature

"An examination of the theory and practice surrounding the genre of electronic literature and exploration of its major works and authors."

Posted by MD Coverley

Dear Students in Electronic Literature –

I do imagine you are finding your work in E-Literature both challenging and fascinating! This field is still so new, really, and the scope of work gives you all so much to explore.
I am so pleased to be joining your group – you may know me as Marjorie C. Luesebrink, or by my pen name, M.D. Coverley.

One thing that I would want to stress, here, is that this medium is not only new to students and critics; it is also yet new and unfamiliar to most of us writers. Whatever I have done, in any case, should probably be considered literature in an “experimental” mode. It will be a long time, IMHO, before this field evolves into a predictable, well understood genre.

Since you are reading “Pixis Byzantium” {http://califia.us/Byzantium}this week, perhaps it would be helpful for you to know a little about my writing and how this piece relates to my practices in narrative fiction.
First of all, I was a print writer long before computers were available to create digital art and literature. I started writing at age 8 and first published at age 12. I attended UC Irvine’s MFA program in fiction, wrote and published print novels and short stories, and generally thought of myself as an ordinary “writer.” All that time, though, I felt that linear print was restrictive. There was something confining about it – something that did not let me approach the sensory world in quite the right way. As soon as computers became a thing of the desktop, I started training myself in all aspects of electronic media – text, image-making, and sound. Somehow, I thought, this was the direction I needed to go. But I had no idea of what path to take! As soon as I started actually writing e-lit, though, I knew that THIS was the medium I had always wanted to use – and that I wouldn’t write print fiction again, most likely!
In the summer of 1995, I attended a seminar at UCLA directed by Katherine Hayles entitled "Literature in Transition." At that time, all of the online digital arts were in the very early stages. The WWW had just been launched, and the only e-literature was published on floppy disk! The concept, however, of a new form of storytelling, one that combined text, image, sound, structure, and coding, was irresistible. During that summer, I began a very extensive electronic novel, Califia (published on CD by Eastgate systems in 2000).
In 1995, of course, the field was relatively young – and most of us had little more than a keen interest in a nascent field. We read the current texts, met every morning for lecture and discussion, spent afternoons working together on the computers, and whiled away evenings talking about how this field might function and develop. It was a transformative experience for me in so many ways. First, I came to know Kate and benefit from her deep understanding of literature and its manifestations in electronic media. Second, I was able to meet many people who have stayed in the field – Stephanie Strickland, Joe Tabbi, Jaishree Odin – and who I continue to work and collaborate with. Finally, I was able to organize the resources to conceive of the Califia hypertext as a concrete possibility and actually begin the work on it. The first screens of Califia were my “project” for the summer.
Since that first seminar in 1995, Kate has conducted two more – and both of these brought new people to the field and enriched the theory and practice of e-literature significantly. It was through these seminars, also, that I came to better know the work of your instructor, Dene Grigar, as well!

Within a couple of years, the Web did become a showcase for the growing number of e-lit writers. Online zines sprang up that published a wide variety of inventive digital poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Among these were frame (published by trace), The Iowa Review Web, New River, The Electronic Book Review (EBR), The Blue Moon Review, Word Circuits, and Inflect. I published short stories and essays in many of these pioneering publications and acted as contributing editor for some of them, as well, to solicit work from around the world.
The possibilities for new creations and experimentation in digital arts were, and continue to be, enormous. My own interest, though, lay in the exploration of structure and architecture in a sustained narrative. I liked all forms of born-digital prose, but I was most drawn to the challenges and problems of creating a "world" in which the reader could wander freely, "discovering" the story as she went along. Even before I finished Califia, I started the groundwork for another "novel"-type story, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day. Both of these works took years to complete - and the time span has led to myriad technical difficulties: software going out of date, browsers changing, computer hardware altering the creative platform, and so forth!
Currently, I am stretching my muscles with a few short pieces for a while as I finish the more extensive piece that you are reading, Pixis Byzantium.
“Pixis Byzantium” fits naturally into the evolution of my work from 1995 on. I have, all along, been interested in investigating the use of (real, sensory) natural objects and historical phenomena to give shape and meaning to the narrative process in electronic literature. Moreover, I have been fascinated by the possibility of using real phenomena, actual landscape, and layers of history to create the architecture and narrative structure of my fictions.

For example, in a piece called Tide-Land, I used the various tides (spring, neap, ebb, low, etc.) to identify a range of meditative moods associated with contemplation of the past. In another piece, Eclipse Louisiana, the phases of the moon identify narrative time frames and the navigational architecture in a story about memory and loss.

Most extensively, I suppose, would be the use of natural elements in my long novel, Califia. In this work, the four cardinal directions define the structure of the story. Moreover, the three narrators who tell their versions of the larger story are specifically associated with possible human relationships to the earth: Kaye, who is attuned to cosmic cycles; Calvin, who lives in a middle-distance kind of movement; Augusta, who is attached to detail and the moment. {You can read more about this at http://califia.us/chistory.htm.}

I would also add that specific of natural detail, such as bird calls and the sounds of the “northern lights,” show up fairly often in my work. Stephanie Strickland and I collaborated on a piece called The Errand Upon Which We Came in which we used a series of bird calls that were recorded by a scientist working in the tropics.

Landscape as it creates a sense of place, then, has been central to my work all along. Locations like the Nile River [in Egypt, the Book of Going Forth by Day] and Constantinople [Pixis Byzantim] I found particularly interesting because the history of a people and a culture formed material strata visible everywhere. This concrete, material evidence of place and time, then, became the architectural, structural form for the narratives.

Pixis developed from a trip to Constantinople and extensive reading about ancient Byzantium. The ancient city of Byzantium was destroyed in 1453. All spring, during the months before the final destruction, the citizens of Byzantium sat within their beautiful walls - knowing that they had only days or weeks to survive. Among the populace, there were those who were resigned, there were those who had reasons and explanations for what would happen, there were those who offered miracles and wonders: but everyone was essentially paralyzed to do anything to save the city. They gathered at the beautiful Sta. Sophia and prayed. This piece is narrated by the people I imagine might have been waiting for the fall of Byzantium in the spring of 1453.

It is also, though, about the history of Byzantium and the relationship of its destruction to the loss of other civilizations. What persists in the human narrative is the structure of decline and defeat after centuries of domination. The people of Byzantium sit impotent inside their walls much as the ancient Romans did, and much as we, even today, do when we are threatened with world-changing events.

The “layout” of the piece – the narrative access – is a map of Byzantium. But, in addition, the word Pixis means "little box" in Greek. Thus, the architectural structure of this work is like one of those complex, little Byzantine painted ivory cases with boxes and boxes nested inside. To read the piece, one needs to keep mousing over and clicking on the images, moving from illuminated scene-box to scene box. Any screen which seems to have no clear place to click will reveal new things wherever you click or mouseover. If you are eager to move to another “scene,” all you need to do is mouse over the screen to find another “box” to open!

I hope you enjoy this piece – even though you may only get to one or two sections of the main narrative. It isn’t a “story” really, rather it is a collection of vignettes inside the framework of an historic event. As such, this represents another experiment in fusing the coding/architecture/shape of the electronic work with the actual materiality of the landscape, the natural phenomena, and the presence of time in place.


Despite the fact that the WWW is a familiar part of all of our lives today, the frontier for digital art and literature is almost boundless: the opportunity to explore and create new digital forms lures us on!

posted by: grigar at 01/29/08 22:46 | link | comments |

Coverley's Story

We will switch from Coverley's Book of Going Forth by Day to her work, Byzantium. This work is located at http://califia.us/Byzantium/.

So, please read this work for Wednesday's class along with the other work assigned.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 01/21/08 16:57 | link | comments |

Textbook Is In

Close Reading New Media is now in the bookstore. Please pick up your copy as soon as you can.

posted by: grigar at 01/18/08 16:27 | link | comments |

Dene's Post about the History of Elit

A Quick and Dirty History of Electronic Literature

1. Hayles’ Electronic Literature History, from “Electronic Literature: What Is It?”

1989-1995 First Generation, or Classical

Dominated by the Eastgate School, which was characterized by the use of a particular hypertext authoring tool called “Storyspace.”

Other works of electronic literature were in development during this period. These were driven by HyperCard, the hypertext software introduced by Apple that drove Apple’s unique operating system.

Overarching traits of the works in the Classical Period includes:
Heavy use of words
Little to no images or sound
Driven by hypertext linking system
Reminiscent of print-based literature; its authors hailed from literary backgrounds
Originally Mac-based; later was available for PC

First commercial work of this period: Michael Joyce, “afternoon: a story,” 1989

Other notable works include: Stuart Moulthrop, “Victory Garden,” 1991; Judy Malloy’s “Its Name Was Penelope,” 1993; Deena Larsen, “Marble Falls,” 1993; Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl,” 1995 is the “culminating work” of the period (Hayles 6).

1995-Present Second Generation, Contemporary/Postmodern

While Hayles does not elaborate on the works of this period (she identifies the period and moves on to the idea of genres), we can surmise from the technological developments and changes to the computer industry that have occurred since 1995 what some of their characteristics may be . . .

Technological Developments
Even though Tim Berners-Lee had introduced the web in 1984 (the same year at the Macintosh desktop computer (called the “Classic” ) was introduced to the market, it was not until the introduction of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) browsers Mosaic and Netscape in 1994-5 that the web allowed for easy access and display of online works to the general public. Bandwidth, however, was small, so the delivery of multimedia works remained a challenge. Another challenge at the time was coding since there were no GUI HTML editors available. Authors who had taught themselves how to produce work using Storyspace or Hypercard had to commit to learning how to prepare works for the web.

Despite this, we do see the beginning of the migration of electronic literary works from stand-alone authoring programs like HyperCard and Storyspace to the web. These works resemble first-generation works in that they were heavily word driven. Driving the move to online environment was the fact that these works were free and easy to disseminate, requiring no “middle-man” to negotiate the sell of the work. It also eliminated the need to distinguish between a Mac-based or PC-based work since web coding for the web is not driven by system platforms. MD Coverley represents those authors who began their careers producing Storyspace fiction but later moved to web authoring. Califia, for example, was published by Eastgate in 2000; but the bulk of her work was published for the web. One final impetus driving authors to the web was that there was no “editor” picking and choosing work that could be published on the web or telling the authors how to “fix” the piece for publication. So, essentially anyone could be published. This condition led to the rise of a whole new crop of authors who took advantage of self-publishing. Self-publishing itself became an acceptable practice for electronic artists––which is opposite of the way it is viewed in the print world (aka “vanity press”). And since it was difficult to make money on one’s work even when it was published professionally by electronic-oriented publishers, it did not seem to matter where one’s work was ultimately found or how it got there. The main impetus was to get one’s work “out there.”

Competing with web-based elit works were those produced in CD format. The Voyager Corporation dominated the elit market in the production of works from this period. What drew audiences to CD elit works was that they allowed for graphics and sound, which of course the web with its limited bandwidth could not. The culminating commercial works of this genre were Myst and Riven, two adventure games, published by Broderbund Software from California.

But the CD movement failed just as it was gaining in popularity. With the increased computing bandwidth (not to mention memory and speed), images and sound have become ubiquitous elements of the web environment, and interactivity has increased. Elit works moving to the web were eventually able to achieve the look and style made popular by those produced for CDs, and so replaced CD technology.

Changes to the Computer Industry
In 1995 a landmark court case involving Apple and MicroSoft came to a close. Years of fighting over the GUI windows system, which was the hallmark of the Mac environment (but developed for Apple by Gates), resulted in a win for MicroSoft and the decline of Apple––until Steve Jobs rejoined the company in the late 1990s. Apple’s rise in market share since the early 21st century is attributed to Jobs’ innovations to personal computing (iTunes, emphasis on multimedia objects, iPhone). But the years from 1995-2000 were bad ones for the company, which had at one time dominated the personal computing industry.

This situation meant that elit works produced with software for Macintosh computers were in danger of being rendered obsolete. The move to produce Windows versions of elit works began. But interestingly elit artists, for the most part, remained loyal to Apple and continued to develop their work for both platforms even though the computer industry predicted the death of Apple during this time (actually, reports of Apple’s death was an ongoing phenomenon that seemed to drive Mac-users to dig their heels in deeper). It would not be hyperbole to state that most elit artists are Mac users.

Overarching traits of the works in the Second Generation Period includes:
Use of color graphics, video, animation
Integration of sound
Increase in interactivity
Increase use of the web to deliver work
Less reminiscent of print-based literature

2. Kac’s Electronic Literature History, from Media Poetry

Kac begins the history of media poetry with the citation of an essay written by Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov entitled “The Radio of the Future,” in which he predicts the “the impact of telecommunications on literature . . . and culture” (273). Thus, he connects this form of elit to the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century and in doing so, follows the lead of fellow art historians, Lev Manovich and Oliver Grau, who connect media art to Russian Avant-Garde artists and the Italian Futurists, respectively.

Hew goes on to point out that Modernists in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and the US experimented with analog technology and poetry making. American poet E.E. Cummings, for example, used his typewriter to play with “visual syntax.” As I mentioned in my first lecture, the first computer generated work was German poet Theo Lutz’s Stochastische Texte” (1959). See: http://www.netzliteratur.net/lutz_schule.htm

The important literary group, OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or “Workshop for the Potential of Literature), founded in 1960 by French writers Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, is seen as one of the biggest influences upon the development of experimental poetry.

Following WWII when artistic production was disrupted, the late 1950s and 1960s regained the spirit of experimentation. Important to note are Brion Gysin’s “Pistol Poem” (1960)[ http://www.inter-zone.org/bgbio.html]; Gerd Stern’s programmed kinetic poem “Over” (1962) [http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/stern-gerd.html]; Clair Philippy’s generative work (Poems no. 027, 929, 078, 105, 140) (1963); and John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem System” (1969).

Experiments with generative poetry, especially, continued through the 1970s and 80s, but we also see the use of other technologies with Richard Kostelanetz’s “Three Prose Pieces” (1975), which used video and his work “On Holography” (1978), which used holography; Syvestre Pestana’s poems (1981), which used animation; Eduardo Kac’s works (1982), which used ascii and holography; and Rod Willmot’s “Everglade” (1989), which used a hypertext authoring system for DOS platform.

It is important to note that Kac ends his history in 1996 with the publication of his book, New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies. In his second edition (the Introduction you are reading comes from it), he makes no move to update his history. So, it ends with the beginning of the web.

While he never defines media poetry, we can determine from his Introduction that he is talking about poetry that has been created through a direct mechanical process in a way that renders it different from work produced for the print medium. In the Introduction of the First Edition he writes:

The work of the poets explained and discussed in this issue takes language beyond the confines of the printed page and explores a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinks, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatio-temporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo, multiple simultaneities, and many other innovative procedures. (11)

Characteristics he associates with it include:
“Greater portability”
“Integration of word, sound, movement, transmission, and many other sign processing features into a single device”
“broadband network ubiquity” (7)
Awareness of a larger, non specialist audience (7-8)

In essence, what Kac suggests is that the history of elit begins with experimental poetry produced in Europe, North America, and South America. It is a trajectory that begins in the early 20th century and has continued on to the current time and encompasses a variety of forms. The driving force behind it however is technological experimentation and innovation, not necessary limited to the computer but certainly at its center today.

In looking at the two histories presented by Hayles and Kac, we see a conflict of sorts. Kac’s history begins close to 100 years ago in Europe and encompasses any kind of mechanical influence upon the production of poetry. Hayles’ begins in 1989 in the US and takes in all forms of literary output and all definitions of texts. Key for her is that these texts are generated for and by computing devices.

posted by: grigar at 01/15/08 18:42 | link | comments (4) |

Blog Post from Kate Pullinger

From Kate Pullinger--

I’m a writer with a long history of writing and publishing novels and short stories; for many years I’ve also written for film, television and radio. Since 2002 I’ve been creating digital work as well. I teach on an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media I helped set up – (http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/pg/ma/cwnm.jsp). If you are interested, you can find my books and other digital projects on my website at www.katepullinger.com.

‘Inanimate Alice’ (www.inanimatealice.com) came about when a former student of mine, Ian Harper, approached me; he was developing a large project that included a film called ‘E|Mission’, a game, and a gadget, and wanted to put together an innovative viral marketing campaign to promote all three elements. After some discussion, we came up with the idea of publishing on the web a series of linked stories or multimedia episodes that tell the back-story of the main characters in the film, Alice, a games animator, and Brad, the game character she creates.

Though the original idea is not my own, I was given free reign on developing the stories for ‘Inanimate Alice’. For me, this private commission was a welcome opportunity to create further work for the web, with the added bonus of being able to work once again with one of my favourite collaborators, the supremely talented web artist and writer, Chris Joseph (www.babel.ca). We had worked together previously on ‘The Breathing Wall’ (www.thebreathingwall.com); our collaborative partnership worked well, despite the fact that Chris lived in Montreal, Canada, and I lived in London, England, and we were able to meet only once a year. Chris has since come back to live in the UK, but the first three episodes of Alice were created via e-mail.

We took a couple of decisions early on in the creative process that have proved to be very useful. We decided to tell the stories from Alice’s point of view, in the first person, and we also decided never to represent Alice visually – the reader experiences the stories through her first person voice, but without ever seeing Alice’s face. These decisions were made partly due to budgetary constraints – we had no money to hire actors, so could not represent Alice’s face, nor record her voice. However, we have found that these two decisions have worked well for us, helping to draw the reader into Alice’s world, while leaving the story very open to the reader’s own imaginative interpretation. The fact that you never see Alice’s face makes the reading experience more akin to reading a book, where characters are not represented visually and your readerly imagination is more fully engaged.

We made lots of mistakes with ‘Episode One: China’; the first draft of the script was too long, much too wordy and poorly structured. We didn’t properly understand this until we’d created a working draft, using Flash, of the entire episode. We then had to dismantle the episode and re-write the script and re-do all the work in Flash, which was laborious and time-consuming. With subsequent episodes we now make absolutely sure the script is finished before moving onto creating the episode in Flash. I’ve found that writing digital fiction has a lot in common with writing a film script; structure is of huge importance. Structure determines narrative pace, momentum, and tension. With episode one, after our false start, we realised we needed to begin with some kind of story hook, in order to draw readers in. All episodes, including episode four which is nearly finished, rely on a similar structure now: opening story hook, back story, resolution.

Chris and I collaborate closely on all aspects of the episodes, but we do have defined roles: I’m the writer, Chris creates the work in Flash. Together we collect images and sounds (episodes 1-3 used images and sounds found or purchased on the internet; episode 4 has been created using entirely newly created assets). Chris composes and creates the music. We have a lot of toing and froing over all the different elements, essentially co-directing the overall production. In a profound way, the narrative voice of ‘Inanimate Alice’ is the voice of our collaboration.

‘Episode Four: Hometown’ is nearly ready to go; our producer, Ian Harper, is looking at ways to finance further episodes by figuring out how to make money out of ‘Inanimate Alice’. While, as I said, the original idea for the project arose out of other projects of Ian’s, ‘Inanimate Alice’ has taken on a life of its own. We’ve won a number of prizes and the episodes have had multiple screenings at film and digital arts festivals: there’s a list of all this on our About page at http://www.brad-field.info/. To date we’ve been in discussion with game developers and a big range of content providers, but Alice has yet to find a commercial home. We’ve collaborated with a game developer to create an easy-to-use tool called iStories that will allow people to use their own stories, images, and music to create multimedia stories, and are hoping to release this later this year. So stayed tuned for future developments, as well as ‘Episode Four: Hometown’.

Kate Pullinger

posted by: grigar at 01/14/08 11:16 | link | comments (4) |

Rob Kendall's Post

Creating Faith
posted by Rob Kendall

One of my motivations for creating Faith was the desire for a poetic form that was unique to the digital medium. Over the centuries poets have been drawn irresistibly to various systems of verbal organization involving rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, syllable count, word repetition, and other sonic devices. Twentieth-century poets were particularly amenable to visual forms such as the acrostic, the mesostic (an acrostic that runs down the middle of the poem instead of the beginning), the palindrome, the Oulipian snowball (a succession of one-word lines in which each word is one letter longer than the next), and the various manifestations of Concrete Poetry. It wasn’t until the advent of the computer, however, that kinetic forms became feasible.

Faith is cast in a kinetic form that relies upon successive overlays of words. Unlike printed forms, which progress down the page in patterns of lines and stanzas, the structure of Faith expands inward and outward. Words emerge between and around existing words to propel the poem forward. From four initial seed words, three additional verbal layers grow until the screen is filled. Then the process is reversed as a final layer is peeled away, leaving us once more with just four words, though not the ones we started out with.

How should a poet approach form? Content can simply be poured into whatever form happens to be on hand for storing it in, the way you’d pour leftover gravy into a bowl. But don’t form and content both deserve better? Don’t they deserve a mutually supportive union?

When working in the sort of overlay structure I adopted for Faith, it would have been easy to build the poem by merely expanding upon the meaning of each preceding layer. Just pour more gravy into the bowl a little at a time. Add a sentence. Fill in a few adjectives. But who wants to take the easy way out? I set my overlays the task of changing the meaning of the words that came before as much as possible. Verbs become nouns (“bend” progresses from “can’t bend this” to “can’t the mind press on around the bend”) or adjectives (“consummate” graduates from “to consummate this vision” to “to be only this consummate ‘o,’ this visionary ‘r’”). Sentences divide and recombine.

More importantly, each successive layer undercuts the preceding one by contradicting it. Thus the poem engages in an argument with itself, allowing the form to embody an attitude that wavers between faith and logic. Form becomes content. The poem comes to a mock conclusion that merely ends up where we started, making the poem cyclical.

It was very difficult to write this piece. I started with a version of the most complete layer (the fourth) and worked backwards, but getting the different overlays to work together the way I wanted required constant tweaking and tinkering. Making the animation come out exactly right was a big challenge, but it was crucial to the poem. The animation provides a sort of commentary on the central argument. Finally, the music ties the choreography together, while at the same time emphasizing each layer’s distinct character. I like to think of the final result as something of a song and dance for two slightly offbeat characters.

posted by: grigar at 01/10/08 22:18 | link | comments |

Lecture 1 Is Available

A couple of you missed the first day of class and, so, missed the first lecture on Electronic Literature. To make this information available to you, I have converted the Keynote slides into a Quicktime Movie. You can access it at:

http://www.nouspace.net/dene/338/dtc338_lecture1.mov

Unfortunately, when one transfers presentation slides into a movie, one loses the external links embedded in the slides. This means if you want to find the external links to the three elit examples, you should look over the citations below:

Slide #14
Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries
"Samsung Means to Come"
http://www.yhchang.com/SAMSUNG_MEANS_TO_COME.html

Slide #15
Thom Swiss
"Shy Boy"
http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/shyboy/

Slide #16
Dan Weber
"5 x 5"
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/september06/waber/fivebyfive.html

It also means that it is better for accessing the .mov if the video on Slide #23 is removed. To access the video, go to:

http://www.nouspace.net/dene/338/dimensionality.mov.

As for Monday, we will talk about Rob Kendall's posting and work, "Faith". And we will continue with the other work due for that day.

I am glad to have you all take the course. It is great to have so many students taking the class who have such good insights into content and who have so much experience with technology.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 01/09/08 22:14 | link | comments |