 Is that working? Look at all those phones and cameras. Hi. And I'm going to drop this here. So welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. And of course, in the beautiful Berkeley Institute for Data Science, thank you, Kevin Koi, for having us. And welcome. Welcome, everyone, also afar in the interwebs. Hi. Bienvenidos y bienvenidas. Before we start this interesting, very interesting colloquium, as curator and coordinator of the show, No Legacy Literatura Electronica, which we're celebrating today, I would like to give some special thank yous. And the list is long, so bear with me. First, for my fantastic team, it was a big team effort. My co-curator, Elica Ortega, who will speak to you in a minute, Claude Potts, our special curator for print objects, because No Legacy has 16 digital installations and 50-plus experimental print works. So go check it out. Stephanie Lee, our lead exhibition designer. Aisha Hamilton, our library exhibition design liaison. Caudi Hennessy, coordinator for digital works. Cristina Sa, consultant for Portuguese. And I hope she's in Porto looking at us. David Wong, lead for computer infrastructure support, as well as the many, many students from the BCNM and new media studies that have helped us with the design of the show. Grace, Keenan, Deira Marin, Michael, Anna, Madeleine, Ningu, Yipu, Alexandra, and our student docent, Sam Honeycutt. Of course, nothing could have been done without the support of our generous sponsors. So big, big thanks, the Gorazón, too, and again, long list. The University Library, thanks Eric Mitchell, Beth DuPois, Boroso, Sujik Johal, Jeffrey Johnson, and Kate Tasker from the bankruptcy, so thank you, bankruptcy. The Berkeley Center for New Media, thank you, Greg Niemeyer and Lara. The Hellman Foundation, the Spanish and Portuguese Department, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the College of Letters and Science, special thank you to our dean, Tony Cascardi. The Digital Humanities at Berkeley, thanks Laulia Bonvacano. The European Institute of European Studies, thanks so much, Jerome DeWolf. The Portuguese Studies Program, the Center for Latin American Studies, our friends in the fabrication shops at the College of Environmental Design, the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas, and many, many more that have helped us throughout. We couldn't have done it without you. I also would like to remind you that as part of today's opening and after these roundtable discussions in the morning at 5.30 in the Morrison Library, which is right across the hall, we will have two readings by two of our showcase artists in the show, Amaranth Borsuk and Dominico Chappe. So please check that out. Come and join us for a tour of the exhibit and a glass of wine or two. So without further delay, I would like to introduce our first panel or roundtable discussion, Electronic Literature, History, Archaeology, Artifacts, with Dini Grigar, Roberto Cruz-Arzabal, and Elica Ortega. Elica will be double-deeping today as speaker and moderator. We're very efficient here. So I'll introduce her first and then she'll move on. Apart from being co-curator of the show with me, Elica is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Digital Research at the University of Kansas, where she teaches courses on digital humanities. She writes about digital literature, not necessarily digital media, intermediality, materiality, reading practices and interfaces, books, networks, and multilingualism in academia. She co-directs the DH seminar at the Hall Center for the Humanities at KU. She's part of the executive committee of Global Outlook Digital Humanities and executive council officer for the Association of Computers in the Humanities. She also writes for Red HD and Deon. And I guess I've been talking forever now, so I'll leave it to her to present the rest of our speakers. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for the introduction, Alex. I wanna echo all of the thank yous that you've already done. This has been really an amazing couple of years of planning and working through the exhibit and none of it would have been possible without the bigger and smaller and all-size contributions that everybody has done. Thank you so much to all our guests, too, for agreeing to come here. We're really thrilled to have you here. As Alex said, our first round table is going to be dealing on history, archeology, and artifacts. Basically, at the exhibit, we have two conceptual threads and one has to do with the materiality of the works and the other one has to do with transnational and translinguistic and trans... What's the other approach? Translingu... The other title? Transatlantic, yes. Thank you very much. So the first one we'll deal with with the history, archeology, and artifacts. And I am really, really honored to present Dini Grigar, as one of our speakers here. She is a professor and director of the Creative Media and Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. Her research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of electronic literature. She has authored 14 media works such as Curly 2014, A Village Yourself, 2011, the 24-hour micro-elit project, 2009, When Ghosts Will Die, 2008, and Follow Field, a story in two parts in 2005, as well as 52 scholarly articles. She also curates exhibits of electronic literature and media art, mounting shows at the Library of Congress, and for the International Symposium on Electronic Art and the Modern Languages Association, among other venues. With Stuart Mountrop, professor of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, she is the recipient of a 2013 NEH startup grant for a digital preservation project for early electronic literature that culminated into an open-source multimedia book for scholars entitled Pathfinders, and a book of criticism entitled Traverse Souls. So, keep an eye out for those. Our second speaker after is going to be Roberto Cruz Arzaval. He is a PhD candidate in comparative literature and an acting professor in the Hispanic Literature Department in the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. He's also a widely published literary critic in Mexico. He's interested in the relations between literature and other arts, media-specific analysis of literary texts, digital literature, materiality, and contemporary poetry. He is a founding member of GEOM, the Laboratory of Extended Literature and Other Materialities, which started in 2013. So, I don't want to talk too much. I'd rather hear what you guys have to say, but I do have a little bit of, I want to begin, and I want to tell the story of how the project came to be. This goes back to June 2013, one of these wonderful weeks in June, in Victoria, when Alex and I were taking the electronic literature course that Sandy, Dini, here, as well as Margie Loosbrink and Davin Heckman were teaching for the first time at the HSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. The course was basically one day dedicated to the history and theory of electronic literature, another day to the criticism, to the teaching, and faithfully, there was one session, one of the exercises was dedicated to curating and planning and exhibit from the selection of the works to the planning process, the floor plan, and so on. And this is how No Legacy came to be. And even though the project has changed so much, we can still, even some of the selection of the works, we can still trace it back to that week in June. And by the way, so the courses are taking place again this year, just saying in case you are interested for it. As I was saying before, No Legacy, the Atura Electronica gathers two argumentative lines, two approximations to elite production. On the one hand, a transatlantic, transnational, and translinguistic approach to bring together works in Spanish, English, and Portuguese produced all over the world, the subject of the second table. On the other hand, the topic of this round table, the material or archeological view of elite, of elite, sorry, vis-a-vis the historical one. We take as our starting point Siegfried Cielinski's proposal of media, I'm quoting, as a space for action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated, end of quote. No Legacy aims to be such a space made up of the physical space of the gallery, right outside the source, and a metaphorical space, a thinking tool to create new connections among the works both print and electronic. In No Legacy, we aim to unfasten the ideas of influence and the passage from one literary movement or period to another, to of the basis of literary history, to propose instead a literary archeology where material strata exists in overlap and juxtaposition. This is not to discount the value of the other kinds of studies, but an attempt to uncover other kinds of connections among the works as they deal with their materialities, their temporalities, and their overall conceptualizations. As Craig Gorkin says, no single medium can be apprehended in isolation. Moreover, media, always necessarily multiple, only becomes legible in social context because they are not things but rather activities. The exhibit thus is also one of these activities. Similarly, the principle of juxtaposition that crosses the whole of the exhibit also aims to bring, also aims to blur geographies and languages that are already hard to pinpoint, more on that soon. Admittedly, this has not an easy undertaking. Many of the objects in the exhibit collection fall under and have been studied by us even, or by everybody really, following categories like avant-garde, post-avant-garde, magic realism, post-digital, and so on. The weight of a figure like Jorge Luis Borges is almost impossible to avoid. Undeniably, all of the works in the exhibit are products of their time and speak to one another. They all bear those marks. Nevertheless, no legacy as a space of action gathers the temporalities of the works circumscribed to the time space of us in the gallery. In this way, we reframe the works out of their traditions and their times in order to connect them through these continuous relationships of analogy, tension, and coincidence. Though these kinds of relationships might appear idiosyncratic when put against systematic orderings of literature, they are revelatory of aesthetic and philosophical concerns traversing or notions of the literary. Think about Carlos O'Kendo de Amad's Cinco Metros de Poemas and J.R. Carpenter's Ethereic Ocean proposing a horizontal reading scrolling. Then, think about how Ethereic Ocean's simultaneous voices of the ocean resonate with the multiple voices in Octavio Paz's Blanco. Consider how Jor Piringer's Alphabetic Peace re-toreses Poemas Nomayoto Camino, Belengaches' Poema de Agua, and Guillermo de Torres Girandula make our eyes, head, and hands thrilled in order to read them. Be fascinated by the various ways in which David Herms and Jim Andrews put the infinite into practice. As a physical space, No Legacy is an intervention of the library setting and of the place of electronic literature in it. We move away from a computer or media lab, the art or museum gallery, and the classroom in order to both claim the library as a place for electronic literature and to bring the works in close proximity of the traditions from which we seek to disconnect them and reconnect them back again. The wood displays, beautifully created by Stephanie Lee and her design team, play along the ideas of operability and interoperability of the digital media. The raw and organic feel is the backdrop to displace them from the slickness of digital media. The exhibit intends, aims to encourage visitors to draw their own connections. Located in the heart of the library, we ask visitors to reflect on the place of electronic literature within or without the always amorphous notion of the literary. We purposefully avoid references to literary movements, hoping to set the ground for them to look at coincidences based on the works' materialities. As you will see, the works are put together according to the ways in which they enact or put into practice the idea of endlessness and labyrinth, discontinuous time, the life of the typographic characters and the back and forth of page, screen and page. And without further ado, I would like to need to talk now. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here and I thank all of you for coming on this spring morning. I'm not used to raining in California, so this is a surprise. I'm from Portland, Oregon area where it rains all the time. My students thought I was going on vacation today. I've been riding to them about the rain, so, but thank you so much. And it's an amazing, I've been curating electronic literature for a long time. And this is probably the most beautiful show, well thought out show, conceptualized show I've ever seen. So I want to congratulate both curators. And I can tell you, I know the kind of work that it takes to even just think about the pieces you're selecting, much less fabricating all of the materials to go with this beautiful organic look that has been brought to this work. So it's just absolutely stunning. So Stephanie, your group has just done a great job. So thank you so much. My job today, I think, is to talk about, to tease you a little bit about the notion of legacy. And so the title of my presentation, I'm not really going to read your paper. I'm just gonna talk through some ideas with you. And that is, yes, Elid has a legacy, et in a legacy, right? So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that. And I want to start with just the definition of electronic literature. I think a lot of you had a chance to walk through the exhibit briefly. I mean, you've not had a chance to study it. It takes some time to work through the pieces and understand it. But I thought I'd start by just giving you an explanation if you've not encountered electronic literature before to tell you what it is, right? There's a lot of definitions and even the board members squabble about what we're going to call it, essentially. But most of us agree that it's born digital literature. It's work that's meant to be experienced through a computing device of some sort, right? That's at the heart of what we are talking about. And it's in a really interesting form because most of us see it as a natural outgrowth of literary experimentation that's been taking place for thousands of years. I'm a Greek scholar by training, so I can say this with some authority that print literature has been around for 500 years, but there was a whole legacy before that that print literature innovated, right? So I'm a Homeric scholar and I just imagine when I was a graduate student what Homer might have said, or the Homeric poet, her or him, might have said when he or she saw the work printed on, written on paper because that was an innovation. And I imagine scholars might have had a heart attack about that, right? The oral scholars. So what we're doing with electronic literature is very much coming out of that desire to innovate. This is a new medium. This thing we've got here that's not going away. It's not a fad, it's not a trend, it's here. So artists for a long time, for 40 years or more, have been playing. As long as there's been computing devices, people have been playing with this to make art, right? That's at the heart of what's interesting I think for me as a scholar. So it's a natural outgrowth and so it really does align well with the digital humanities, electronic literature organization is the organization I represent, DHSI, where we teach this material. There's a natural outgrowth. I also have curated shows that I say. So those of you who are artists might be familiar with International Composium on Electronic Art. We're aligned with them, with the International Digital Media and Arts Association. There's a lot of places that we play with. And library people usually love us because we love libraries. Just to show you some examples, this is just some, just for examples of thousands of works that exist around the world, right? So we see that it's coming to us in forms of mobile. So this is Fine Sonnet by LA artist, Jody Zellin. We have what we call Flash or Kinetic Poetry narrative. This is Samsung by Young High Chang Heavy Industries, a Korean-French team that have produced some award-winning works that have sometimes been shown as net art, sometimes crossing over to electronic literature. We all claim them, because we like it so much. And then The Early Works by Shelly Jackson. Here's Afternoon of Story, Stuart Malthrup, whose work is portrayed out and displayed out in the exhibit. These are works that are hypertext literature, hypertext narratives, poetry, you probably might have heard those terms. They're, what's astounding to me, I've been involved in electronic literature since 1991, essentially. I studied with Stuart Malthrup, now wife, Nancy Kaplan. And I was introduced to Stuart, Michael Joyce, and that whole group. When I was a graduate student, I began collecting their work and meeting them and seeing them at conferences. And what's interesting is that through these years of seeing the electronic literature organization take shape under the supervision of Kate Hales, Margie Lucenbrink, and folks like that, this spring alone, we have three major exhibits in the world of electronic literature. This is a zeitgeist. I mean, it's a time when it's just exploding. We have graduate students writing dissertations on this. We have so many, I mean, we're trying to count the books this morning at breakfast. There's so many books. We have an ELO prize that we're giving out now for the best literary work and the best scholarship. The field is on fire. And these are three shows, one that took place, just taking place now in Barcelona, one that is taking place at Rutgers, and the one here. These are three major exhibits that compliment the many that have been taking place for the last 15, 20 years. The work I've been doing is to document this work because as you know, when you walk around and you look at art, somebody's got to make sure that stuff lasts for generations to be able to talk about it. As a Homeric scholar, it's nice to have Homer in writing so that we can indeed have Homer. If it was left to oral culture, we would not have much left of Homer's Odyssey or Iliad. So someone's got to document this work. So that's the work that Stuart, who's here on this side, the bottom right, and I've been doing with our Pathfinder's project. So there's lots of projects that have been taking place, a whole legacy of projects that Leo is going to be talking about today, Sandy's going to be talking about. There's so much taking place right now that it's exciting to be part of this area of study. This is a shot from my, I have 200 works of electronic literature in my private collection. I've been collecting since I was a graduate student. This is the cabinet that contains them. I'm now working to put them in fireproof containers so that they will last longer than in a wooden case. This is the lab that it sits in. There's labs popping up all over the United States that are there to experience the work, works that are obsolete on traditional, now current computer systems. And this is my lab. It's called the Electronic Literature Lab. I have 47 Macintoshes dating back to 1977. I have every system platform that is needed to read the works that exist that I know about. And there are other labs as well. This is Laurie Emerson's Media Archaeology Lab at UC Boulder. And she's looking at a lot of different hardware, but she is also collecting electronic literature as well. There's a lab at Smith at the University of Maryland and they're collecting Dina Larson's work and Bill Bly's work at the Duke Library at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript. They're collecting all the papers for Judy Malloy, Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall and Nez Brees, which is a very exciting thing. And at Harry Ransom, they've got Michael Joyce's papers. At Stanford, they have Judy Malloy's papers there as well. There's a lot of her materials that they've got and MoMA collects Judy Malloy's work, her art pieces, which I think are interesting to think about, which brings me to the topic of how things develop, right? So quickly I just, as one example, and I use Judy Malloy because she is a Bay Area artist and she had spent time in Berkeley. So she's your native daughter, so to speak. And I like that native daughter. And this is one work by her called Uncle Roger that began in 1986 as a serial novel for the net. So how many of you know the well? Heard of the well? She delivered this over the well a few episodes a night from December 29th of 1986 to January 30th, 1987. And then they asked her to create the well folks, asked her to create an interactive narrative, which worked as a database. And then that developed during about the same time she was delivering the serial novel. Then she created a box version for exhibits, which I have one of five copies that's left in the world, which is exciting to have. She created then a PC version because a lot of folks in this period of 1988 were jumping over to PCs and away from Apple products. Then she created in 1995 a web version and then she's got a DOS box emulator that's available now that you could experience, kind of the experience of the 1980s. So it has the sounds of the computer roaring and the beeping and the beeping and all that stuff that happened with the early computers. I wanted you to see this to see the morph, the way it has morphed through time. And then just to finish this up, she had produced a version that was an analog version. This speaks to the crossover between the fine art practice and the literary writing that she did. So many of us, you know, Ambrose is an example of this that come out of this kind of, I want to call hybrid experience of fine art practice and a keen creative writing sensibility, bringing those two elements together to create works like this. And this is Uncle Roger that's this piece here in analog form as a card catalog. She created a whole variety of these starting in 1979. And these are documented at the Duke Library. Here's another one from 1980, 1985. And then we get Uncle Roger in 1986 on the computer. So the leap was not so much of a leap across a major gap. It was a nice kind of methodical move to the medium. I want to end by just mentioning a couple of interesting things to think about as scholars, right? I'm always interested when I work with postdocs and graduate students, you know, the kind of methodologies and theories that we use in this field. And it's really a combination of traditional humanities, which is what I was trained in originally, and this DH kind of theories and practices and methods. And I have been listed here, some of them listed here, textual analysis, which I used with my study of Homer's texts, which I used in the study of Judy Malloy's texts. There's an image from one of the notebooks that I got when I was at the Liechtenstein. Media specific analysis, looking at something like this and understanding the affordances of that medium and what the artist could do with it. Because that's where real genius comes in, right? How you can really play with the affordances and the constraints. Close and deep reading practices. Platform code studies and then translation studies, which I'm also trained in. So those are just some of the theories and methods. So this field has taken hold, it's spread across the world. We have an electronic literature or organization meeting this coming summer. And we have 250 people coming to this conference and festival. And every continent is represented, except Antarctica. So that's my next place I'm gonna go is Antarctica and get some scientists there. But every, we have something like 27 countries coming to this conference, to give papers and to show art in this field. So it's an exciting time and it's an amazing show to bring into the history and the legacy of our field. I wanna thank you all for having me here and letting me talk for a second. I'm gonna, just one more thing I wanna say. This came this morning at 6.30 from Joe Tabby. We're so close to having an integration into disciplinary practices, administrative needs. We also now have a credentialing document that has gone through the MLA and has essentially been blessed that we're using now to give to departments for helping people get tenure and promotion in the field. So this has been worked on for about a year. This came this morning just in time for this talk. So I wanna thank you all for having me. Good day, thank you. It's a great honor to me to be here with Alex and Podelica and everyone else. And it's such an honor. And I'm going to read some notes on the intersection between archive and materiality. These are some notes I was thinking days ago and because my English is not so good to improvise, I prefer to read this one. I hope so now to take many, many time. One, an object meets another object. Well, I have to say that I'm also a writer and essay. So this is an intersection between academia and creative writing and so on. One, an object meets another object. It doesn't touch it, but intersects it. The encounter is more than just the contact between surface. One integrates and the other, their structures collapse. It may create rings or not, but indeed it creates a new structure, an heterogeneous and flexible one. Wine, point one. These objects are real, but in material. They are cultural objects. If we understand culture as the social act of creating common images. Because of that, they are an effect of the social form and at the same time, determine it. What I call objects were called discourse by some theorists of the last century, like Michel Foucault. It isn't more than an analogy, but a productive one. Gender and social class are example of these subjects. Some of them form subjects, and others form things and texts. Two, the materiality of literary texts is a kind of cultural object. According to Catherine Hales, we shall define materiality as the physical interaction that occurs between humans and technology and the multi-layer histories that lie within any technology of communication. For example, the materiality of a work of elite is not just the intermedial texts, nor the machine in which exists, nor the code, or the reader, but the interplay of all of them, of all of them displayed in time and space. Three, following Derrida and his classic archive fever, every archive needs for existence a consignation and a domiciliation. The first one determines that what constitutes the archive, the second one that limits what remains outside and inside of the archive. So, the archive has an origin, a double one, dynamic around itself. 3.1. Usually, literary texts are part of an archive, that in the past has been called literary tradition. The consignation of some texts is the field of dispute of the literary history and the criticism. 3.2. In the field of art, the museum plays the role of a consignation and preservation of the archive. It makes architecture its domain. In the field of literature, this is the role of the library. 4. The library is the result of the intersection between materiality and archive of literary texts. It is a cultural object whose structure keeps and generates the interplay that forms materiality. At the same time, it consigns and domicilates inside it. 5. The relationship between archive and materiality in electronic literature is paradoxical. Despite the fact that materiality includes both literary texts and the machines that generate them, the inherent properties of the technology don't allow it to be consignated into the archive. In other occasions, nevertheless, those properties demand the consignation under the form of a domain. 5.1. The electronic literature collection is an archive that consigns a certain number of relevant works of electronic literature. In doing so, creates a double domiciliation. The works are drawn individually in the webpage of ELO, and are made visible as a whole for the visitor. The archive consigns individuals, but domicilates a type. 5.2. B.P. Nichols' first screening poem were created in a computer that doesn't exist anymore, in a programming language that is not recognized by any other machine. The historic and aesthetic importance demand to be consigned in the archive, but their materiality doesn't allow it. Jim Andrews worked in the recovery of the poems, consigning the work into two domains, an emulator that gives us the chance to watch it and play it with the poems and a video that documents them. 5.3. In the labs mentioned by Dean, several teams preserve the renaimates and renaimates of and obsolete technologies. Because of that, some of the works of elite can be played in their original languages, I mean in their original codes. Those labs are not an archive. Reserves, but it doesn't immobilize. It is the domain of a new archive and restitutes the domains of original archives. 6. The aim of the archeology, as we learned it from Foucault, is not the pursuit of an origin nor a totality, but of a path. The political economy of the practices and the knowledge is what constitutes the arché. In the archeology of the electronic literature, nevertheless, we need that the arché remains in the material artifact. In so far, this isn't enough, we need to reanimate it. 6.1. In the study of the hypopnesis, Bernard Stiegler says that we exteriorize even more cognitive functions in contemporary nemotechnical equipment. In doing so, we extend the institutive materiality of the archive, we consign the expression in a machine. 6.2. In this time, this exhibition operates as a nemotechnic apparatus. The library is not just the domain, but the agent of domiciliation. 6.3. An exhibition says, George D.D. Uberman can be a delucian war machine. 6.4. Materiality becomes the war machine against the archive. The archive becomes the war machine against materiality. The exhibition, this exhibition without legacy, will become the consignation of both. So I think we have about five minutes for questions. If anybody would like to start, or... Excuse me? Oh, yes, yeah, I will. Anybody? You'd like to, in 12 minutes, use a trigger that's not immobilized. Nothing seems to be part of what this exhibition is doing, and I wondered if maybe you'd like to say something about the way this is tried to obey that and maybe be male, so in your exhibition, and the way that that works in your tutorial practice. Thank you so much. Beautiful. Somebody else, oh my God. So the question was how to achieve the archiving of the pieces without immobilizing it and what the approaches that we've taken for the exhibit are, as well as Indini's practice in her lab and her exhibitions. So what I can say here is for the exhibit at the beginning, and again, this is a project that has been unfolding for two years. There's been many changes. So originally, we wanted to show the pieces in the computers that had been created originally, and I guess as closely as to an original as we could. Over time, we realized that the challenges to do that were many. And in many cases, in many cases, it was just impossible to do it, and even to find out what that original was. That was an interesting conceptual kind of thinking to do as well. So in that sense, I guess the approach was a little bit looking into how they have been reinvented, how they have been relocated or re-enacted into different platforms and potentialities depending on the machines that we have that we had available for the exhibit. And then from then on, when putting them together, just thinking of how they would speak to each other within the space of the exhibit. So moving a little bit away of looking into the piece itself and how it was going to live on its own, what its own life was, and what its life could be in the exhibit with the other, next to the other pieces. So I guess that was the more fluid kind of approach that we ended up taking. Yeah, so. So I teach curating, and I'm teaching, of course, this semester in curating. And so we use, I don't know if you've heard of Vince Deacon, but he's one of my favorite curators. And he has a theory about multimedial curation, and that is looking at works as a site of likeness. Works are participatory, I call it PI, participatory, interactive, and experiential. So if you come to looking at works, especially works that are dynamic like electronic literature, the works themselves are alive. And you put them next to each other and they feed off each other and produce a new kind of entity. So there's this energy that happens in curating works of electronic literature. I've also curated print-based works and paintings. So I come from a training of curation for traditional art. So there is a difference when you produce this kind of exhibit than when you produce a traditional painting fine art exhibit. The second thing I'll mention is one of my other favorite curators is Hans Ulrich Ubrisk, who talks about art as experiences. And if we think of art, not as objects, but as experiences, it changes the way you handle them. So even with something like the Pathfinder's Project where we're archiving and documenting those works, we treat the works as open spaces. We have the authors perform their works on video and then we capture those videos for the book. And then we have readers come in and perform the readings and we have those along with the author's readings. So that's just one series of readings by three different people giving different perspectives with the idea that that's just three of so many possibilities. That's different than saying, here's a DOS box simulator, here's Uncle Roger, this is it, because it's not it, right? It's not it. Thank you, Tini. Yes, that's a really good question. And I guess the best example to take is Victory Garden. We had Victory Garden, a small maltrowse piece, in the library collection as a floppy disk, the original from 1992, and we were delighted to have it again because we had this impulse to do it as close to the original as possible, to a first edition, let's say, to do it, which was more in tune with the idea of a bibliographical kind of exhibit. Then we realized that there was no single computer on campus that could read it. And that prompted us to not only look into machines that could read it, but also talk to the people in the digital archiving lab, is it a lab? Yes, yeah, in the bankrupt library. So that was a great, I mean, that was a great problem to have because it allowed us to partner with people who are at the forefront of the issue of preservation and rescuing those materials looked in their platforms. Still, so we were hoping to get another, still a vintage machine to read it, which we couldn't get in the end. So we had to go through emulation and having a virtual machine running in the end to read it. So it's been, it's a big matter of trade-offs really. So in the end, it boils down to what are we more interested in making, like bring it to life somehow or bring it to life as it was supposed, I guess kind of mummified in a way, the way it was supposed to be. So I guess that is, I mean, the decisions are very specific to each one of the pieces. And also by, I guess by being a little bit more flexible as to what they would look in the end, has allowed us to bring them to life in a different way. So Ana Maria Rives and Ipoemas too, which are small gifts, gift files, are going to be living in a completely different medium, which you'll be able to see later today. But just thinking about the scale of the works and how they go in tune with the smaller scale devices that we have currently as well. Thank you. I should repeat the question, right? What is the role of the visitor in an exhibition? Would you like to begin with Ana Maria Rives? Well, I think it's a complex role because of course the visitor activates the machines and plays with the objects, with the works, but also it can make relation that are not obvious in the space. When I was visiting the exhibit, for example, it's very interesting to see that electronic objects are alive, artifacts, which I can play with them. But the books, I cannot. The books are, yes, it's very ironic, it's very paradoxical, but it's very interesting because I can see the book as an object and related with other books as in the Barburg Atlas, but and then I can go to the electronic devices and play with them with the imaginary of the book and doing so. So the visitor is an activate, it's like a play master, like something that have to play with the objects and the time and the space and all the complex thing besides the decisions of the curator. We talk in terms of architectronics and that kind of worldview of curating, there's four things you have to think about. The space, what you have to work with, the curator's vision of what that shows going to look like, what message it's going to have. There's also the objects themselves, the experience of the works, and then the visitors. You have to design for them as well and all four of those components have to work together. So curating is not just curating the objects, it's curating the experiences but also curating the space, people that come into the space and even curating your own vision. Because when I start a show I have a thousand different ideas. I've got to put that into some sort of order, else there's no show that makes any sense. So you're curating your own thoughts as well. So that's, there's four components in any kind of work you do. Thank you, Denny. Kelly. So you're curating electronic literature sort of the traditional humanities but also this electronic literature in general into those institutional spaces, what kind of contribution to that type of international? Would you like to start? You start? I start? Okay, I will. Then Alex can pitch in as well, yes. So the question is why have electronic literature in the library basically? So we do see it as an intervention precisely because of the kinds of experience that we have with electronic literature really not having a place to live in the library as the Victory Garden example showed. I mean, the object was living in the library but there was no way to access it anywhere in the library or in campus for that matter. So how do we bring back the idea of the literary that so traditionally and for such a long time has lived and really inhabited and filled the space of libraries and how does electronic literature move has kind of moved outside of that because of the environment that it requires and the infrastructures that it requires. So how do we bring all of those things back? And this is a question that has always been that has always been also at the center of digital humanities approaches. How do you bring the humanities back into the library when what you need is a different kind of space that does not necessarily obey the architecture? And I mean, the architecture in really broad terms like the building, the spaces of the library, the power potentialities of the library too, and so on. So in that sense, we're intervening the space of the library, I guess, physically to us in the sense of bringing more power, moving the furniture, bringing new furniture in that holds not just books or not at all books for that matter. But definitely the idea is to make that connection that to trace that line in between the idea of the literary that has always existed in the library and to bring it to electronic literature. But also back again, as Roberto was mentioning before, like how do we approach these objects of books once we've been reading electronic literature too? And more conceptually, again, just thinking about what is a library in the 21st century? What kind of materials does it hold? What kind of activities does it invite? And what kind of infrastructures it facilitates for the kind of scholarship and the kind of cultural production that is going to be preserved and contained in the libraries currently? My friend Nancy Testman, who was a head of all the libraries in Vancouver just retired, but I heard her speak about it about two years ago before she retired. And one of the things she said was that in her perspective, the new library was a library not about books, but about information. And anything that required information, any medium that held information was fair game for her library system. And I liked that because that meant that electronic literature fit nicely in the Vancouver libraries. And we did mount a show there for them. The second thing I'll mention is that the thing I like about electronic literature, I like about curating electronic literature more than media art, is that electronic literature, we embrace the notion of computation. It sits at the heart of what we do. We're not embarrassed about it. We're not ashamed of it. We lay it bare for all of you to see. We don't hide the computers. We may enhance them in a show like this, but we're not embarrassed of the wires and the cables and all of the mucky stuff that happens with computing. It's part of its beauty. And so I think from that perspective, that makes a difference in how we handle these objects. And because it is information, it sits in a library beautifully. So the two are so interwoven. That's why I do think the natural habitat for electronic literature is a library sit at setting. Yeah, it's very interesting also that an exhibit like this in a library is also an intervention, not only in the space, but also in time. Because we can extend the leave of the books and the leave of the electronic literature to the past. We have like one century of Hispanic experimental literature from the first one, avant-garde, and the late work of Eugenio Tiseli, for example. And it's very interesting because we can see that century of Hispanic experimentalism in all the media. So it's like an archaeology for the future. It's creating a new time from a physical space. And I think that it's a very interesting intersection. Thank you, Roberto. Sandy. I'm pulling up on what Roberto just said about an archaeology to see if there's a library sit at this place. And I think we're using the language of intervention and how there's a library here in the way that it's done. And I mean that also in sort of depth, because it's sort of a cybernetic country. My question is, clearly, we want to be in a position to see whether we are scholars such as the non-concepts and trying to really get to our work. What do we imagine a different kind of library where we really want to teach the language of intervention with the language of time crisis and being on the edge? Do we write that? Do you do our answers? So the question is, what is the use of using the language of intervention and being on the edge of, yeah, do we want to move past that? One of you would like to begin? I just think it's, I don't think of it as intervention. I think it is a natural habitat. So I'm more, I think the show is so organic because it's using wood anyway. So there's this natural kind of form that the electronic literature is taking here to represent the notion that it is a seamless connection between the library's early mission and its mission today as a site of community, of information, flow, and access. Thank you, Dini. Roberta? Yeah, well, I use the term intervention. Yes, it's a warm language also. But I think it's part of the paradox of the electronic literature, of the literature in general. Yes, the library is a common space, is a space for preservation, but also can be a space for agitation. And I think we can put in that in front of our exhibits. It's not the only one. It's not the only thing that we can do. Of course, we have to preserve, but also I think we can agitate and we can move forward and move in the inner of the spaces. That's sort of. And really what I could pitch in is the intervention, it's been more as the struggle that we've been going through imagining what it would be like. And also coming back to Alex's question with the visitors, how are we going to, just thinking through how the exhibit layout was going to work with all the people walking through the whole, all day long, pretty much. So it is an intervention because we hope it will make people stop for a bit, play with the works, make their own connections, as I was saying before. But it's true. I mean, I also think it's their natural space, but does everybody think it's their natural space? And what kind of reforms in architecture, in facilities, and in thinking are going to be necessary for that to be really, I guess, the standard? I'll mention something about being here. We're in this beautiful space that's the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. And last February, last year, I did a curation course in London. And one of the places that we visited was the Open Data Institute, ODI, which is, if you've never visited, it's an amazing place. But they have in the space, in the space very much like this, installations of media art throughout the entire office space, which I thought was just an amazing concept. And I asked them, point blank, why do you have art next to your desk? Why is that there? And their response was, this is information. We're information. We're interested in data. This is beautiful data. This is sublime data. And we want to promote that. We want to embrace it. And I just thought that was an amazing concept. So here we are today, electronic literature in this environment. It's natural here too, right? It's become natural anymore. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, but I'm happy to talk some more later. Thank you so much everybody. We're going to take like five minutes to reorganize for the next panel. And thank you so much to Roberto and to Dini. And thank you all for coming and braving the rain. We're really excited to have you all here. Thank you so much. Hello everyone. I think we're going to start with our second panel. Thank you so much again to everybody for being here. And right now it is my absolute pleasure to introduce, she already introduced herself and she requires fairly any introductions. My wonderful, wonderful co-curator and really dear friend, Alexandra Saoan-Pasquale. She's the official introduction. She's an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches contemporary Spanish literature and culture 20th and 21st centuries and electronic literature in digital humanities. She's also part of the executive committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her work explores the intersection between literature and other technologies and has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States. In the Journal of Spanish and Cultural Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, letras hispanas and caracteres, estudios culturales y críticos de la esfera digital, among others. And thank you, Alex, so much for doing all of the work and I'll just give you the mic now. Okay. I think the best way to do it will be to also introduce my colleagues here and then maybe more naturally go into my conversation. So I'm very happy to be able to share this roundtable today here with, I'm going to say also my friend, Sandy Baldwin and Leo Flores. Sandy Baldwin is associate professor of English and for faculty and digital humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He's author and editor of 11 books, including the Internet Unconscious, winner of the 2015 Catherine Hile's Prize for Criticism. He's vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization and he is managing editor of the Electronic Book Review, one of the oldest online peer-reviewed journals of criticism and editor-in-chief of the Computing Literary Book Series, the only academic book series focused on scholarship on electronic literature. He's currently, his current artwork primarily focuses on activist performances and interventions in multiplayer games and has been shown around the world. Leonardo Flores is a full professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus and the treasurer of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012 and 2013 Fulbright Scholar and Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature, especially poetry, surprise and its preservation via criticism, documentation and digital archives. He's the creator and publisher of a scholarly blogging project titled I Love E Poetry, which really is the main and most important blog about this in my opinion. And a member of the editorial collective of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 just released and what we'll be talking about today. I don't want to take much time away from our wonderful guests so I will keep my intervention short and sweet, hopefully. Or I'll try. And perhaps I will start with a personal comment and a few provocative questions or theoretical positions. Firstly, I would like to explain something behind the curation of no legacy that was not addressed directly by Elika and that it has to do a lot with my own communicative limitations or my failures in explaining to my colleagues and friends or even my mother what I really meant when I was talking about electronic literature. I had been thinking a lot about elit and my expressive constraints had proven to be very frustrating until I realized that what I wanted to say about elit could not be said with words or not quite or not exactly with the type of words that I know how to use in my human languages and the alphabetic languages that I speak and it is not because English is my second language. I felt a lack when talking about digital logic, aesthetics, electronic rhetoric, different literary notions that don't belong to the realm of printed words but don't come from the oral tradition either. I found myself seeking for a somewhat esoteric discourse about electricity that needed to be somewhat powered by light which is the only medium that is in its self-continent carrier of pure and pure information with a la McLuhan and I realized that paradoxically to talk about this electronic immateriality I needed to think about its material. If words couldn't grasp the electronic literary as a concept I needed to make a material discourse like this exhibit. A way of writing that trespass words and obviously languages something very trans. But how trans is really elit? How transatlantic? How translinguistic? How transnational it really is? And why should we read it or not as world literature at all? Right? Or why should we even think of this as a theoretical question when thinking about electronic literature in the world? And a few ideas come to mind immediately. We are dealing with a type of literature that moves easily between media as we said in the previous panel but also between languages, between linguistic traditions and thus a comparative framework presents itself right away as a potential approach. Jessica Pressman has actually proposed this very successfully when she explains that electronic literature is comparative literature. It is born digital. It operates across multiple machine and human languages and it requires translation of these languages before it even reaches us as human readers. It is procedural and computational and it's processed across multiple platforms, protocols and technologies in accordance with the constraints and technical aestheticities of hardware, software and network configurations. Elit combines text, image, sound, movement, interactivity, design, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as genre categories. This is what Pressman says. And for these reasons and more electronic literature requires its reader to think and read comparatively. She explains. Moving a little bit away or to the side of her I have also proposed somewhere else that Elit should be or could be read as foreign language literature due to the interdisciplinary nature of the electronic literature field and the multi-layer qualities of the digital objects. Under study, Elit raises suspicion in English and complete departments as well as media study departments not being literary enough for the first two but paying too much attention to literature over the latter and this is something that Beanie has said before. Elit is something intrinsically hybrid going beyond languages in the sense of idiomas or technical practices and this hybridity allows me to position it in the foreign language department. Shameless plug here. After all, we are facing a type of literature that necessarily incorporates different semiotic languages sound, movement, text but also programming and formal languages JavaScript, Perl, Python and natural languages that can be expressed in different tongues. Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, English. Couldn't we think of this combination as a language in itself? A global language? There seems to be something inherently global about Elit. Scott Redberg and Patricia Tomasex have noticed that Elit's dependence on the global network has made the development of electronic literature more international in nature than any other previous literary tradition besides the fact that the French, the Spanish, the German, the Dutch, the Brazilian, the Scandinavian, the English, American and Canadian this is their list don't necessarily speak the same languages we're all becoming increasingly aware of each other's works. The field of electronic literature is a network of network Redberg says and we're only beginning to learn how to work together. This landscape seems to assume that there is something, as I said before, intrinsically global about Elit, something that would make us wonder if we can or if we even should talk about Elit in different languages. Because the Elit community is intertwined with the global network it has also been posed as essentially international yet as Redberg and Tomasex remind us it is still the case that many communities are emerging from and are responsive to international, national and language based literary traditions under this lens in my particular case I wonder what would Spanish or Hispanic Elit look like what elements beyond language would be decisive for its conceptualization and where would we locate it if talking about geopolitical frontiers in the web has long become pointless. Are we witnessing the ultimate type of world literature? One usually thinks of question of circulation and reception of works around the world when we think of world literature and these type of works circulate on the one hand almost always in translation which, and I'm thinking particularly Spivak have argued that this translation eliminates the linguistic richness of the original and the potential political force that a work would have in its context. On the other hand, circulation depends on the world market. Conversatively, Elit is usually published for free not depending on publishing houses or sales although of course access now depends on different material considerations like having an internet connection or the right software or hardware or access to it. On the web Elit simultaneously gets published in several multiple, every location and a lot of the time different languages at the same time. I'm not interested in patterns of circulation per se although the same inequalities of the global literary field that exist in the world which our colleague from Stanford Franco Moretti has described as one but unequal exist in the web where are also present here in the web and in the physical real market where most works exist in English. Unfortunately for now at least although I know my two colleagues here are changing this the map of Elit tends to replicate the map we all know it is broadly un-global and it lacks diversity. Most theoretical works on electronic literature propose formal principles and if we're lucky with reference to communities, histories or practices of production but they don't come to the front of established histories of Elit or are the most canonized works as Sandy actually has noted. Some other approaches abandon the idea of languages and geographies altogether by proposing like Joseph Tabby has said a new definition of the literary in relation to world literature and I quote only every distribution of concepts a way of thinking about the conditions of literary writing will take us to a place a collaborative workspace where works by many different authors can reach a selective audience more diverse than any faction could be. Rather than attempting to produce a cross-section of world literature in new media Tabby's approach is to advance a notion of the literary different from print-based models that are so thoroughly embedded in our idea of world literature all their equally embedded ideas he says like the grand thought of freedom or and the yearning towards universality also need to be investigated in the conception of cyber-visionary no no less than in the long-time scenarios of world literature is what Tabby said what is universal is no longer a single world vision that necessarily transcends its national racial gender or cultural origin what is universal instead is the ability by observing the constraints on the current world system as it configures itself in our actual writing spaces to enter into meaningful conversation with other creators in written as well as not written form in the sense and I'm still with Tabby, so I like him very much world literature the electronic networks that support it and the social networks that sustain it can be regarded as an alternative formation to globalization what is literary about world literature can be recognized in its capacity to disturb this mode of operations of global communication using sexual instruments whose operations are largely conceptual and this of course echoes a lot of ideas about elit production and distribution in the web as participating within an emerging digital gift economy an alternative model of circulation and economy instead of course one important accomplishment of electronic literature and actually indeed one of the important accomplishments of electronic literature may be or may have been to locate narrativity not as a literary universal but as one of the many qualities best realized in the particular medium of print in the sense digital media would not be a threat to the life of books the death of a book or literature but would help us in our reevaluation and relocation of this very slippery term of the literary in multiple media and obviously if you walk around our gallery you'll notice that the relocation of literary across different media is one of the structuring concepts of this multilingual electronic literature exhibit so then my earlier questions emerge again how transmedia is elit how trans linguistic is it really how can we read it under a transnational framework and well should we even bother with this I hope that my partners here in crime have some sort of answers for us so thank you so much yeah hard act to follow thank you so much elix technical man can you tell me if this is working right am I good alright thanks so much elix and I'm gonna have some very scattered remarks and partly to get to talk about some specific projects and the remarks are really preparatory and minor but hopefully following what elix said I was thinking about first generation electronic literature and naming rights this is a phrase as you probably know from Catherine Hale oh it's not on how do I turn on yeah that was cool I can be a technical one technical one that's a special power well it says something there it is so this is Kate Hale's well known influential formulation she also talks about classical works first generation electronic literature and this seemed to refer for her in a number of essays and then culminating in the 2012 book electronic literature which is still the only book out there of that name electronic literature this seemed to refer to works from the 80s and 90s by largely American writers using hypertext and this set out what electronic literature was it implied a certain historical time frame and she talks about that first generation ending in 1995 which is sort of the rise of works on the web eventually works in flash and so on it was rooted in a particular aesthetic idea of the works that were you know again tied to hypertext and so on was rooted in genetic notions these works were born digital and so on and also in this privilege of naming that she named these first generation works I'm thinking of this in particular because I'm thinking of alternative legacies of illet that go back in other directions I mean this is a book that I co-edited with Fritura the work is that is by Pedro Barbosa and a Hathorley and Melida Castro and these are on works from Portugal and Brazil going back decades and we all know many other traditions and I'm just evoking the hails not so much to say she was wrong because I think she was right this was about naming that electronic literature and Laurie Emerson has made this argument that some ways electronic literature was another way of seeing it was being born was when the electronic literature organization was formed in 1999 which gave a name to this and the idea here is there would be different affiliations different heterogeneous groupings that certainly now we recognize it's electronic literature and we're kind of under the part of our job part of our mission is to gather those affiliations to make other histories and other arguments for what electronic literature is or could be. In this then I'm thinking about something that I've been working in electronic literature and digital creative writing for I was trying to think about it for 22 years and people have in the whole time that I've been working on it there's been this question that people constantly say why isn't there elit in and you can fill in that those brackets and I'm going to describe here what I think of as in a very naive way as a double logic here so typically this would be why isn't there elit in Uganda or why isn't there elit in Bhutan or why isn't there elit in wherever we want in Chile and these typically are questions of asymmetries right and I was thinking of four kinds of asymmetries here that they're typically questions of places where different technical infrastructures so if I ask about why isn't there elit in Uganda it meant in some ways because they don't have internet connections they don't have the software they don't have the hardware they don't have those infrastructures there were questions human infrastructures too that meant they didn't you know well if I ask why isn't there elit in in Algeria it's because there aren't pedagogies to address it there aren't you know people to teach the skills this sort of thing memories and traditions because it seemed to mean well you know meant they don't have the experimental tradition they don't have the reference to all the things we think are important Ulipo John Barth whatever you want and then they don't have the context of networks in such places in Bhutan I'm just choosing these out of my head in part because they're placeholders they don't have the artist networks they don't have the you know outside of you know they don't have maybe the universities to sustain this now I think the big question is this question itself right because it assumes that and I think the issue of why is there no elit is one of these formulations that is both illuminates certain things but also obscures certain things in other words we go people who ask those questions are in some ways saying why isn't there what I think why isn't what I think elit is visible in all these places whatever place it happens to be and there are these and the problems again are because we've developed we because the people asking the questions have a certain technical framework in mind that they think elit fits right that you must have an internet connection or you must have x, y and z because there's also an idea of a certain human infrastructure that you need certain skill sets you need a certain approach to writing again that you think that we think certain memories and traditions that we necessarily connect to an experimental tradition and that makes a lot of sense you know I come out of an experimental writing tradition and that I when I teach about elit I say to students elit comes out of experimental writing but that's that may not that's the case for me and that's the case for many people speaking of this orientation and that leads us to look for leads people to look in locations and say why experimental writers why aren't you doing elit and the same with context and network so I think part of the question here is the very kind of thing Alex was asking about is what is both the need for organizations like the ELO and scholars at universities who have privilege and have resources to go and teach about elit and to go and seek out elit in other locations but also to be prepared to completely give up on what they think these things are and repeatedly to say what are you know to find things that we may not identify as elit another you know the classic example is which Dean mentioned earlier right young hei chang has become the sort of token of elit in East Asia right you know when people say why isn't there elit in East Asia but you can say there is right we've got young hei chang but that's and the wonderful thing about young hei chang for that argument is they clearly connect to as Jessica pressman has shown connect to the tradition of modernist poetics they fit in you know they have technical infrastructures they're doing things in flash they have this kind of idea of memory tradition so they fit really well so all that's to say that I think as this field grows both both institutionally academically scholarly and also as artists we need to be prepared to also be taking apart what we build I was thinking then and like I said these are really rambling things but I'm trying to get to a few projects here affiliations communities and translations I'm just looking ahead to the title of the ELO 2017 conference in Porto that a number of us are already working on and we're looking specifically in this to questions of translation questions of affiliation questions of community obviously but counter translation counter affiliation counter community and so then I'm just going to talk about I don't even know how long I've gone for hopefully not too long I'll think you about this I'm going to talk quickly about three projects that try to do this I think other people here have heard me talk about the cell projects some is that going to kind of load cell project on it so I can talk about the cell project which one one okay well this is the cell project I'll talk quickly about it it's a ELO created ELO initiated this group cell and again that's part of the kind of tense asymmetry here so the ELO you know based here in the US based at MIT created this organization that's intended to be the sort of global organization around electronic literature it stands for consortium of electronic literature currently consists of simply like 10 groups worldwide research centers who are developing online resources for electronic literature in that sense it attempts to grab a snapshot of kind of global view of ELIT in another sense it again replicates the situation because the groups that are doing it all have the resources to create big online archives and and so on it does attempt to it does attempt and is working on a search engine that would search across these sites so we would have a kind of first kind of merging where we have let's say ILV poetry which has many many readings of poetry and other things as well but also projects from let's say Germany that focus on German language electronic literature projects from from Portugal like POEX that focused on experimental writing some of which is electronic literature large projects such as ELMSIP in Norway that focus on electronic literature in any sense so ELMSIP anything that anybody thinks electronic literature is there so what this tries to do then is to step above or move to a meta level to say what do all these groups think electronic literature is what is it globally how can we understand it how can we use different kinds of data mining different kinds of tax on a different kinds of analysis to both look at where we agree where we disagree where there might be clusters of interesting things that are happening in particular languages but also very looking we're hoping through this database the search engine to find unforeseen things right topics that might be totally unforeseen but again it has the same you know our countries that we participate are largely a kind of again places that have that kind of the resources and the infrastructure and so on so I think this is my side show somehow I'm trying to go back to it because I want to go back but it doesn't want to let me go back hold on is that what it is oh yeah it's kind of waffling isn't it air bears what well I can just talk some I can talk some more so then I was going to talk about two other projects trying to from my mind think about this in a different way I'm leading a series of workshops in Ghana and Benin in May with colleagues from both RIT and the University of Perry Wheat where we're collaborating with the University of Ghana and then some cultural institutions in Benin to both present these as discussions of electronic literature in other words we're going to we're working with arts organizations in those locations as well as the universities there to say here's what you know we're coming from Paris we're coming from the we have these projects and this idea of this new art field and a kind of tradition but what's going on here and part of what stimulated us was a series of encounters through things working with me with then artists working in West Africa doing to my mind really exciting work in using new media largely using cell phones also doing some Facebook work that they would they did not see themselves as doing either literature per se or even elit they had no awareness of what we were doing and we're trying to find a setting where we can dialogue with them and it's like this what would you let be in Spanish or a question service was it look like from West Africa and then I was going to talk um how visitor that's I mean it's not I there is well I'm almost done anyway but there okay so so I think I'm almost done I've probably been talking too long anyway um so yeah and this is um this is also partly sponsored by UNESCO who have an initiative to think about what is digital humanism rather than digital humanities in other words what would be a new kind of humanism um they want to suggest an alternative to what they see as a kind of technocratic instrumental idea of digital humanities um and also then what would this mean how would this let us think about um other regions and different kinds of regional clustering because again if you look at the if you look at brought more broadly in DH DH has some of the same uh asymmetries that I'm talking about and then yeah quick lastly this is Arabic elit which is a initiative set up by a scholar from Egypt who's organizing the what what seems to be the first network of Arabic language elit writers she's working with me and on a fellowship in Rochester for several years and in this one I've been trying to you know my I don't I don't know much about the area she's kind of organizing it from below we're organizing a similar kind of set of conferences and workshops in well Dubai at this point we're hoping in Egypt as well um and then returning to the US to try to bring a number of elit artists from those places um again trying to sort of say what you know what what does this mean what what do you think this is what kind of dialogues can we set up with you um to to map the field in a different way and map it in a way that the US doesn't feel like the biggest thing on the map so that's pretty much what I was going to say thank you where's preview there we go all right so thank you for uh setting the setting the tone and getting some good material out here uh I want to talk about some concrete projects a specific concrete project the electronic literature collection which we launched just a few weeks ago and we are still adding features and developing towards a towards a complete sort of a distributable uh physical media version downloadable version uh by June um as one of the editors of this collection I worked also with Anastasia Salter Stephanie Boluck and Jacob Garby who who wish they could be here and high if they're watching um we put together you know we we went through this process that started in 2014 we were elected chosen by the yellow board and given the the mission to to assemble do the call together this electronic literature collection this is the third one the collections happen every five years at least have been happening every five years the first one was in 2006 the next one volume 2 in 2011 and now we have volume 3 which I'm happy to present now in putting this collection together we had a few questions that were raised and I'll go through them quickly here and then I'll go and try to respond to them in detail what is the mission of the electronic literature collections in general and specific specifically volume 3 what did we want to achieve with it how far can the ELO's network reach when making a call for the electronic literature collection we were curious about how far we'd be able to get are there universal standards to assess the quality and or importance of the submissions we come at it from a tradition that is very rooted in the US and English-speaking world and how do we strike a balance between inclusiveness and standards in our selection so thinking of the mission well first of all we wanted to assemble valuable works and resources for our audience and of course that begs the question what is our audience we do have a global audience but we are producing something for an organization that has its core in the United States it's a registered US non-profit organization which does have an international scope it has a board with members from Canada, France Portugal, England, Puerto Rico I don't know if you count that as international we could debate that another time but admittedly this is an English-speaking audience but it also a multi-lingual audience we wanted to have things for that sort of diverse audience we also wanted to produce a snapshot of the field what is ELIT like circa end of 2014 so what are some of the platforms that are important at this time the internationalization of the field and of the organization and our reach is part of that narrative part of that historical moment historically important works for example Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger is a work that she is a pioneer in the field and has in the past decade become like the field has awoken to the importance of her as a pioneer she wasn't in any of the previous collections she is here now and emergent genres what's going on, what's fresh what's new even if it's a little rough what's coming out how far could we reach with our call well we this is the first collection in the age of social media as we have it there is a facebook group for the electronic literature organization the call was widely circulated there other organizations other groups have their facebook groups have their social networks we advertise the call heavily in social media email mailing lists 17 international consultants that helped spread the word as well and we went directly to communities and tried to reach them and get them to spread the call and we received 500 over 500 submissions the most any of the collections has received so how could we address those 500 works and do justice right how can we assess quality we admit that quality standards vary by community but as a board composed of four members fairly young members really of the community some coming from a gaming perspective from an artistic perspective from other perspectives I was the old one in the team I was the senior one in the team we kind of agreed that an engagement with the media was important a serious engagement some sort of innovation or at least a virtual performance of that engagement of that work and significance we wanted works that had some bite to them that had an impact we then had to make the decisions we made an initial quality assessment in which we went through the works and we rated them in terms of yes maybes, nos it went beyond that but one thing we did in narrowing that selection of over 500 works after that initial quality assessment we still had a couple hundred quality works to get something closer to 60 which was what previous collections had so we made the decision to prioritize new voices we have very well established people in the field who had been in previous electronic literature collections we wanted I think we felt that the opening of the field to new voices to new spaces was important to bring in here and so we prioritized new voices and then works that maybe were from underrepresented countries, languages, platforms we revisited we reconsidered keeping quality in mind because we did not want to create just represent for the sake of representing something that maybe wasn't up to the standards of the community and the audience the result 114 works which is like one out of every five works the main cluster of works the main node, and I'll show this in a moment contains 73 works so the previous collections had 60 works each all in one sort of main grid we increased that to 73 and we had three special collections folios if you will of terraco-gorge remixes that included 16 works renderings which is an elit in translation project and bots that is an emergent elit genre that we felt was important to represent in the end there are 26 countries represented in this collection and 13 languages which we're quite happy with the main grid of the 73 works and you can see the terraco-gorge remixes, renderings and bots here on the left hand column, those are the folios and if you open those this is more or less what they look like they're documenting these projects these genres, this phenomena that are best appreciated collectively so bots are one of the oldest elit genres that we really go back we go back to Eliza in 1964 she's the grandmother of Ciri and all these other wonderful bots that we have but with social media Twitter in particular this network has blossomed a lot of people are producing bots creating bots and doing wonderful things and we wanted to get a snapshot of that so if we were to look at the author distribution where are the authors in this collection well I threw together a little heat map the darker colors the US, Canada you can see England it's a little darker but it gives you a sense of where the elit is and also where it isn't and it's not so much because we didn't try we did reach out to folks from Africa from India but they didn't have the networks they didn't know where the work in India was for example that they could bring in if we're to look at a distribution here of the country you can see that there's about 56 authors that reside in the US this does not necessarily mean that they're American so there is diversity within that but residing in the US we have 56 authors that's about 42% of the authors so that's pretty good if we look at the language distribution 50% of the works were originally written in English the other half in other languages and 17% of those have been translated into English and actually many of the works are in multiple languages but again we tried to the moment brought some diversity into the circumstances now if we were to do a quick comparative look at the three collections volume one 2006 this is an early moment in the organization the ELO at that time was not having regular yearly conferences and when they started they were bi-yearly and now they're yearly conferences volume two which was the organization was a little stronger a little more international and volume three which I have just presented if we look at volume one there are two categories in their keywords multilingual or non-English works there are seven so that's about 11% and authors living outside North America which I imagine includes Canada were 16 so again it was international from the start but we also have to acknowledge how far can we reach as editors in a call volume two we have 14 works not in English so that's 23% that's an improvement one of the editors Laura Borras Castañer from Barcelona, Catalonia you know she I'm sure helped activate her network and bring that diversity those new voices into the field volume three it's in the age of social media you have a Puerto Rican who's talking to Mexicans and Peruvians and Argentinians but you also have you know this wonderful social media diversity here so we have 42 works that are not in English 37% of the collection and authors living outside the US 77 58% so it's a step in the right direction I wonder what future ELCs are going to look like you know I imagine we'll have more ELIC created as new generations become increasingly digitally native we'll have more ELIC communities around the world resulting in more international submissions I think digital divides across countries, languages, ethnic gender and socioeconomic classes will erode as the sort of penetration of code literacy and internet networks increase we'll have new platforms emerging others will mature and others will fade flash is fading fast and obsolescence will continue as will preservation efforts so I think we have a lot of work to do just to think globally here I went and looked at some statistics internet users in the world you know this kind of gives you a sense of the growth of the field right internet users by region notice that Asia is 48% of the internet users you look at the list of internet countries by internet usage China is number one 21.97% of the share of world internet users at least it did in 2014 when this data was assembled and we can see that the United States the penetration is the percentage of population with internet for China is 46% for the US is 86.75% I think these are telling numbers but this elit thing this digital creativity is a kind of a numbers game we need people increasing numbers of people who are code literate growing up with games doing things that will be natural to them they won't this creativity we just can't stop it and it will inhabit these digital spaces so the point of entry for electronic literature media is a big vector of entry and of course artistic and avant-garde movements that have to do with media concrete poetry, visual poetry etc enter that way video poetry programming generative literatures among the oldest in the field so code literacy, platform literacy platforms flash was a platform that allowed an entire generation of artists to produce work I think tablets, mobile platforms etc are inspiring an entire new generation video games of course you start with play but soon you're cheating hacking and creating you know deeper into this and networks whether they're social media networks or anything that allows us to come together and what will improve these conditions and what will allow them to kind of come out and connect well advanced literacy is a big part of it developing audiences I think a scene people who are moving in elit for example I remember visiting Slovakia Susana Luzarova who was published in the election and we went to a club it was techno pop and there was language on the screen and they were doing music with things but there was language as part of it and I said I look at that and it's like this is elit they don't recognize it as such and in Puerto Rico when I ask where's the elit in Puerto Rico I know a handful of people in the performance scene there's quite a bit of language being made to dance so but how does it come together how does it get published how do these communities then organize and connect the cell project as an example of how communities have become organized enough that they can connect with us and as an organization we need to be receptive to making those connections and scholarship is an entire other layer brings it to universities perpetuates the disseminates this and publication and we need to think down the line about profits whether it's direct monetary profit or in some sort of cultural currency so thank you I leave you with those questions about humanism at a time when post humanism is also this big currency being discussed right and particularly in relationship to the question of both virtuality and materiality that I'm kind of assuming is also at the heart of what maybe you mean by digital humanism I don't know and taken up by post humanism and those discourses so I was just curious because I wasn't sure what you meant I'm going to repeat the question thanks for that question the first answer is that I don't know because it's not my formulation it's the UNESCO conference that is funniest in part but I'll take some stabs at it I think they intend it in relation to digital humanities where the argument is that digital humanities both as an outgrowth of the humanities as increasingly as increasingly a site of a particular kind of cultural literacy that feeds into kind of a broader neoliberal kind of culture of the humanities in service of STEM and other things has lost the sense of the humanities as humanistic and let's say concerned with what's human and who different cultures are and so on I think that argument is also that digital humanities has become increasingly focused on instruments and tools so I think that's part of the thrust of it but I do think it's very interesting in terms of transhumanism I'd have to speculate on that I mean certainly thinking of humanism as a mobile kind of set of orientations towards others that would try to try to interrogate national boundaries in the era of let's say vast refugee flows where digital humanities doesn't necessarily take that up those directions but I don't think you're also asking about what I also hear in your question is transhumanism which for me invoked for a long time this kind of the uploading question and it were downloading question whichever way you go and the kind of post human body question I don't think we're thinking about that necessarily I think if we would we might also then ask what is embodied digital practice in these regions we're looking at so I think again in the work in Ghana we are interested in how artists and writers in Ghana and people who don't think of themselves as artists but who are writing are embodying and thinking of their lived embodiment in new and different ways in terms of digital networks that might function quite differently than the way my students do at RIT let's say so I think that's if I were to go into the post human part of digital humanism that's where I might go but I haven't thought of it yet so thank you for that thank you so much for the great morning Dr. Flores I want to know if the graphic you showed of the literature from different countries counts literature from different countries that's translated twice once in its original language and then second in its English version which would bias it towards more diversity than it really happens but then I also am more interested even in the readership of those materials the circulation if in fact the readership is mirroring the authorship or if it's different I did both I did an initial sort of rough chop that presents the multiple languages and it did show that bias and I tried to separate the works that were translated into English and the ones that were written in English I also did a sort of a manual count of those works so you know there is there is diversity but we're not all there all the way there right so really what we have is a 34% of works that are that were not written in English even though they may be translated into English and many of them are so that's that's the real number and which I actually presented in one of the slides now the readership we this is the first collection that actually has some Google analytics of tracking data I mean so we're actually gathering data as to where are readers I mean I would love to answer this question again in a year but from the outset the readership has been global and rather massive I mean from my own I Love Epoetry project which I launched four years ago and have been tracking data since then I am shocked by the kind of international readership that I have so from all over people are interested in this and they are you know they're avidly reading so with a project like I Love Epoetry I receive about between three and four thousand hits per month so I mean it's not like Web, Rockstar or anything but it is significant it's a whole different scale library everybody that's been hitting that site since we launched it on June 1st and it's interesting to look at the data because about 60% is coming from the US but 40% from the rest of the world which is really amazing and it's not just universities but libraries offices and I can track it almost down to where they're sitting in the universe which is really fascinating but it's but it's exciting to see that kind of growth in our field right and I suspect in five years we're going to see even more of a shift away from US in English to other countries that's the direction we're going right now as we build our board and add more folks from the US for seeing that have great impact I just wanted to add one quick comment on the question of translation and the ELC which as Leo's pointed out it's been massive and impressive you know amazing undertaking there's a lot of, what's interesting for me to see is there's a number, this is through the CEL project we see a number of the research centers are looking at translation and the kind of complexities of translation and especially because the ELC collections have concentrated the issues often do we translate the work into English and there's also a lot of work being done on how do I take English language, e-literature and translate it into French, Polish whatever it is and as we start to move both ways we start to get a kind of practice of translation with e-lit and the issues of the challenges and also start to see kind of in some ways again I think for me how the reference point is so often been English language works and as we start to move into other languages we start to get a better sense of this kind of thing so I just wanted to mention some of these different efforts I quickly would be shouting out to NT2 in Montreal and also the people at Perry Weed in Paris who've been working on and also people in Poland all these groups are translating English language works into other languages and setting that kind of practice out Thank you so much for all of your presentations I have I guess two kind of comments or questions one is I feel there is a shared optimism in the electronic literature world that this thing is expanding and more people are going to be using it and like we're moving forward right and I wonder how you relate that optimism with the feeling the rest of the literature world feels we're in a crisis right like less people are reading less people have time to have quality engagement with things the question of increasing access to resources is questioned right like we don't even know if the planet is going to be able to sustain this technological expansion with all the minerals and materials and ways that it produces right so there's an ecological dimension there is the economic crisis right so I just wonder which dialogue or like how this is problematized in electronic literature and the other question is in the last presentation I thought it was really interesting that the big boom because it's related right is like China right China is using like the big increase in the use of the internet and technology is the Asian world and so when you you've been talking about international or worldly electronic literature and I was thinking about Alex problematization about languages and that right do you have none in the European languages thinking about electronic literature because language functions in a very different way right so how does someone living in China in Japan in Thailand interact with this what kind of language and literature is produced and in your collections at the end do you have incorporated that kind of or are we talking about Spanish English French like European language speaking world interacting with media because I mean I'm very curious to know what it would look like electronic literature in China for example thank you Blanca there were like 10 questions in that so I'm going to start answering one and then I'm going to move on so and perhaps related to that idea of the the crisis of literature print literature no one's reading and then the yay everybody's doing illid right have a question and I guess it has to do a lot of well the question is really what is reading right and what we kind of how we value it and how we hierarchy or how we sort of categorize it with hierarchical values and the fact that for the longest time because we've been using print we've also valued that idea of spending a long time with one object right and thinking well deep attention is needed and this is how we should read and we should train people to do this and we should you know this free time also right we think of the evolution of print and the novel and the sort of bourgeois environments where you develop right this response to that and then now thinking well we're reading in a different way scattered is you know and maybe you can call it hyper reading or surface reading or you're scanning and somehow we feel but that's not as serious or that's not as good right that's not because you're not engaging deeply with it and so you can't have a complex thought with that right and that's the type of thought we should have well I mean maybe my question is like maybe we shouldn't right maybe we should just stop putting them in categories and numbering one is you know above the other and then just thinking the different models and maybe they're also different logics of reasoning that come with different media right and so then we shouldn't be talking about a crisis of literature or reading just that they're two models right and maybe one now is more suited to a different way of thinking now I'm not going to go into what ideologies or our economies are attached to each one and you know how I feel about it but I think that's one way of approaching it to start now is how Chinese electronic literature looks like I'm just going to pass on well we have we have at least two works from China one of them in the renderings project which is translated into English but provides access to the original so I invite you to go check it out I myself I'm quite curious and I am also ill-equipped I do not know Chinese I wish I did but so I think for us to actually reach that we need to get there we need to bring scholars we cannot expect to represent their electronic literature I think that would be a almost a colonialist move a colonizing move and we want to resist that we want to invite and to have conversations now the other thing in terms of electronic literature and its growth I think it's a wonderful growth and a movement it is also not what is driving the technological development there's no money in elit and money is what's driving all of these increasing networks now we are and there are many problems with this this sort of growth environmental ethical etc however inside of all that and inside of all the problems that brings there is also a blossoming of creative uses of the word in those spaces so I think I think electronic literature is an important and necessary almost inevitable side effect to this shift to the digital and I don't think it's going away it's only increasing so we're not the problem and we're not the solution we are a happy accident or a happy inevitable impulse I really like the question I like the aspect also that you pointed to problems of resource consumption and kind of extermination and it would be I think we do need to keep in mind a horizon of where we might stop reading or stop having any literature wouldn't even be a word anymore and I think we all appreciate being reminded of kind of inherent of optimistic claims right or utopias and it might be this idea of remapping one of my questions was sort of like this idea well if we look at let's say Zimbabwe and say why isn't there there and no matter what we do we find less maybe it'll dry up everywhere and that is sort of I think something we need to kind of hold as a possibility I didn't want to quickly say working with West Africa and Ghana because I was thinking of non-Indo-European languages they have a practice of a dinkro which are an older pre pre before the adoption of English using a different kind of symbol systems that have kind of complex cultural meanings they're what are they, they're ideographs right and they're people doing they're not calling it elit work but animated works using those and there's also interesting work in the African I'm sorry in the Arabic elit world using again Arabic language works where you often have to come up with interesting solutions because so many of your software you use is so tied to the English language so a lot of it's video work right because with video I can video you know morphing Arabic work but you do have the one piece which is he does what does he do this sort of alternative programming system in Arabic right that's in the ELLC and that's really interesting because he's been directing what is his last name? Ramsey Nasser and he's been directly addressing the kind of Indo-European bias of programming languages of platforms of all this sort of thing. If there's a burning question we can address it it I'm pretty new to literature but I wanted to get your opinion do you consider memes electronic literature yes or no and why and is there is there like a thing or a place where you can say okay this is not electronic literature anymore you know my answer is everything is electronic literature just like if you decide something is art is art right and that's the point this is the point of enunciation I'm just like playing with it but I'm going to let them actually answer because I don't enthologize or categorize or I curate a show where I have wood that I consider it's electronic literature so well I'll be quick too I say yes and why not but also I think because they use language they activate memory precisely as a meme but a kind of literary memory always has both a passing on of a of a topos of a space of literary context but also an erasure of literary context which is what literature always does and memes do that too so for me that works pretty well yeah I love memes I would say definitely yes part of what's interesting about them that's why I ended on a meme saying you're already writing elit is because that is one of the points of entry for an entire generation of young users who are instead of writing on the empty page are writing on images are writing on gifs or gifs however you want to you know or comics or so so and they're activating them they're writing on media they're often pulled from media products that come from artworks right the television film whatever that have their in Spanish would call a pie for sale they have a language you know like a call in response you know what if I told you is a reference to the matrix to I mean it resonates right it contains a lot of baggage and writing on that space is and writing in interesting ways on that space I think is something that the current generation of millenials or digital natives or whatever you want to call the current generation they're doing it and massively and I'm excited to see what great things might come from that and what am I lead to next I think memes are a gateway elit yes why not I'm interested to see what the ELC4 5 and 6 will be like and we have several fanfic works there I think these are really important questions because there are certainly internal debates in the field that say certain things cannot count right that a digitized digitized version of what have you of Wordsworth does not count and I think personally I would not legislate on that as much as see those as boundary cases that need to be debated because both because I think that's the case that's how literature functions that every time I say you know every time I say someone rewriting a chapter of Don Quixote is not literature Borges tells me it is right so you know this sort of thing but also because you know I think that we run the I don't want to go on too long but we as a group on the danger of coordinating it off and creating a new kind of kind of boutique and I think rather we need a kind of very flexible maybe almost rather than an ontology we need a kind of series that keeps moving so and with that we end thank you so much everyone for being here and I want to remind you all that the actual big opening because this was just a teaser really it's at 30 at the Morrison Library and we're going to have a very different approach to electronic literature which is with two artists presenting their work to us and their views, Dominico Chape and Amaranth Borsuch so please come and I'll see you later thank you oh for them great we can just have them well really