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Reading
Digital Literature: American-German
Conference
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Brown
University |
October
4 - 7, 2007 | Roberto_Simanowski
/at/ Brown [.] edu
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Jeremy
Ashkenas
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The ability to publish and
distribute otherwise unprintable
writing. The emergence of new
rhetorical forms.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
That a large amount of it is
concerned with reacting to Critical
Theory, as opposed to communicating
a message of its own.
Bio
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John
Cayley
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
Many aspects of digital literature
excite me: the programmabilty of the
sign itself; the recovery of time
for literary art; writing that is,
itself, time-based art; the
discovery of complex surfaces for
writing as inscription, writing in
literal space and time; literal
art.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
That literary values and strategies
of signification may be overwhelmed
by those of other media (typically
audiovisual media) before artists
have been made to fully realise - in
the context of digital media - that
poetics is the art of the symbolic
and that other media are also
subject to this fundamentally
literary practice.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
n-Cha(n)t by David Rokeby
(and his The Giver of Names);
Brian Kim Stefans Dreamlife of
Letters, Listening Post,
....
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Too many of these (here follows an
arbitrary scatter-shot):
poetry/poetic prose: Mac Low,
Retallack, Bergvall, Pastior,
Mathews, Kafka .... Art: Beuys,
Matisse, Horn, Turrell ... fluxus,
language, and poetical
formalism.
Bio
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George
Fifield
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The
aspect of digital literature and
digital art in general that excites
me is the growing sophistication of
the interactivity involved. Not all
digital literature is interactive
and not all interactive literature
is digital. But interactive digital
literature, shorn of the adornments
of multimedia, has been quite adept
at getting closer to the promise
that the reader's own subtleties of
personality have a direct effect on
the art.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
It's still on the computer. Not that
I'm a luddite, by any means, but I
would rather read a book in hand
than on a computer. I just don't
like the screen for text. The Sony
reader with its E Ink technology
seems to be headed in the right
direction, but it doesn't appear to
be programmable, so it isn't as yet
usable for digital
literature.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Galatea by Emily
Short
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
This is an impossible question as my
taste in both literature and the
visual arts is wide ranging and
inclusive. But here are a few works
of non-digital interactive art that
have given me pleasure. Felix
Gonzales-Torres, Untitled
(Portrait of Ross in L.A.) 1991;
Alfredo Jaar Playground,
1999, multiple works by Yoko Ono and
the traveling exhibition do
it, organized by Christian
Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier and
Hans-Urlich
Obrist.
Bio
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Chris
Funkhouser
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
Outrageous
cybertextual intertextuality in all
media
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
Laziness in performance and
preparation of works; didactic
poeticians
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Visual poem/collages by K.S. Ernst
and Amy Hufnagel, Internalational
Dictionary of Neologisms,
Arteroids, Intergrams,
V: Vniverse, The Speaking
Clock
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Ben Polsky’s hand-wrought
emanations of Newark in decay (see
http://benholli.com/sitesurveyindex.htm);
Nathaniel Mackey’s writing (in
all forms), Cecil Taylor on
piano
Bio
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Peter
Gendolla
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me most:
Once
upon a time literature was a forum
to reflect, discuss or review the
effects on the human body of what
McLuhan has called extensions of
men, media for instance. In the
digital age the extensions are
returning into the body, literally,
as reintegration of bio-electronic
media into the perception- or
neuronal-systems of the human body.
And again, digital literature is
reflecting the consequences of this
process…
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
The claptrap, razzle-dazzle of some
projects.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Until now: none. Nearing to a
favorite one: Wardrip-Fruin's
Screen.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Cervantes’ Don
Quichote
Bio
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Katherine
Hayles
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The challenge electronic literature
presents to reading, writing, and
understanding textuality; the
ability of electronic literature to
explore time-based production while
still maintaining the semantic
vocation of text; the fusion of
human and machine cognition that
inheres in the writing, storage,
transmission and reading of
electronic texts.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
Its always-looming obsolescence and
ephemerality; its lack of universal
access; its dependence on
monopolistic proprietary
software.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
John Cayley's Impositions,
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's
Listening Post, Stephanie
Strickland and Cynthia Jaramillo's
slippingglimpse, M. D.
Coverley's Egypt: The Book
of Coming Forth By
Day.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Mark
Danielewski's House of
Leaves, Richard Powers' The
Echo Maker, Steve McCaffrey's
Carnival, William Burroughs'
Naked Lunch.
Bio
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Daniel
Howe
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me most:
When
computation engages deeply with
language at multiple (transparent)
layers within a work; when the
'writing process' can be augmented
via digital/procedural processes;
when approaches to literary
production leverageprinciples of
emergent systems, when surprise
happens.
Bio
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Fotis
Jannidis
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The seamless merging of different
media + the
interactivity.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
It is getting old so fast. I cannot
imagine reading a contemporary piece
of hyperfiction or playing a modern
computer game in 50 years. Probably
we will only have movies of what is
now an immersive interactive
experience.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Deus Ex.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Mmh -
In arts I am not a monogamist. Even
on the smallest bookshelf you can
have Buddenbrooks next to
One Hundred Years of
Solitude, If On a Winter's
Night a Traveler next to
V., Hyperion and
Wallenstein on the top and
the Glass Key and
L.A.Confidential crammed into
the back, some poems rolled up too.
Looking around you would see a
Magritte, a Liebermann, 1,2,3 Max
Ernsts and probably more. And if
film is still a non-digital art
...
Bio
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Aya
Natalia Karpinska
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
Doing strange things with
text.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
Forcing our audience to sit hunched
in front of a computer screen,
alone, struggling to figure out a
new interface. Almost every work
invents a slightly new
interface!
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Paul Notzold,  TXTual
Healing,
Y-H Chang Heavy Industries
The
Struggle
Continues
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Kandinsky
Several
Circles,
Stravinsky Firebird
Bio
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Justin
Katko
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The ability to feed the work's
web-traffic into the work itself,
not interactivity but feedback
channels established to generate
minimal units of response.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
The dual emphases on interactivity
and visuality. The first tends to
aggrandize its representation of
democracy as a materialization of
such, and the second (as far as
poetry is concerned) tends to drown
out the music that makes language
lyrical.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Andrea Brady's Wildfire,
UBERMORGEN.COM's Google
Will Eat Itself
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Marcel
Duchamp's Anemic Cinema
(1926; film), Guy Debord's
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(1952; film)
Bio
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Thomas
Kniesche
- his
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The fact that literature is no
longer bound to the twenty-something
letters of the alphabet. By
incorporating other media, entire
realms of expression are opened up
to literature. "Reading" is no
longer what it used to be, a
basically imaginary or hallucinatory
activity that has always been the
entertainment of a privileged elite.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
The fact that literature is no
longer bound to the twenty-something
letters of the alphabet. The
incredibly complex activity known as
"reading" might suffer from the
encroachment of other media into
literature.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
I don't have one but I am very
interested in digital mystery texts,
such as
Spaetwinterhiteze.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister's Years of
Apprenticeship and Thomas Mann's
The Magic
Mountain.
Bio
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Rita
Raley
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
the surprise; wonder; the synthesis
of text, image, sound, performance
into a ‘total work of
art’; waiting for such a
synthesis
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
platform & browser
issues
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
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Work
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Innovation
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Technique
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Young-Hae
Chang, various
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A-
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B+
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John
Cayley, Overboard and
Translation
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A/A-
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A
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Olia
Lialina, My Boyfriend
Came Back From the
War
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B+
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A
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Ted
Warnell, Poems by Nari
(various)
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B+/B
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A
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Dan
Waber: Strings
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B+
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A-/B+
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Talan
Memmott: Lexia to
Perplexia
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A-/B+
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A
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Mark
Hansen and Ben Rubin:
Listening
Post
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A/A-
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A
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- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Lately
I find myself thinking about
Cloud Atlas;
Atonement; Never Let Me
Go; Waterland; The Sea;
William Trevor’s stories.
Now, Voyager will, I
suspect, always console and
disturb.
Bio
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Francisco
Ricardo
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
For me this points directly to its
future, to the possibility of its
malleable evolution into an
experience so entirely autonomous
that "literature" ceases to be
the more or less conventionally
associative term for it. In but a
few decades, we have already
witnessed variants on the emergence
of a forking path narrative, and of
late, the word has begun to converge
with nontextual media. One aspect of
the work that will not disappear is
its principal association with
"literacy" (as opposed to theatre,
orality, or other expressive modes),
but this constant supports a world
of such numerous contextualizations
-- temporality-morphing,
character-morphing, plot-morphing,
to name a few, that the notion of
story is itself eidetically enhanced
up toward something that it has
never before assumed. Adding to this
mix the final appearance of
distributed or social authoring
promises to yield up new authorial
practices and productions whose
motivations will probably be tied to
empirical acts (e.g., sports, social
enactments) and enable this art form
to transcend others both in
reflective and participatory power
simultaneously.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
Literature in any form is a
historically determined phenomenon,
gaining in impact and depth with the
passing of time. In fact the story
is the "content form" of literature,
and it stands in a diametrically
different kind of temporal relation
with the present than "media", which
is to say the "vehicle forms" of
literature. These are always of the
moment, and therefore progress only
by obsolescing each other. The
presence of both content and media
in a single creative platform
obviously speaks to a need for a
tenuous creative balance that has
not always been properly maintained.
When the ground of literature is
made subservient to the dynamism of
any media through which it is
experienced, the former suffers from
the same eventual obsolescence as
the latter. Obsolescence, a
criterion of media, ought never to
apply to a literary work; it never
did before.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Perhaps my preferred work is itself
a study of the genre itself. Raine
Koskimaa's Digital
Literature: From Text to Hypertext
and
Beyond
is the crispest prolegomenon to a
theoretical appreciation of every
other work of digital literature
that I have encountered.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
The entire oeuvre of Andrew
Neumann.
Bio
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Jörgen
Schäfer
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
In the Gutenberg era, literature has
always been a (highly abstract)
medium of identifying and working
through the effects of
socio-cultural change. I am
interested in how literature can
retain this quality in a digital
media environment.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
I am rather bothered by the
ignorance of many scholars and
readers who tend to compare every
piece of digital literature they
come across with classical
masterpieces.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Screen;
Jean-Luc Lamarque:
Pianographique; Michael
Mateas & Andrew Stern:
Façade.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
What a
difficult question! Well, let’s
try: My favorite books are Elias
Canetti’s autobiography in 3
volumes, Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz,
Grass’ The Tin Drum,
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s poetry
and Christoph Hein’s novels. I
admire the performances of German
comedian Gerhard Polt. My favorite
movies are Magnolia,
Babel and The Life of
Brian, and my favorite pop album
is Radiohead’s Kid A. As
regards visual arts, I am interested
in Dada, Pop Art and contemporary
photography.
Bio
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Roberto
Simanowski
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The migration of words into foreign
environments to experiment with
multi-layered, inter- and
trans-medial ways of expression as
seen in the past in concrete poetry
and painting with
letters.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
The hostility of those foreign
environments to the linguistic
expression of meaning. Digital
technology tends to cannibalize
language turning it into visual or
sonic objects, performance, or
sculpture. It does so to overcome
the authority of the word rather
than to inherit the qualities of the
'slaughtered'. The reason may be
jealousy or subconscious love.
However, the result is often
de-semantisation and a multi-medial
pidgin.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Listening Post is a
fascinating and conceptually complex
work at the border of literature and
sculpture or installation. I like
YATOO by Zeigenossen and
Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came
Home from the War.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Verlázquez' Las Meninas,
Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)
by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and
Heinrich Heine.
Bio
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Thomas
Swiss
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
Work done by multiple artists from
multiple "disciplines". And: Bi- or
trilingual works.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
and many others.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
At the moment? Well, even printed
books are digital (composed
digitally, printed the same) these
days, so I'll note some influential
songs/bands: Joy Division, The
Handsome Family, Animal Collective,
Beck.
Bio
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Patricia
Tomaszek
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me most:
I
like the way how texts become more
visual, the interplay of texts,
fonts, colors, moves, multi-medial
devices and the presentation on
screens excites me a lot!
Programming texts in a special way
can enhance the meaning of a
text.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me most:
The
lack of literature!
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Noah
Wardrip-Fruin's Screen, Olia
Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Home
from the War, works by Robert
Kendall.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Poems
by Robert Creeley; Rainer Maria
Rilke's Letters to a Young
Poet; Georg Weber's With time
life passes more quickly
(Piano); Hermann Hesse's
Demian; Jonathan
Safran-Foer's Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close; Peter Handke's
Selbstbezichtigung. Movie:
The Life Of Others (Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck)
Bio
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Mark
Tribe
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
The Internet's ability to bring
esoteric works of art (digital
literature included) to large and
sometimes diverse audiences never
ceases to impress me.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
It bothers me when cool technology
is used to prop up weak
writing.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Rob Wittig: The Fall of the Site
of Marsha
(1999).
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Yoko Ono: Map Piece
(1964).
Bio
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Karin
Wenz
- This
aspect of digital literature excites
me
most:
Most exciting for me is the
continuation of concepts coming from
Fluxus, Dadaism, Concrete Poetry but
also from programming languages
being realized in new interactive
environments.
- This
aspect of digital literature bothers
me
most:
The loss of concepts in favor of
performances, which connect easily
to remix cultures but end up in a
spectacle, losing depth and
coherence.
- My
favorite work of digital
literature:
Interpoesia by Azevedo
and Menenez, Listening Post
by Hansen and Rubin, Paranoid
Panopticum by Maat.
- My
favorite work of non-digital
art:
Literature: Italo Calvino, Arhundati
Roy, Haruki Murakami. Film: Akira
Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano
Bio
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