I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Nordic Digital Culture Network, a Nordplus Higher Education network which we have been working to develop for the past year. Linking together digital culture programs from the Nordic and Baltic region, the Digital Culture Network facilitates curriculum development, student and faculty exchanges, and innovative teaching ideas and best practices. Students studying in the programs in the network will benefit from increased student and teacher mobility and enhanced opportunities for study. All the programs in the network — the University of Bergen in Norway, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland — are leaders in the field of digital culture in their respective countries. Network participants will facilitate student and faculty exchange ranging from express visits to semester or yearlong exchanges, joint programs and master’s degrees. We are launching network activities this activities this fall and spring with faculty exchanges between the institutions, and will add programs, such as student exchanges and a summer school for digital culture, in coming years. I also encourage students from other countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere to explore the exchange and M.A. program opportunities detailed on the site. For instance, both Bergen and Jyväskylä welcome applications to our M.A. programs in digital culture from well qualified international students. While international students are responsible for their own living expenses, they are not required to pay tuition.
We’re very pleased to be welcoming hypertext pioneer and new media innovator Stuart Moulthrop to UiB as a guest researcher for the next two weeks. If you’re in Bergen, please attend his lecture on the 22nd or his reading/demonstration on the 23rd.
I recently made a contribution to TAGallery, a project of cont3xt.net. The project is an experiment in using del.icio.us to collaboratively tag interesting sites related to new media art and literature. Each curator/participant is contributing a short “exhibition” of ten links on a theme. Predictably, I suppose, I contributed a collection of electronic literature links.
First of all, let me point in brief to networked_performance for Simon Biggs’ very good report on the E-poetry 2007 Festival in Paris. I agreed with him that Robert Simanowski’s close reading of “Listening Post” was probably the best of the academic papers presented during the conference. I was also a fan of Jim Carpenter’s presentation, in which he talked in a clear and pragmatic way about best practices for writing good code for epoetry, including distributing source code so that others can learn from it. Carpenter recently released a new version of his poetry engine, which will write some pretty good poems for you. There were many other papers and panel discussions as well, though this festival was primarily about the poetry. For four nights in a row, there were three to four hours of poetry readings. The E-Poetry scene is much more performance-oriented than other venues for electronic writing, and some of the performances were much more video art or performance (for example one work allegedly about the objectification of women included the performer disrobing on stage — providing the Festival with an early controversy, which all such gatherings require) than they were electronic writing as it is usually understood. That was fine with me. Overall, I appreciated my first experience of this very vibrant scene that exists between visual, conceptual, performance, computer, and writing. I also enjoyed the opportunity to meet many writers I have worked with and communicated with extensively online in person, in addition to spending time with old friends in one of the world’s great cities. Rather than a more formal report, I offer you this cellphone video extravaganza — short clips of 30 seconds to a minute of many readings from the festival. Forgive the quality — it was my phone used in dark crowded rooms filled with poets drinking in the poetry, after all.
A Brazilian epoet setting fire to her poems onstage, a la Jimi Hendrix. Read more…
The Electronic Literature Collection UK Launch event I attended Thursday night in Leicester, England went very well. About 40 people turned up for the salon, including many of the former trAce regulars, interested local people, and people who took the train up from London. I gave a short introduction to the Collection, and Kate Pullinger, Jon Ingold, and Chris Joseph, read from the work. In his introduction, John Cayley discussed the context of electronic literature with the traditional literary world and the art world, showed a bit of Translation, and asked us to think about whether this form of literary art was literature or something else entirely. Jon Ingold gave what was possibly the best short introduction I have yet heard interactive fiction, in particular the brutality of the constraints involved in writing IF, before guiding the audience through a short reading of All Roads. In her presentation of her work with Chris Joseph on Inanimate Alice and other projects, Kate Pullinger raised questions about the economic models for electronic writing, and discussed how Inanimate Alice is in part an experiment in developing a commercial model for e-lit. She also discussed iStories, a project she is working on with Chris to develop a commercial toolset of electronic literature applications that would enable authors with little design or programming experience to more easily develop works in Flash. Donna Leishman also sent in a prepared text which a De Montfort Ph.D. student, Jess Laccetti, read to the crowd while Chris demonstrated a bit of Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. We had a short but spirited panel discussion afterwards, discussing the differences between teaching elit as creative writing and teaching it as literature, economic models for electronic lit, and other things. One of the encouraging things about this event was that a number of readers who had never before encountered e-lit were in the audience, were clearly actively interested in what they saw and heard. I also met a Polish Ph.D. student who is currently living in London and writing his dissertation about e-lit, and overheard a couple of people from London say that they heard about the event at Grand Text Auto ; ). It was a very good evening, and I’m grateful to the Institute for Creative Technologies, particularly Chris Joseph for putting it together. Jess has also blogged the event, and posted short videos of Kate Pullinger’s and Jon Ingold’s readings.
Here are the slides from my presentation at the MIT5 Conference. I was presenting on appropriation in electronic literature. The text of my talk (more notes than finished paper, though I’ll come back to this and post the finished paper to the MIT5 site when I get a chance) is below.
Appropriation in Electronic Literature and Digital Culture
A Spectrum of Appropriation
The Oxford English Dictionary cites two definitions of the word “appropriation” that are appropriate to the subject of our discussion here. The first and oldest definition of appropriation, dating back to 1393 is “The making of a thing private property, whether another’s or (as now commonly) one’s own; taking as one’s own or to one’s own use; concr. the thing so appropriated or taken possession of.” A more recent 2002 draft addition is “* Art (orig. U.S.). The practice or technique of reworking the images or styles contained in earlier works of art, esp. (in later use) in order to provoke critical re-evaluation of well-known pieces by presenting them in new contexts, or to challenge notions of individual creativity or authenticity in art.”
It’s important to note that while our main concern is those practices which fall under the latter definition, those practices may also include the former. We can think of the artistic practices of appropriation on a spectrum that ranges from coy modernist practices of referentiality in the work of writers such as TS Eliot, to the practice of recontextualizing and satirizing, such as Marcel Duchamp’s practice in the readymades or L.H.O.O.Q., to the practice of using one literary work as a basic material for another, as in Tom Philips A Humument, to the overt overwriting practices of Kathy Acker. At an extreme end of the spectrum of literary appropriation is plagiarism, simply taking someone else’s work and publishing it under your own name.
There is of course nothing new under the sun, and writers and artists have been making use of appropriation strategies since the ancient Greeks. Shakespeare borrowed both plot and occasionally specific lines from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England Scotland, and Ireland, and nearly every writer since Shakespeare has borrowed from his work, borrowing a plot, a situation, a line or several. The widespread use of appropriation is not nearly as surprising as the fact that a combination of the popular mythology of authorship and the dictates of contemporary copyright law have contributed to a popular illusion that most creative works are in any sense “original,” or that authorship is ever really a matter of a singular genius working in isolation from the texts and authors that have come before.
In our short talks and discussion today, we’ll be focusing on forms of appropriation in electronic literature and other textual digital artifacts that make use of appropriation strategies including reference, homage, overwriting, recontextualization, and outright thievery. We’ll be focusing on the ways that appropriation has affected our own work as writers in the networked digital environment. I’ll focus on the “softer” side of appropriation in electronic literature and digital art: those kinds of appropriation that use materials from other sources in order to recontextualize or comment on the originals in the creation of a new work. Nick will focus on “five-finger digital culture”: bolder and more extreme forms of appropriation in which artists explicitly take the words or material of others. Jill will discuss how appropriation shapes and structures the blogosphere. Following these short talks, we’ll have a more informal group discussion of the relationship between appropriation and collaboration and then welcome questions from the audience.
Before moving to examples of appropriation in electronic literature and in my own work, I’d like first to consider briefly the place of appropriation in network culture more generally.
The Appropriative Nature of the Networked Culture
While appropriation has always been a part of the processes of writing literature and making art more generally, with the growth of the internet and the rise of networked culture, concurrent with the inculcation of “postmodern” collage and pastiche into high and low culture, sampling, remixing, and mashup in music, film, and television, appropriation has become one of the principle modus operandi of culture in our day. The idea of hypertext itself is appropriative, resistant to the idea of any single written text or work of art existing in isolation. In conceptualizing a hypertext system, Ted Nelson wrote of the idea of literature that “Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see. The individual document, at hand, is what we deal with; we do not see the total linked collection of them all at once. But they are there, the documents not present as well as those that are, and the grand cat’s cradle among them all.” (NMR 447) Nelson conceived of the hypertext link as a device to make texts extend to those other texts from which they derived, and those that in turn were derived from them, as well as those that they were in conversation with. Nelson himself, in imagining his unrealized Xanadu hypertext system, clung quite deliberately to the notion of copyright – imagining a system in which every link, every borrowed and remixed piece of content would credit its owner with a micropayment. The hypertext system of the World Wide Web, however, has no similar system baked into it. While some wall their writing behind subscriptions or DRM apparatus that require users to pay to play, the general practice of the web is to simply publish information on the network, making it available to all free of charge. The question of who then owns the information, and the legal questions of what someone else may then do with it aside, the global hypertext network works so well only because we make these texts freely available, and because we feel free to link to any other text we want to.
Stewart Brand identified one of the central tensions of the network era at the first Hacker’s conference in 1984 when he said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” The question, of course, isn’t really what information wants, but what people want. If we consider what authors and artists might want, in comparison to what their audiences might want, we might expect that the creators want to get paid for their work, while the audiences want unfettered access to it. But the equation is not that simple. While artists like to eat, it is in the nature of the vocation to value appreciation more than remuneration. Given a choice between an audience of one hundred devoted readers and a hundred dollar bill, I think many writers would forego the cash. Furthermore, while everyone wants to enjoy the fruits of their labors, artists raised in a multimediated culture recognize that the without unfettered access to other cultural products, without the ability to reference, reuse, remix, and sample from the culture, their work becomes nearly impossible. Imagine, for instance, an extremely copyrighted world in which it would be impossible to reference a television show, or a song, or a brand of toothpaste in a novel without first asking permission and paying a fee. Because so much of the twenty-first century lifeworld is owned, copyrighted and trademarked, it is almost impossible to create art that reflects contemporary reality without appropriating from it.
In his wonderfully plagiarized/pastiched essay in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Letham notes that “Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary.” The first generation raised on the network is furthermore wholeheartedly dismissing those restrictions. Few contemporary college students feel any qualms about downloading any music, television show, or movie they want to. Filesharing technology tends to stay ahead of industry attempts to police it. There is an enormous disjuncture between what is clearly becoming the most widely embraced cultural ethos and the evermore-restrictive copyright regime. There is no question in my mind who will lose this war, it’s already in the hands of a culture accustomed to borrowing, swapping, sharing, or from another perspective, stealing intellectual property. Yet piracy may be more benign than industry fearmongers make it out to be. The same college students who download gigabytes of music and movies illegally still purchase songs on iTunes, leave their dorm rooms to go to the movie theater, and pay exorbitant prices for tickets to see their favorite bands play live. The culture of downloaders might no longer be asking which aspects of their cultural consumption they need to pay for, but rather which they want to support. Having made the leap to rejecting contemporary copyright law altogether, many in this generation are also pushing the boundaries of fair use when it comes to using media artifacts owned by others in creating their own forms of expression.
I’m sure that most attending this conference are familiar with the Creative Commons movement, which attempts to find a middle ground between restrictive copyright regulations and the public domain, enabling creators to license their works in ways that permit that to be shared and reused to extents they determine. Since the birth of the movement, an enormous amount of textual, audio, and video content has been licensed in this fashion. Many artists are welcoming the opportunity to participate in a gift economy, and to contribute their own artwork as a material to be recontextualized, reused, and in a sense, recycled by others. While illegal appropriation of images, audio, and texts was a common practice in the early years of the Web, an increasing proportion of creative artists are making appropriation entirely permissible.
From my perspective as a writer and as a literary scholar, one of the most compelling questions about both these changes in attitude and practice with regard to copyright, and the changes in the nature of digital textuality more generally are what impact they will have on both the nature of literary artifacts, and on the culture in which they are produced and distributed. The emerging culture of electronic literature in particular provides some intriguing models of modes of appropriation. The field of electronic literature is largely one based on a gift economy, in which the majority of authors and journals publish and make their works freely available online. While to date, few works of electronic literature are published under the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, which allow sampling and reuse, one can anticipate that in the future more authors will do so.
Different modes of appropriation are already an important part of the toolbox of electronic authors. I’ll provide a few examples of how electronic writers have made use of appropriation before discussing how appropriation has functioned in my own work.
Appropriation by Reference in Early Hypertext Fiction
Tearing a page from the modernist and postmodernist print authors who preceded them, referential appropriation was a common practice in the works of the authors of the first widely read hypertext fictions, published before the rise of the web in the Storypace platform. Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, published in 1987 by Eastgate systems, for example, included characters named (Lolly and Naussica) after characters in other classic literary works, and includes quotations from other literary works including Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and “Blow Up,” Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger,” quotations from Tolstoy and samples from a variety of poets. In afternoon, Joyce’s mode of appropriation in his fragmented narrative was clearly derivative of familiar modernist referentiality – direct attributed quotes and coy references that Joyce used to signal the reader to particular themes in his work, or to personality traits of particular characters.
Another classic work of Storyspace hypertext, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, published in 1995 by Eastgate Systems, made use of a variety of appropriation techniques in delivering a narrative that is to an extent itself about appropriation–specifically developing the theme of identity as a patchwork of appropriated parts. Patchwork Girl is an explicit response to and recontextualization of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Appropriation as a Method of Revitalizing “Classics” – Translation and Adaptation
Megan Sapnar’s Pushkin Translation
Sapnar and Ankerson’s Figure 5 Media Series
Barry Smylie’s Illiad
The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin
Appropriation as a Method of Harnessing Network Discourse
Many examples of art that use network traffic/metrics/etc. as basis for algorithmically generated art – for example http://www.cinemavolta.com/phaseframe.html
The Impermanence Agent
Newsreader
Appropriation and Collaboration
You and We
My Boyfriend Came Back from the War
Appropriation in My Work
The Unknown – Homage, Overwriting, Identity Appropriation, Network Effects, Meta-Appropriation.
Kind of Blue – Appropriation of characters, situation, and discourse model. Explicit appropriation.
Implementation — Physical appropriation of public spaces as writing media, direct appropriation of some other texts (for example US Iraq war propaganda leaflets).
If you advertise on the internet and make use of an ad that moves from its original position to cover up what I am reading and demand my attention, I will not buy your product EVER. If I am already buying your product, I will boycott it thereafter.
This trend of advertising that zips all around the browser window until you click on it is driving me nuts. It’s an intolerable form of textual pollution.
Eyebeam passes along word of The Creative Act, a collaborative project which has declared February “Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month. Participants in the project will make something creative each day during the month of February, choosing a different theme for each week. The project has some interesting constraints, such as that thing should take no less than 20 minutes and no more than 1 hour to make. Participants then post text, or a photo, or some other documentation to the group blog.
According to the New York Times, “A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.”
This is just sad. Isn’t it time that humans just give up chess playing altogether, and begin trying to take back poetry before the machines take that from us too?
For my birthday, Aurora made a drawing of “Ulcharmin,” my WoW avatar (level 57 Orc Hunter). An appropriate gift, since I’m currently working on my essay “The Corporate and the Quotidian in World of Warcraft” for the World of Warcraft seminar we’re having here at UiB later this week
I’ll be there in spirit and via videoconference Friday. If you’re in the area, you should definitely attend.
: AUTOSTART – A Festival of Digital Literature
:
. Kelly Writers House, October 26 & 27
: Celebrating the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1
: MACHINE series # Electronic Literature Organization
: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/autostart.html
:
:=:#=:.#=::==.=….:…> Charles Bernstein
.#.=..=:#.=::===…:.:.> Jim Carpenter
::.=.==…::==:.=#:…#> Mary Flanagan
:#.:…:.:=#..=.=.=:==:> N. Katherine Hayles
:.=#:.===.:.:::.=..#..=> Daniel C. Howe
:=#:::=:.#:=.=.=….=..> Aya Karpinska
..:.==#==::#==:……:.> Aaron Levy
:#=.=..:..=.::=::#..==.> Marjorie Luesebrink
::=:=:…:=..#.==#.=.:.> Nick Montfort
…..:==::.=.#:.=.==#.:> Stuart Moulthrop
:=…=#:…:::=#===..:.> Jason Nelson
:#..=.==..:=.=..:#.=:::> Jena Osman
:..=.=.=.=#:=:#.:…=::> Bob Perelman
:::=..=:.===.:#:.=#….> Aaron A. Reed
:….:.:.===#=.:=:#=..:> Scott Rettberg
.==:.=…:..#.::=:.=.=#> Ron Silliman
.=…:=#.=:..=:..#.==::> Brian Kim Stefans
:#.::…=:.:.==.==:..#=> Stephanie Strickland
…=..=#=::=.=..:.:=:.#> Noah Wardrip-Fruin
:
: All events except the tour of Slought take place at the
: Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania,
. Philadelphia, PA
:
: THURSDAY Oct 26
:
: 1:00-2:30 pm Discussion (Arts Cafe)
. A conversation about writing and literature in the digital
. age, featuring four prominent poets:
: > Charles Bernstein – University of Pennsylvania
: > Jena Osman – Temple University
: > Bob Perelman – University of Pennsylvania
: > Ron Silliman – Silliman’s Blog
:
: 2:30-5:30 pm The Open Machine Open House
: Electronic literature available for reading and discussion
: throughout the downstairs area, with guided tours at
. 3:30 pm & 4:30 pm by two Electronic Literature Collection,
: volume 1 edtitors:
: > Stephanie Strickland – New York City
: > Nick Montfort – University of Pennsylvania
:
: 4:00-5:30 pm Wet Digits Workshop
: An introductory workshop for those new to HTML and digital
: writing, led by the editors of The New Media Reader:
. > Noah Wardrip-Fruin – University of California, San Diego
: > Nick Montfort – University of Pennsylvania
: [[[ RSVP REQUIRED: contact wh@writing.upenn.edu ]]]
:
: 5:30-7:30 pm Reading (Arts Cafe)
: Presentations of electronic literature by Electronic
: Literature Collection, volume 1 contributors:
: > Mary Flanagan – Hunter College
: > Aya Karpinska – Brown University
: > Stuart Moulthrop – University of Baltimore
: > Aaron A. Reed – Salt Lake City
. > Noah Wardrip-Fruin – University of California, San Diego
.
: FRIDAY Oct 27
:
: 10:30-11:30 am Tour of Slought Foundation (4017 Walnut St)
. Slought Foundation broadly encourages new futures for
: contemporary life through public programs featuring
: international artists and theorists.
: > Aaron Levy – Slought Foundation Executive Director
:
. 1:00-4:00 pm Electronic Writing Jam (Room 202)
: A time to write collaboratively and to discuss forms,
: techniques, and technologies, hosted by:
: > Jim Carpenter – University of Pennsylvania
: Participants include readers and editors from AUTOSTART’s
: Thursday program as well as:
: > Daniel C. Howe – Brown University
: > Brian Kim Stefans – Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
: Participants by videoconference include two editors of
: the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1:
. > N. Katherine Hayles – University of California, Los Angeles
: > Scott Rettberg – University of Bergen, Norway
: An editor of volume 2 and volume 1 contributor:
: > Marjorie Luesebrink – Irvine Valley College
: And volume 1 contributor:
. > Jason Nelson – Griffith University, Australia
: [[[ RSVP REQUIRED: contact wh@writing.upenn.edu ]]]
:
:::::::.:::::.::::…::::::::.:::::.::::.:::::::.:::::::.:.::::::::::::
Via GTxA, calls for papers and works for two upcoming electronic literature centered conferences in Europe: E-Poetry 2007 will be held from May 20-23 in Paris at the Université Paris VIII. Submissions of both papers and epoetry are being accepted. Full papers must be submitted by December 10, 2006. Re-Mediating Literature will be held July 4-6, 2007 at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Keynote speakers for that conference include Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Samuel Weber, and Jan Baetens. 250 word abstracts for that conference are due November 6, 2006.
Scott Rettberg (CV) is a Chicago native who now lives in Norway. He writes, and writes about new media and electronic literature. Rettberg is the cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is an associate professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen, and is the proud father of Jessica Ann Rettberg.
Kind of Blue, a serial novel for email. Frame Journal of Technology and Culture (August 2003).
Implementation, a novel on stickers. With Nick Montfort. 2005.
The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, eds. An edited CD-ROM and online anthology of selected works of electronic literature. College Park, MD: The Electronic Literature Organization, 2006.
Tokyo Garage. A remix of Nick Montfort's Taroko Garage poetry generator, for the imaginary city. 2009.
“Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing,” “Written on the Body: An Interview with Shelley Jackson,” and “Avant-Gaming: An Interview with Jane McGonigal.” (Complied PDF) The Iowa Review Web (July 2006).
“Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft.” Book chapter in World(s) of Warcraft, a Critical Anthology of World of Warcraft Studies. Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming 2008.
The Unknown, An Anthology: an anthology of fiction and poetry by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton, published in 2002 by Spineless Books. PDF free for the clicking, buy the book from Spineless Books.
Piercing Through, a play I wrote back in 1997 about a group of college students studying existentialism together during the first Gulf War (more fun than it sounds), which was selected by the Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative and performed as a staged reading at the Aranoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Nordic Digital Culture Network, a Nordplus Higher Education network which we have been working to develop for the past year. Linking together digital culture programs from the Nordic and Baltic region, the Digital Culture Network facilitates curriculum development, student and faculty exchanges, and innovative teaching ideas and best practices. Students studying in the programs in the network will benefit from increased student and teacher mobility and enhanced opportunities for study. All the programs in the network — the University of Bergen in Norway, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland — are leaders in the field of digital culture in their respective countries. Network participants will facilitate student and faculty exchange ranging from express visits to semester or yearlong exchanges, joint programs and master’s degrees. We are launching network activities this activities this fall and spring with faculty exchanges between the institutions, and will add programs, such as student exchanges and a summer school for digital culture, in coming years. I also encourage students from other countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere to explore the exchange and M.A. program opportunities detailed on the site. For instance, both Bergen and Jyväskylä welcome applications to our M.A. programs in digital culture from well qualified international students. While international students are responsible for their own living expenses, they are not required to pay tuition.
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