Click here to view the embedded video.

In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

Jason Nelson's Scrape Scraperteeth

All,

Excuse my long, long absence. But I’m back to play. I’m hoping we can re-energize this community of ours. So any ideas would be more than lovely. But first some news!

Brian Stefans has curated a series of Digital Poems/Fictions. One pagers he calls them for the San Francisco Gallery of modern art. Many of the authors/writers/readers here are included.  So Explore below and do write some comments, so they know we are reading.

http://blog.sfmoma.org/authors/columnists/bstefans/

Send in the ideas to get NetPoetic running stronger!

cheers, Jason

Friday, May 6th 2011
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
FREE

Over the course of Spring semester, sixteen NYU students have engaged in intense electro-textual experiments: composing, mangling, generating and remixing electronic text using the Python programming language. For one night only, these students will gather to present and perform their experiments to the general public.

Some examples of projects that may make an appearance at the event: movie dialogue remixed in real time; dynamic newspaper blackout poetry; an endless exquisite corpse from Twitter search results; infinite generative creation myths; and much more.

Reading and Writing Electronic Text is a course offered at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/). The course is an introduction to both the Python programming language and contemporary techniques in electronic literature. See the syllabus and examples of student work here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/

More information online here: http://bit.ly/ghIunh

Jason Nelson notes:  This promises to be a very exciting development. Even if you don’t submit something, please do send them messages of support and congratulations. We need more literary Journals exploring the genre.

Call for Submissions of Digital Animation, Electronic Literature etc.

The Prairie Schooner literary journal and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, both of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, are developing a web site devoted to electronic literature. A spot in the pilot edition of the Prairie Schooner digital project is open. Artists, filmmakers, and/or programmers interested in submitting literary-inspired pieces for consideration should email their finished or near-finished, previously unpublished digital work (or links that provide access to the work) to Timothy Schaffert, Prairie Schooner Web Editor at tschaffert2@unl.edu. (Though we prefer that the project has not been featured on any other website, we will consider work you’ve published yourself on sites such as YouTube. With your submission, please provide information on the history of the piece.) You may also submit queries. You must secure rights for all material included in your multimedia submission, should we decide to include it. Submission period: Jan. 15, 2010 through March 15, 2011. (If your project is chosen it must be delivered in final form by April 15.)

The Prairie Schooner digital project goes live in fall 2011 at http://schooner.unl.edu

About Prairie Schooner digital:  This new site will feature pieces such as: collaborations between authors and visual/video artists, hypertext projects, and other literary multimedia artwork. Among the contributors are author and filmmaker Terese Svoboda and artist Tim Guthrie, along with various visual artists, animators and videographers. The project will also include an adaptation of stories from the Prairie Schooner archives: Eudora Welty’s “The Whistle” and Alice Hoffman’s “The Bear’s House.”

Sadly I’m sick again. Crap, damn, hell. And this time the consequences might be higher than a few weeks rest. Damnit. But blogish personal dribble aside. I’m eager to re-energize this community. I’ll be sending out an email later today, between naps, asking for ALL AUTHORS to post videos/photos of where they create/work/write/are inspired. But before then, I’d like to for authors (or readers) to post recent press about all things E-Lit/Net Art. This could be your work, others, the field in general etc.

So to start the process: some recent press:

Huffington Post Gallery of some of my odd digital poems.

An alarmingly critical, but happily poorly written slam of our entire field in the Australian newspaper

Chronicle of Higher Education article on the new ELO collection. (comment on this one!!)

Please do either send press to me, or post your own!

cheers, Jason Nelson

I’ve been working on a project based on my courses on electronic literature. I’ve been teaching it for over five years now, and am getting a sense of the texts that I use. However, I always feel like I’m building the class from the ground up every time, so I thought it would be cool to collect my materials into some sort of “anthology” to have on hand.

I also wanted to create a user-friendly, brief introduction to the field for people not in school, or who have no access to such a class. There are numerous places to find criticism and writing related to electronic literature, but they often contain such a huge amount of text that the newbie would not know where to start. Consequently, they are often very academic in discourse level, which is alienating to someone unfamiliar with the jargon.

This collection is intended to be for students, not my fellow artists and academics, but I hope there is something interesting to find in here for you as well. I’m sure we all have different approaches — for instance, I assign exercises in Scratch and Wix, which won’t be reflected in this list, and I tend to stay away from historical readings or computer science — and I’ve prowled several of your syllabi and websites in the creation of this list. So this can be seen as a continuing conversation.

This is a “freeware” anthology in that I only limited myself to works that were already available on the web. In a few cases, this might be in the form of bootlegs — sometimes it’s hard to tell what has been approved, since not everyone uses a Creative Commons license — but I limited myself to pieces that don’t require special privileges or subscription costs. (In one case, the essay works on my iPad but not laptop; in another, I thought it was freely available but it was not, but I’ve kept it in anyway since the author’s a friend of mine.)

I hope to edit a book to sell on Lulu for cost that will include primarily excerpts from the works, along with editorial glosses. The model is the “Documents in Contemporary Art” series, which are readable in a few days, as opposed to the often mammoth books on digital culture published by MIT (much as I like them).

The website that I am creating for this anthology will contain the essays in .pdf form (reset, since many of these pages are nearly illegible), a .pdf of the edited book with my editorial commentary, a page of videos I often use when teaching, a “ten week course” that is a series of essays, links and assignments based on my course, and other materials such as a bibliography, via Amazon’s “listmania” feature, of electronic literature books.

This is not a complete overview of the state of the field, or an attempt to create a “canon.” If the image here is skewed or flawed, it’s only because it’s meant to be a launching pad for an independent investigation of the genre, either as a scholar or artist. The fact of the matter is, there isn’t a whole lot of great writing on the works themselves — more of the e-lit writing is about its theory and potential — so I tried to include what I could. If you know of better deep readings of a particular e-literature piece, please let me know.

Inspired by the New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, this selection is a mixture of theoretical texts, creative works, manifestos, critical readings, interviews, Wikipedia articles, encyclopedia entries, lists, blog posts, and other miscellany. It only includes work that can be included in a book (or a .pdf). Any feedback you have is welcome!

Special issue on Archiving Digital literature

Announcing a special issue of the bi-lingual german-based journal “SPIEL” concerning archiving digital literature.

Electronic literature and E-Poetry is updated, interactive, subjective and well networked. But how durable is it? How long do texts published on web pages remain readable? What happens to the old issues if one visits a literature magazine “through the web”? How is a blog archived? Should texts that are deliberately published on the fleeting medium internet be conserved at all for the future?

It seems ironic that the transient character of the internet is attached to a medium that seems to be very suitable for documentation and archiving. And still each website only remains available on the internet at its original address for less than 100 days on average. Afterwards it moves or is erased completely. This is of course also the case for Net literature.  However, different genres turn the tables. These conceptions don’t even have the problems of archiving and musealization, but explicitly excluded them. The temporary and transience becomes the topic of literature.

In this special issue of the magazine SPIEL: “Siegener periodical for International Empirical Literature Study” new methods and objects of the archiving of Net Literature are presented with very different points of view being represented. In addition to theoretical articles on this topic’s specific problems, Net authors, Electronic literature authors, E-poets and institutes engaged in or familiar with archiving comment on this.

me talking crap

All,

I am damn sorry for having been away from NetPoetic.  Damn damn sorry.

So I figure it is time for a re-launch.  As part of the re-launch festivities or activities or really to get this site growing and glowing and flowing again, I think we should start with some question/answers play.

So starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting (and emailing) a question every two weeks. Then those on the list and those still reading or soon to read can answer the questions via a post.

Any ideas for questions are appreciated, and hopefully the best of these can be archived and maybe even collected somewhere, somehow.

cheers, Jason Nelson

File Prix Lux

All,

UPDATE: Joerg has mentioned that this same work is also getting an honorary mention at Ars Electronica. Holy crap….time to move to a new format. Again congratulations to Joerg and vote for him at File Prix

Our very own Joerg Pringer has been nominated for the File Prix in Brazil for his “ABCDE……” IPhone creation.

And you can VOTE FOR HIM here .

And explore the other nominees, some interesting and not-so-interesting work. And obviously Joerg should win.

And again……..VOTE FOR HIM here .