Review of the Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 1

"Electronic Literature" - ten years ago, when digital poetry was really beginning to take root in the Internet boom, this term was still very foreign. Even now, muttering those two words in that order generally musters nothing more than a blank stare. Take one term that we're all pretty familiar with - electronic - and throw in something which pretty much bores the typical person - poetry - and a small black hole of thought is usually conjured.

Using mixed media is nothing new, even outside of niche art communities. Before Warhol was messing with pictures, William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience is considered by many to be an old school hybrid work, and father of many of today's mixed media artists. Going back far beyond Blake's time, poetry was orignally an oral tradition, marrying song with language. Mixing forms of art together is certainly not a modern invention, yet Electronic Literature and Digital Poetry seem to have something unique going. The obvious secret to this apparent uniqueness is - form. The form of Electronic Literature mirrors the form of our economy, with the rise of the Information Age so is there a rise in writing which explores the digital medium. Perhaps this is why - once we get past the dumfounded stares and apathetic grins - Electronic Literature has the ability to resonate with those who have experienced it.

The Electronic Literature Collection brings together some of the most successful artworks in this fluid and relatively new realm of digital literature. The artists who choose to take this leap are not afraid to work in unexplored water, and generally digital works of this nature are more experimental by conventional measures. Be warned that this is not your typical poetry by any stretch. Many of the works are definitely recognizable as poetry, yet there's always something that disturbs our traditional sense of poetics. This goes beyond the fact that we have to view it on our computer screens instead of in a book - the works in this collection draw upon something that in today's consumer culture has become an extremely profitable tool - interactivity.

To varying degrees, each piece plays with the interactivity of reader and text. In print, this is always the case - we're always experiencing the text, so there's constantly an interaction occurring. However, the Electronic Literature Collection takes this to a previously unrealized level. One of the better known pieces, Kerry Lawrynovicz's Girl's Day Out asks the reader to not only take part in the work, but to actively investigate the text. The reader is first faced with many options, not unlike the title menu of a DVD. If the reader selects "Poem" from the options, he or she is presented with a block of text. But this text is not all it seems. Click on the text, interact with it, and it changes. We find that within this block of fairly straight-forward text, there is actually a poem or perhaps even several poems. Lawrynovicz challenges the reader's notion of what poetry is, and asks the reader to think about text as containing a multitude of meanings rather that one fixed meaning.

A multitude of meanings - all right, now I just sounds like I'm in love with post-modernism or something, but that is the type of reading that the Electronic Literature Collection asks for. It is the type of reading that the Information Age asks for, and this is evident throughout the works in the volume. Carving in Possibilitesis another example of how digital poetry plays with interactivity. Deena Larson creates a tool for the reader, but in effect the reader creates the poem. Depending on where you place the mouse, different lines of poetry will appear. This method ensures that there is no real beginning or end to the poem, it is created dynamically by the user. As you read through the poem, the blurred picture in the background becomes clearer and clearer. The idea that the reader creates meaning out of a text as he or she reads it is not revolutionary, but Larson takes this theory one step further - with Carving it's not just the meaning that's being created dynamically, it's the text itself. While many of the elements of the piece are fixed (for example, there is a finite number of lines that can be used to create the poem), the text is never identical. Each time you read the piece, you have read a different text.

If the blithering nonsense I've been spouting out here sounds in anyway interesting to you, I encourage you to check out the Collection ASAP. I've only touched on two of many pieces, some of which take these ideas and push them even further, some which bring them back down to a more accessible realm. Print will never die, hopefully, but it's valuable to take note of the artists that are really pushing the boundaries. And as our culture becomes even more entrenched in technology, this type of art is bound to be a resonant medium for human expression.