I am reading a book called “Prehistoric digital poetry”. I asked a bunch of people if they knew a book or an article that could help me in writing a history of electronic literature. (It’s something it has been tormenting me since September and I am still trying to figure it out. I hope I am following the right path.)

Anyway: what I am coming across in this book is an innumerable quantity of poetry which was created even before the Internet era but still, it was clear that technology sooner or later would have played a great role in the future of literature. The author Chris Funkouser starts from the dawning of concrete poetry and explores many bigger and less bigger literary movements that dealt with technology. One of the authors I’ve found most curious, multifaceted, imaginative and questionable, too. The latter is not at all a harsh critique against him, not at all. On the contrary I do appreciate him  because his works strive to explore the potentials of poetry and art in general at their utmost.

I have been browsing through his website for an hour or so. I started looking for poetry, in particular for some works that Funkhouser cites in his book, and I ended up discovering something called “BioArt”. Kac himself invented this name after his 1997 project called “Timecapsule“.

“When the public walks into the gallery where this work takes place, what is seen is a medical professional, seven sepia-toned photographs shot in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, a horizontal bedstead, an on-line computer serving the Web, a telerobotic finger, and additional broadcasting equipment. I start (and conclude) the basic procedure by washing the skin of my ankle with an antiseptic and using a special needle to insert subcutaneously the passive microchip, which is in fact a transponder with no power supply to replace or moving parts to wear out. Scanning the implant generates a low energy radio signal (125 KHz) that energizes the microchip to transmit its unique and inalterable numerical code, which is shown on the scanner’s 16-character Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). Immediately after this data is obtained I register myself via the Web in a remote database located in the United States. This is the first instance of a human being added to the database, since this registry was originally designed for identification and recovery of lost animals. I register myself both as animal and owner under my own name. After implantation a small layer of connective tissue forms around the microchip, preventing migration. ”

(http://www.ekac.org/timec.html)

Weird and almost creepy, isn’t t it? Here there are some more pictures,  and believe me, those are even more creepy.

Kac’s works are always astonishing and sometimes really questionable. The basic concept of Bio Art is that what is involved is not just the mere artistic intention of a piece of art whatsoever using whatever medium to do it, but also biology as a way to manipulate life and transform it into art. Back in the day the dispute about the relationship between art and nature was a paramount issue which was then surpassed after the XXI century vanguard movements. They explored new dimensions of art and proved that art doesn’t have to be the copy of nature to be called “art”. Speaking of nature and art, then, how one cannot remember Oscar Wilde and Ruskin’s aestehtic theory…all in all, we as humans have always marveled at how nature can create beautiful spots without our intervention, and at how human creation expressed through art can give birth to as much enchanting works as nature. But what happens when nature and art can intermingle, when the creation of nature meets the creation of man, or better, his/her creativity? Let me show you something:

Beautiful flower, isn’it? Yes, it’s a flower, a Petunia…but what if I say that Edunia (this is the name of the plant) is not just a variety of Petunia but it actually contains part of Kac’s genes extracted from his blood?

“The Edunia has red veins on light pink petals and a gene of mine is expressed on every cell of its red veins, i.e., my gene produces a protein in the veins only. The gene was isolated and sequenced from my blood. The petal pink background, against which the red veins are seen, is evocative of my own pinkish white skin tone. The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower.”

(http://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig.html)

Nature has been told to make a splendid red-veined pink Petunia to blossom, and this is what it exactly did. Man has intruded in this process exploiting it and literally injecting in it his own concept of art as a creation of something intentionally thought and meant to be art. Are you still convinced that what you are looking at is just a flower?

Qualcuno però mi ha fatto riflettere su questo fatto. Mi è arrivato un commento molto piacevole su Facebook riguardo a questo mio piccolo pezzo di mondo, in cui effettivamente di italiano non c’è nulla (tranne ora due post, questo e il precedente, e una pagina di introduzione).

Comunque, se vi capita di leggere questo avviso, vi prego di non temere di commentare qualsiasi post vogliate in qualunque lingua. Cercherò di rendere più visibili i link ai vari lavori di letteratura elettronica che sto commentando, in modo tale che anche se non viene letto tutto il post sia possibile discutere del suo contenuto. Lo scopo principale di un blog, d’altronde, non è solo quello di dire la propria sul mondo, ma anche di condividerla e, se necessario, alterarla e adattarla. Quindi, viva la poliglossia.

 

[In this post: Letters demand things; Young-Chae Heavy Industries]

When a text becomes a work of art, when we look at an ordered string of letters not for the meaning it carries but just as curve and straight lines combined together, are we still entitled to talk about literature? Or is it already something that trascends literature itself?

This is the question that I am asking myself since I saw Michael Madsen’s “Letters demand things“. I believe that it is a perfect example of how art and literature easily intertwine in the realm of the digital media. This project makes you play with the sound and the shape of the letters as if the reader is the one who can free them from the obligation of composing words that carry meaning. Letters want to live just as signs, they need to be looked at for what they are without the burden of something to communicate, they are longing for a sort of reification: “they now demand to be typed, spoken, traced, heard, and related to in specific ways. And yet, for all their demands, they only exist as reflections of human handwriting and visual echoes of muscles and air working in concert to give them life as sound waves”,  Madsen declares in his initial statement.

Art that deals with letters, words that lost their meaning.

This reminds me about Concrete Poetry and its attention for the graphic aspect of poems. But it was still labelled as Poetry. Boundaries are blurring.

Another interesting work which poses itself in between for being an artistic approach to words and poems, as its very creators say, is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. This artist duo set in South Korea but influenced by manifold cultures and traditions has exhibited its masterpieces in many famous museums and galleries, such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the New Museum here in New York. They use a simple graphics, mainly just black letters against a white background, combine it with marvelous jazz music, and as a result you get a poem that line by line, and sometimes word by word, jumps, bounces and floats on your screen. No links and no hypertexts. Even though I feel less iffy about seeing it as literature than Madsens’s work, it is not “electronic literature” in its common sense. There are no links, no hypertexts, no different paths to choose among. The only choice the reader has – and they are absolutely aware of that – is pushing the  “Back” button. According to them, it doesn’t mean that the reader is a passive receiver because she has in her hands the strongest power of choice, that is to say Stop.

I believe that this power is the same as the one of closing a book when we do not want to read it anymore. Or better, it is more than just a power, it is an Inalienable Right of the Reader.

But is it what we really want from electronic literature? One can argue that what they are doing is miles away from what we mean with that. Personally speaking, I really like Heavy Industries’ works but I feel that there it lacks the “playable”and interactive part of electronic literature.

But there is a subtle mistake in all this reasoning: we should avoid a perspective which is too literary-bounded and take into account that one of the added values that media art has is combining different fields and perspectives, such as literature and art, so to create a unique intermingling matter. Sometimes we like it, sometimes we don’t, but its value lies in its capacity of astonishing and surprising us.

One thing that this research about electronic literature seems to desperately want to teach me is that I have to be ready to have my expectations unmatched and marvel at mundane things as it was the first time. Even if it seems hard to get rid of traditional concepts and prejudices, they sometimes are just a ballast to dump so…let the hot-air balloon of our imagination and creation fly.