Mark C. Marino is a Ph.D. from UC Riverside, studying chatbots, electronic literature, games, and other new media. His dissertation,
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This is a review of
What is the good stuff
of electronic literature?
In her online essay
the good stuff. The
So, what is the good stuff
of electronic literature? Given the variety of pieces
assembled here, there is no simple description.
When the ELO decided to put the collection together, their organizing keyword was
variety
. To interact with the sixty pieces is to experience their success
in developing an enticing anthology particularly for course syllabi in electronic
literature. The collection includes poetry, drama, and fiction rendered with sound,
animation, and of course, that golden trait, interactivity
. The pieces use
Shockwave, Flash, JavaScript, interactive programming languages (TADS and Inform) and
HTML. The works are hyperlinked texts, animated poems, games, films, and new genres
that have yet to be contained in any tidy taxonomy. The question What is
electronic literature?
quickly gives way to What isn’t?
as these
editors produce not so much a genre as a network of pieces whose greatest common
factor is their delivery media, the CD-ROM or the Internet. However, while the
collection includes a powerful cadre of those multi-talented dilettante
artist-programmer-coders working alone or in collaboration, the variety of the works
does not derive from a variety of producers, especially with respect to social
economic status and racial characteristics. Perhaps the ELO’s efforts to freely
disseminate the collection will provide a means of inspiring a wider variety of
potential artists for the next volume.
Available on both CD-ROM and online, the collection also offers multiple
organizational structures for exploring the contents. The user can pursue the
front-page, a matrix of thumbnails for each piece, which again highlights the
heterogeneity of the pieces themselves. Alternately, the reader can examine the works
by keywords, authors, or titles. Keywords
offers a breakdown of the different
forms, according to the genre of the work (codework
or wordtoy
), the
medium or programming language (Flash
, VRML
), the author (women
authors
, or collaborative
), or the tone of the work
(parody/satire
). Some of the keyword seem to strain to describe their
collection. Network Forms
, for example, is rather loosely defined as works
that are structured
or make use of the styles of network forms such as the
personal home page, the FAQ…, the blog, the listserv,…or email
. Clearly this
categorization seems more folksonomic than taxonomic, describing based on a set of
related features rather than formal requirements. Again, this less rigorous naming
protocol reflects a much more inclusive attitude than one might find in an anthology
of poetic forms, for example.
Amidst the collection, there are some works that transcend the collection itself and stand out as pillars of electronic writing. Such pieces have already garnered much critical attention. Most notable among these would be Judd Morrissey’s
hitsof other megastars in new media, it often includes the visionaries with lesser-known works. Such pioneering artists include Shelley Jackson, author of the much critiqued
electronic literature, the range of their forms, styles, and content perplex attempts to easily categorize these lexia, which is perhaps the central message of the
Eliterati seem to cannibalize any electronic delivery venue they encounter. Perhaps the most obvious variety in the collection is menagerie of forms. Whether using natural language or computer languages, animation or games, the works offer a sense of the perpetual metamorphosis of electronic literature. Nonetheless, Flash and its precursor Shockwave are certainly dominant multimedia delivery systems. Descending from FutureWave Software’s SmartSketch of the early 1990s, now produced and distributed by Adobe, this software that has been so dominant with online marketers and web designers has proven just as useful and contagious to eliterature. Whether allowing users to carve their own version of Michelangelo’s David in Deena Larson’s work or offering music, images, and voices in Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s
openforms. Jason Nelson makes his Flash files freely available for remixing. The desire to share and open these art forms reveals another common goal among these artists, the promotion of the field itself through the development and circulation of works that can be reworked.
Programming languages offer these artists a major alternative to proprietary production systems, such as Flash. Not surprisingly, hypertext, including HTML/DHTML serves as the lingua franca of many of the other works, but it is not alone in programming languages. Perhaps due to editor Nick Montfort’s interests, interactive fiction, written in TADS and Inform, have a healthy representation, making up five of the sixty works, as opposed to say conversational agents, whose lone representative is actually also a work of interactive fiction,
Written in 2000, using Inform,
They told me you were coming.Very quickly, the interactor will discover that he or she can speak back. Here, then, is a chatbot, a conversational agent, in the middle of an interactive fiction (IF). Of course, from Floyd the robot in Steve Meretzky’s Infocom game
traditional IFnor a
traditional chatbot. If spelunking through
tell abouta subject or
ask abouta subject as the primary means of textual interaction.
One of the major questions facing electronic literature is what will be prioritized, the literary quality, which we might shorthand as the (post)humanistic resonances of a work of art, or the technical quality. Nowhere is that tension clearer than in the
Although simple from a technical standpoint, the work tells a complex and enigmatic story of memory, desire, lust, truth, and consequences.Similarly, in the introduction to Alan Sondheim’s
These texts…are not multimedia productions or cybertext machines….Instead they document a long-standing online performance.Behind these justifications and apologia is a sense of obligation to serve up a collection of gizmos or, to borrow Shelley Jackson’s word,
Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. In the introduction to Rob Wittig’s
a comic romp that uses the form of the common early-webthe editors note that Wittig's workhome page,
reflects less interest in using bleeding edge technology than in adapting literary forms to the vernacular styles of new media. Meanwhile, other pieces foreground the interface or the underlying processes. Of Dan Waber and Jason Pimble’s
visually pleasing and quite readable. Few literary collections offer assurances of the
excusesmay not be necessary at all. Nonetheless, in the editorial rooms of electronic literature echoes the constant call for the readable through interfaces that are novel and, more critically, technologically rich.
To identify this tension is not to say that artists must choose between them or that works cannot have both technological innovation and literary, or specifically textual, virtuosity. However, let us consider Michael Joyce’s
He pulled the water over him like a blanket and slept, anchored in the gaze of an unknown woman and the girl who loved him.There are no Microsoft Certifications or technical requirements for implementing and appreciating the beauty of Joyce’s prose with a style powerful enough to send less adept artists deeper into code and contraptions.
The dual emphases of technology and the literary play out across the content of the collection as well. Technology is frequently a central theme and at least a minor trope in these works. Some emphasize technological history, as artists become archaeologists of media forms. Take William Poindstone’s
By the time a reader encounters Jason Nelson’s
natural languagenor text but a use of signs that helps us reimagine or reconfigure our relationship to sign systems of which our spoken language is only one. Such a move allows scholars of electronic literature to be broad in their scope while still maintaining a thread of continuity of purpose. Nelson himself has spoken about his own efforts as experiments in interface design
Despite this technological focus, the works manage to engage in a variety of political projects as well. Geniwate’s generative poetry
soldiers teach the grammar of war. Stuart Moulthrop’s provocatively titled
transparentinterfaces, this group of artists is trying to dislodge the interactor from such a comfortable position. As a trace of this subversive movement, one of the
The ELO collection promotes the sharing of this electronic literature among artists,
educators, and audiences. While the production of the CD-ROM seems to be a gesture
toward the world of books and discrete objects that can be placed in libraries and on
shelves, Creative Commons licensing (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5) puts the
collection and copyright in the hands of the author’s description
of Nio
.
The No-Derivative Works restriction prevents corporations from taking this content
and developing a viral marketing version of, say,
Hardly an all-ages anthology, though, the
a work directed to an audience of children. However,
While the collection is diverse in its objects and includes a menagerie of interfaces and kinds of semiotic communications, the roll call of authors maintains a certain demographic homogeneity. These works, developed in a literary environment after the advances of pluralistic and inclusive curricula, offer little in the way of cultural diversity. Perhaps as a symptom, racial representations tend to be white. Questions of race become blurred in questions of post-human races.
At this point in the argument, the burden of proof typically falls on the critic to demonstrate the lack of diversity. I do not have access to the family trees of all of the contributors, but having met or encountered most of the authors at conferences, I can at least attest to a lack of phenotypical diversity. Perhaps an easier place to look is in the texts themselves, specifically at the characters represented, visually or otherwise. With respect to the visual representations, white-hued characters abound, as in Marsha of Rob Wittig’s piece or Dona Leishman’s Deviant and
The collection itself may serve to remedy part of this problem, for despite the
reported global
reach of the World Wide Web, literacy in electronic literature
typically requires a one-to-one communication between artist-critic and audience.
Again without tracing out the Facebook networks, I should note that there are
typically fewer than six-degrees of separation between the various elit artists,
since many create elit in the context of electronic literature courses and many of
the artists included have been involved with ELO. The number of people with the time,
training, and access to create these artistic works is quite small and were
introduced to the form by another person, rather than a random web search. To an
extent, electronic literature is a guild-based art form, one that requires mentoring
just as it requires evangelists. The
Also lacking were sufficient examples of elit beyond Europe and the United States. Another topic at the ELO symposium was how to foster more relations with artists outside the English-speaking word and in other parts of the globe. Artists such as Colombia’s Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez Ruiz, whose narrative work
Like many of the works it has collected, the
The answer is preservation. In an age where web pages disappear faster than yesterday’s Firefox plugins, it is increasingly important to preserve at least some of these works off the web. This archival work has been another major project of the Electronic Literature Organization, the Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project. The