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

Electronic Literature with Performance

131 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN PRACTICE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE IN/WITH PERFORMANCE JEROME FLETCHER INTRODUCTORY REMARKS The Context of the Research and the Seminar at Arnolfini Bristol hosted by Falmouth University within the ELMCIP research project, May 3rd/4th 2012 A significant element of electronic literature as a field of practice and inquiry has been its relationship to liveness and the body. This has taken a number of forms, ranging from embodied gestures required to access a digital text; to public readings of digital text from the interface or projected into a specific space; to live performances involving one or many performers in concert with, or in response to, a computer-generated text. Some of these performance modes have links to recognizable practices such as theater or, within the literary world, the live reading. Others are more specific to e-literature such as the mouse gesture, the haptic gesture of the touch screen, the embodied interaction with motion capture, etc. Initially, this delimited the area of digital text practice interrogated by the Falmouth University (UCF) project. However, the course of the project broadened the area of interrogation to open up new questions about the relationship between performance and electronic literature. While retaining the focus on the embodied, live performance, a wider conception of the notion of performativity was developed during the course of the research and applied to works of e-literature. This wider concept sought to give an account of performativity across the whole range of the digital device. Another way of looking at this is that the word “performance” can be applied to the hardware (the computer as machine), the software (the operating system, the programmable codes), as well as direct human interaction at the interface and beyond. For this reason the Falmouth seminar sought to attract not just academics but engineers, coders, and programmers as well. 132 ELMCIP REPORT PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH AS A METHODOLOGY In addition to an extended notion of performativity, the Falmouth research was interested in examining the extent to which practice-as-research can usefully play an explanatory role in the emerging field of e-literature. E-literature is by its very nature interdisciplinary, and it is often the case that academic researchers of digital texts are not only practitioners but also technicians in that they are closely involved in the practical development, programming, and application of digital text works. Needless to say, the notion of practice-as-research is a contentious and ill-defined issue in the humanities and requires a certain amount of framing. Electronic literature is a complex process. Language is embedded in a “noisy” environment of hardware, software, sound, image, video, interface, etc. In order to be realized, e-literature needs to mobilize at a minimum the forces of computing, writing, performance, visual art, and design. Because of this mix of discourses and practices, much of the knowledge that emerges from e-literature is an embodied knowledge and a knowledge that crosses back and forth between theory and practice. In other words, it is a praxis. Much of e-literature is also processual . In order to give a full account of a piece of digital text, researchers have to be aware of the processes by which the work was created. Because of all this, it was important to make the Bristol seminar, above all, a dialogue not between thinkers and doers (in e-lit, as stated above, these are often one and the same person) but between thinking and doing. A further aspect of this dialogue is an attempt to break down the distinction between these two modes such that thinking becomes a form of doing and vice versa. This approach is well summarized by Barbara Bolt in the following passage: Praxical knowledge takes a number of forms and it is this multiplicity that provides creative arts research with its distinctive character. Whilst the artwork is imminently articulate and eloquent in its own right, tacit knowing and the generative potential of process have the potential to reveal new insights; both those insights that inform and find a form in artworks and those that can be articulated in words. It is here that the exegesis offers a critical role. Rather than just operating as an explanation or contextualisation of the practice, the exegesis plays a critical and complementary role in revealing the work of art. (Bolt 2005, 7-8) One final comment as a pretext to an account of the seminar: the event itself was located at Arnolfini Bristol. This is...