Last Thursday, May 3, I attended a conference at the University of Maryland entitled The Future of Electronic Literature, co-hosted by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). It featured keynote speeches by Kenneth Thibodeau, the program director of the Electronic Records Archives project of the US government’s National Archives, and N. Katherine Hayles, professor of literature at UCLA and probably the foremost theorist of electronic textuality in the country.
“Electronic Literature? Is that like e-books?” you ask. Well, yes and no.
In a sense, electronic writing has been with us ever since the telegraph, but only recently has it become a literary endeavor with the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s. For the most part, however, the word-processor is still primarily a vehicle for producing print text — a souped-up video typewriter — and even though more and more Word documents are going back and forth between people who never print them, this does not constitute electronic textuality, strictly speaking, and memos and reports aren’t literature, however finely crafted.
The first work of electronic literature is arguably Michael Joyce’s novel afternoon, a story, written in the late 1980s. It was never intended for print: Joyce has said that he wanted to write a novel that changed every time it was read, and so worked with Jay David Bolter to develop software that could present the piece, a program eventually called Storyspace.
About the same, a publisher appeared. Eastgate Systems, a software company in the Boston suburb of Watertown, began to bring out works of poetry and fiction written specifically to be read on computers, writing that had come to be called hypertext, a term coined by Ted Nelson in 1965, by which he meant “branching and responding text” — i.e., text that provided the reader with decisions to make, then acted (or, as we say today, interacted) upon those decisions. Think of the Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid. Then put it on your computer.
Twenty years ago, when Joyce and Bolter were liberally passing out copies of Storyspace and its test file, the “manuscript” version of afternoon around the country at academic and technology conferences, the package came on a floppy disk (remember those?!) that constituted the electronic “book” of the day.
Indeed, Eastgate’s publishing model was (and still is) that of the small press, the only difference being that instead of buying a book with printed pages you got a quarto-sized cover with two inside pockets, one of which held a disk with the work in question on it and the other a Getting Started booklet that told you how to install what was on the disk, just like any other piece of software you bought in the days before the ubiquitous Internet and easy downloading.
These days we’re all familiar with branching and responding text, of course, from surfing the Web, but it’s hard to remember that this experience wasn’t available to the majority of personal computer users even ten years ago, though once a few businesses figured out online marketing, it wasn’t long before everyone knew what a home page was.
And that changed everything, as we know. The World Wide Web became the world’s largest hypertext, and tools for publication were put at the disposal of anyone who owned a computer and a phone line, and could knock loose a day or two to learn HTML, the simple code used to make web pages.
Today, it’s hard to recognize the place. The concept of “text” has expanded to include sound, images, animation, even virtual reality environments — in short, anything that can be read. Navigation, interface design, and usability are now matters each author must address as part of the process of “writing” a work of electronic literature. And the entire notion of publishing, with the means of production and distribution almost entirely in the hands of producers, instead of being locked up in the iron fist of some capitalist, is undergoing a sea change similar to the revolution caused by the introduction of movable type five hundred years ago.
The Electronic Literature Organization was formed in 1999 in response to a growing interest in the field, both among writers and scholars, and its mission is “to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature,” according to the about page on its website. Until last fall, the ELO’s offices were at UCLA; their new home is MITH, at the University of Maryland at College Park. This symposium was the first joint venture between the ELO and its new host.
ELO recently published Volume 1 of The Electronic Literature Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland. It is offered for free on the web and on CD-ROM, for reading and study on and off the network, and contains sixty short pieces, mostly in English (though French and hexadecimal code are also represented) by authors from around the world.
Not surprisingly, many of these authors were on hand for the symposium. As reported earlier in Arts Hub, Matt Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of MITH and principal organizer of the conference, believes that the most important issue facing electronic literature today is that so few people are doing it — “A lot of people make new media these days (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.),” he said in an e-mail, “but not many people are making literary new media.”
Admittedly, the group is small, but is also enthusiastic. As befits a confabulation of artists and academics, the discourse was often heady, but always rooted in the pragmatic concerns of producing and preserving digital artifacts. Kenneth Thibodeau‘s opening keynote laid out many of the issues facing the archivist of electronic records — not only does the media on which such records are stored decay at ten times the rate of even newspaper, but the technology that encodes them changes so rapidly it’s possible to foresee a digital dark age, when older forms of electronic records will no longer be readable due to abandoned software formats. But he believes that there is reason to hope, since the program he runs, the Electronic Records Archives, as well as others in academia and industry, have helped bring attention to the problem, and the growth of technical knowledge has already led to real long-term thinking about the problem.
The panel following, on process-intensive literature, provided examples of some mind-bending projects: for example, Dene Grigar has hooked up a “Rhapsody Room” in which a poet, by moving through the space and making gestures, can write a poem with her whole body; Rob Kendall‘s “Pieces” requires the reader to move puzzle pieces into place to tell a story; and Stephanie Strickland‘s “Slipping Glimpse” uses an algorithm whereby text strings read the position of the pointer over a video of flowing water, which itself reads the text and responds.
After a lunch break, a second panel considered the international scene for electronic literature, and brought forth some eye-popping examples from communities where English is not the language of the discourse — but since a good deal of the “text” of electronic literature is audio or visual rather than linguistic, it’s possible for a reader to enjoy it even if he doesn’t understand all the words he sees and hears.
Kate Hayles‘s afternoon keynote was concerned to find a home for electronic literature within the academy, where too often “turf wars” between departments make supporting electronic literature, which is inherently interdisciplinary (not to mention expensive, because of the equipment and software it requires), a hard sell for many administrators. A more generous understanding of “the literary,” she proposed, might make adoption of courses and programs in reading and writing electronic literature easier to accomplish.
The subject of the final panel was the future of electronic literature, and again each panelist presented a vision utterly different from every other. But all seemed to agree there is more hope now than there was the last time such a symposium was held, at UCLA in 2002, six months after 9/11. Joe Tabbi, the founder and editor of the Electronic Book Review, proposed a practice of “all-over writing” that corresponds to the “all-over painting” practiced by the Abstract Expressionists. Ever the gadfly, Stuart Moulthrop advocated the enormous opportunity provided by such non-academic pursuits as gaming, mixing, and mashing up in other media; Emily Warn of the Poetry Foundation showed how the oldest poetry organization in the country created a Web 2.0 interactive poetry site; and Kate Hayles suggested that electronic literature would soon move out of the computer altogether, as inscribable environments such as Dene Grigar’s Rhapsody Room have already done.
At the end, everyone was exhausted but also energized, and as soon as I got home I sat down with my copy of the ELCv1 and got to work reading the latest electronic literature. It really is a brave new world.
