Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP): A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project

Poetics in Digital Communities and in Digital Literature

105 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN PRACTICE POETICS IN DIGITAL COMMUNITIES AND IN DIGITAL LITERATURE YRA VAN DIJK E very new work of digital literature creates its own new genre, claimed digital poet Brain Kim Stefans.16 This may be so, but not every work in the hybrid new art form creates and invents its own poetics, too. Artists, communities, and individual works are positioned within, between, and opposed to existing art worlds, histories, and concepts. In this project we have explored the ambivalent position of the new, which has to find a place for itself in the old. Like authors who work in print, authors of e-literature need an institutional and artistic context in which their works can be credentialed and valued, economically and symbolically. Three different approaches were used to consider the question of digital poetics: institutional, ethnographic, and textual. The conclusions that were drawn are presented in the first four sections of this chapter. The first two sections are centered around institutional questions: what is it that builds and binds communities of digital artists? Do artists collaborate, and how do they reflect on these collaborations? Can we say that communities are bound by a common poetics? Sections three and four concentrate on works from a textual angle. Emergent in the course of the project was a clear image of a fast developing art form that is characterized by a tendency towards affect and embodiment. On the other hand, the question of poetics led to a critical engagement with the works. Conclusions will be presented in the fifth and last section. THE INSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF DIGITAL LITERATURE Contrary to what one might think, institutions play an important role in the production, preservation, and funding of electronic literature. Digital literature is rarely “sold” like print literature, and its producers have to find alternative funding to be able to produce work. Due to the absence of traditional gate-watch16 In a presentation on “Writing Becomes Eclectric: A Symposium on Electronic Literature,” UCSD, January 27th 2011. 106 ELMCIP REPORT ers like publishers and newspaper critics, the function of selection, distribution, and reception of this work has been taken over partly by anthologies, reviews, and criticism, often produced in an academic climate (see Saemmer 2012, 83). Artists need the necessary channels for preservation, distribution, and critical evaluation of the work, channels that have the power to create “cultural capital.” Even the production of work often takes place in an academic or institutional setting. Literary festivals, conferences, and workshops form temporary communities in which planned collaboration takes place. This section presents conclusions about issues of institutionalized and planned collaboration and its effects on the production, the presentation, and the content of digital literature. How do we get knowledge of the collaboration; what were the original intentions; and what is the intended or unintended result? The focus of the project was on institutionally funded projects based on collaboration. Although digital arts may seem so experimental that artists operate far from traditional institutions, they are partly dependent on academia and on government-funded projects. In these instances, the community of artists that produces a work has come into being in an institutional context (a festival , a workshop, a project). Although a book-project on collaboration (Collaborative Futures) stresses the importance of “autonomy,” collaboration in digital art is not necessarily produced in autonomy from governmental or other institutions (“Field of Cultural Production” 2010). This seems to be a rather paradoxical situation, since collaborations in twentieth century art and literature were mostly born from a discontent with mainstream and canonical art and its institutions (Green 2001, x). The general conception of collaboration is strongly connected with political action or even anarchy (Lind 2007, 183). In digital literature we find some political collaborations , like the literary community “Circulars” that was formed with the explicit intention to protest the invasion of Iraq in 2003, stating that “poets, artists and critics respond to the U.S. Global policy.” The supposed political quality of collaborations is generally less obvious in most literary digital communities (van Dijk 2012b). Not only on an institutional or political level, transformations seem to have occurred in the cultural value of collaboration: the idea of authorship has altered, too. In visual arts of the twentieth century, collaboration was a “strategic but almost terminal means of shedding traditional signs of unwanted artistic per- 107 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN PRACTICE sonality” (Green 2001, xiii). This, too, seems...