Electronic Literature

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

Andrew Gallix's Article in the Guardian

A week or so ago I received an email message from a guy, a person named Andrew Gallix, in England, interested in electronic literature. The email was followed by a message from Mark Amerika saying to expect Gallix's note and encouraging me to respond to him.

Essentially he asked two questions: "Am I [Gallix] wrong in feeling that cutting-edge digital writing had a higher profile ten years ago compared with today?" and "A lot of cutting-edge digital writing seems to have merged with the modern art scene. I'm thinking of you, here, in particular, of course [he meant Mark]. Am I wrong in thinking this?"

I crafted a very careful response to him. I sent a copy of my response to Mark, who agreed with me on my points, and then sent the damn thing to Gallix. The article showed up this morning with the title, "Is e-literature just one big anti-climax?." He took one sentence of my 1500 word response––the one sentence that he could contextualize to help his argument.

Here is the URL to the essay: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/24/ebooks, and below is the response I sent Gallix that he quoted from. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this will be an international dialogue about elit in a very public space instead of an academic conference hall.

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1. Am I wrong in feeling that cutting-edge digital writing had a higher profile ten years ago compared with today?

Are you asking if elit is still a viable art form, or if the publicity about it has died down? Those are two completely different issues.

The recent Visionary Landscapes: The Electronic Literature Organization 2008 conference at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV) demonstrates that elit continues to be a viable art form. 121 elit artists and scholars from 17 different countries attended the four days of presentations and exhibits. What was telling, from my perspective, were the number of submissions for the media art show: 140 artists sent in works for the three exhibits that ran simultaneously at WSUV, Clark College, and Northbank Artists Gallery. Of these, 44 artists were selected to showcase their work; 10 whose works were considered the most outstanding were awarded bursaries. Key to the success of the conference was the fact that the artists, whether awarded bursaries or not, actually had to attend the conference and give an artist talk about their work.

Most interestingly, the electronic art forms that dominated the scene 10 years ago (i.e. hypertext fiction and poetry, interactive fiction, generative poetry), while still present in the talks and at the exhibits, have been augmented with new genres not yet common among the art produced by artists and scholars in the late 1990s. Locative drama, multimedia performance pieces, digital music-based poetry, among others, were present. Probably the most difficult aspect of elit is the ability to talk about it fast enough, so fast is the landscape changing and developing.

If the noise around elit has quieted down, it is due to the fact that digital media, as a field, has been dominated by scholars and critics trained in formalistic art theories. Lev Manovitch uses Russian formalism, for example, as his lens for formulating views of “new” media, while Oliver Grau focuses his attention on Italian Futurism. What chance does an emergent form with literature in its name have when faced with such a strong art historical perspective? That “net art” became the name of choice for some working in the area of web-based elit should come as no surprise under these circumstances.

So, why isn’t elit found in literature department, one may ask? If you look around the American academy today, you will see that literature departments are dominated by cultural studies and great books, with digital humanities distinguishing itself as a third area growing in importance. Digital humanities, however, focuses not so much on the production of native born digital writing as it does on preserving and presenting analog based literary works for digital contexts. So, in reality, unless it is a department where Kate Hayles, Matt Kirshenbaum, and a handful of other scholars reside, Michael Joyce’s work will not receive the attention that James Joyce’s does.

Yet 140 artists submitted works of electronic literature to my conference. Well over two-thirds of these artists were young people just coming out of BFA and MFA programs. This says to me that the impulse to write and create is strong and is making its way “naturally” to the digital realm, with little prodding and prompting by members of the academy. Some of these young artists wrote to me saying that they were delighted to find a venue for their art and to discover a whole field whose artists are interested in producing work in a similar vein.

The issue for a lot of us is how to continue to get out the word that there is this art form called elit. The Electronic Literature Organization is working, at this moment, to update its Directory of thousands of elit works, to complete its second collection (ELC2), and support more conferences and events like the Visionary Landscapes conference. Along these lines, it is sponsoring Brown University’s upcoming Interrupt conference (hosted by John Cayley) that will be held in October. It takes a lot of energy, not to mention, money, however, to undertake such tasks. And as you know, the US government does not provide support for the arts, particularly the electronic arts, at the same level as governments in European or Asian countries do. So, directories, collections, and conferences are financed on a shoestring. No money, no promotions. Hence, the lack of publicity that you hint to in the question you posed.


2. A lot of cutting-edge digital writing seems to have merged with the modern art scene. I'm thinking of you, here, in particular, of course. Am I wrong in thinking this?

I believe you posed this to Mark (the “you” question), but I will answer from my perspective, though I am sure Mark has more interesting things to say about this.

So much of electronic art, not just digital writing, has been subsumed under the umbrella of contemporary art. Last night the Time Based Art festival here in Portland, Oregon, just ended its 11-day run. Among the works, one could find analog, digital, and intermedial art, and all were called forms of contemporary art. A dance among the water fountains in a park? Contemporary art. Tableaux generated from an audience-driven Power Point slide show? Contemporary art. A monologue? Contemporary art. A beatbox and video performance piece? Contemporary art. Video? Contemporary art. You get the picture. But this does not seem to be the problem for most of us since all art is falling into this larger category. The real problem would be if digital writing is not included, which does not seem to be the case.

The larger issue, however, is the general view of writing: That anyone can write––and, worse, that anyone can teach writing. Because writing is integral to our lives, most of us can indeed pick up a pen and jot something down. It does not mean it is necessarily good writing, but one can make words happen in varying levels of competency. In fact, with all of the writing found on the web, one can say that writing is still a dominant form of communication. Unfortunately, so much of that writing is mediocre at best, which means that the reading audiences are getting shortchanged of quality and dumbed down by the steady diet of junk. One would think that graduating from American universities and colleges where first-year composition is the norm audiences would be particular about what it reads and how it writes. But when you consider that institutions put, many times, the least experienced instructors (i.e. grad students) and/or instructors (i.e. overworked and underpaid adjuncts) teaching four to five classes of 25 students per class per semester in writing classrooms, it makes sense that so many students are finishing college without a clue of how to put a coherent thought down on paper––or a computer screen.

But I digress. Sorry.

Yes, art that entails digital writing, like all art today, is categorized as contemporary art. But I would add that rather than seeing this as a problem, I see it as an opportunity for elit or digital writers to disseminate their work across a broader landscape. A case in point: For the last four years I have been collaborating with a multimedia performance and installation artist from Canada. In our work I write, scripting the pieces and creating the digital writing and spoken word portions of our art. The writing is given the same weight as his music and sound. In truth, we have been experimenting with the balance among what many see as competing art forms: video, animation, sound, music, spoken word, the written word, and dance, and trying to push the envelop on ephemera, both written and performative.


These comments offers a more optimistic perspective than you may have expected. I am happy that you wrote me, and I encourage you to write back with any further questions.

--Dene Grigar

posted by: grigar at 09/24/08 09:50 | link | comments |

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