Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera. She is the author of net art works, like
This is the source
Exhibits focusing specifically on Electronic Literature have been mounted at galleries, libraries, universities, convention spaces, and parks and other outside venues. The Electronic Literature Organization’s 2012 Media Art Show, for example, hosted exhibits in five different locations in Morgantown, including a community arts center, local gallery, the university library, a department’s conference room, and the city’s amphitheater, while the MLA 2012 and 2013 exhibits were held at the Washington State and Hynes convention centers, respectively. The Library of Congress, the most important repository of books in the U.S., hosted
An analysis of the challenges of curating electronic literature exhibits.
Beginning with the
fundamental activities at the core of Digital Humanities
the selection and organization of materials in an interpretative framework, argument or exhibit,allows for
artifacts [to] be seen being shaped by and shaping complex networks of influence, production, dissemination, and reception, animated by multilayered debates and historical forces
Electronic literature is a challenging art form to curate. It is described as born digital works
in this age of ubiquitous computing where net-based electronic literature is available on the web and, so, anySecond,time –– and now with wireless technology, anywhere –– how can a curator make exhibits mounted in brick and mortar exhibit space vital?
in light of rapidly changing technology where platforms and programs are rendered obsolete within mere years, what is the best way for a curator to present electronic literary works produced on systems that have been rendered obsolete?The former question suggests, what I call, a
The challenge of availability for curating net-based electronic literature lies in the fact that it involves digital objects whose natural habitat is the digital space of the web. Exhibits I have curated, for example, offer works that are linked from the artist’s own site or some sort of online archive or database. One can just as easily access them from the comfort of one’s own home or office without even needing to visit a museum, gallery, or library to experience them. Yet because of the unique presentation and interpretation that a curated exhibit can offer, viewers can enhance their understanding of electronic literature when they experience it in conjunction with other exhibited work and in community with other viewers. In fact, those of us who grew up playing video games are primed to interact with digital objects in the presence of others in physical space. This experience can be extended beyond gaming into other forms of interaction with digital objects, like works of electronic literature exhibited a gallery or library. This line of argument follows that of Vince Dziekan, Curator of
stag[ed] virtual experienceswith
events that bring values, beliefs . . . into the public domain
museums without walls
contemporary [venues] of the future will exhibit the virtual and the real alongside one another, crossing and overlapping each one’s boundaries, creating an amazing visual and interactive experience within and without walls
an arena for contemplation of the unique artwork and its aesthetic immediacy to staging virtual experiences
the museum without wallssuggests that
the primary value of artworks . . . no longer reside[s] in them as physical objects.They can be regarded as
moments of artrather than
worksof art
In
[w]orks of art are rarely encountered in isolationbut rather
are experienced in relation to each other and articulated by the architectonics of a building and the unconscious choreography of other people(qtd. in
dialectical approachto curating that
move[s] away from what might be termed as a broadcast model of distribution (entailing a one-way communication approach) by introducing degrees of openness (access, participation) and feedback (exchanges, transactions). . . . This shift entails ideological choices that challenge the [museum’s, gallery’s, etc.] ability to respond to a changing mandate, from one founded on its presentation role to that of providing an infrastructure for aesthetic experience.
black boxassociated with performance and action rather than a
white cubeassociated with emptiness and neutrality
developing critically and creatively upon the dialectical relationship between virtuality and the art of exhibition
I began thinking about the challenge of availability in 2009 when designing the curatorial plan for the exhibit,
connection between object and symbol(Gast,
I followed a similar strategy at another exhibit,
My second question focuses on obsolescence and the challenges it poses for
presenting works in exhibits –– what I refer to as the
Christiane Paul addresses this issue for media art in her seminal essay,
the digital is embedded in various layers of commercial systems and technological industry that continuously define standards for the materialities of any kind of hardware components
lowest common denominator for defining new media artis
its computability
mode of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and dissemination
hypertext fictionor
kinetic poetry.Computability –– functions made manifest by characters expressed in written code and which drives the words, images, video, animation, sounds, etc., of the work
So, what
Davidfollowed by
Jennyin the next query, for example, brings up episodes about the relationship between these two people: David’s messy apartment that Jenny recalls, the picture of David’s former lover that Jenny tears into tiny pieces and places back into his wallet.
Malloy sold Version 2.0 from her home as a hand-made artist package. As far as she knows, only three copies of the complete work exists, two that she donated to Duke University along with other materials that now comprise the Judy Malloy Collection and one divided, at the moment, between Malloy and me. Recognizing that people do not generally keep Apple IIe computers lying around their homes and offices, Malloy produced a web version in 2012, referred to as
Additionally, as curator I am taxed with caring about (to care
) the unique features of
Great stuff, Judy,one reader wrote on December 2,
the ideas and the content are both up to ridiculously high standards. Thanks for the fresh air.Another:
What jacket are you wearing?
Translation theory holds that translation is ultimately a betrayal of the text by
the translator
Because this essay also aims to raise awareness of curating as a form of scholarship, I next provide a detailed look at the various exhibits of electronic literature I have curated over the last six years, starting with the 2008 Electronic Literature Media Arts Show,
Co-curated with John Barber,
electronic literature exhibitsby 17 artists or artist teams; the Fireside Room at Clark College featured net art and videos by, again, 17 artists or teams; the Firstenberg Student Commons at the host university –– Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV) –– featured early works of electronic literature created by 18 different artists and produced prior to the introduction of the internet browser. An invited show, this third exhibit utilized vintage computers and media that were either part of my personal collection or lent to me by colleagues. For the two juried shows, we received entries from 120 artists, of which the judges selected 34.
The choice of venues was purposeful. The gallery, normally used to showcase fine art, provided the opportunity to present electronic literature as both visual and sonic art forms. Until our show, North Bank had never featured media art of any kind. Its location downtown, with good foot traffic, made the work accessible to a public unfamiliar with electronic literature. The Clark College and WSUV meeting rooms, usually home to students and faculty congregating between classes, placed electronic literature squarely in an informal academic setting. The WSUV exhibit, with its vintage Macintosh computers and docents standing ready to educate visitors about the work, especially, received much attention and served as the catalyst for the article about the conference and exhibit that ran on the front page of the weekend section of the
Another important aspect of the three exhibits was the robust collateral materials that accompanied them. The exhibit’s website provided information about the artists’ works and venues. Designed by local artist, Jeanette Altmann and coded by Barber, the website offered a good account of the event, from the artists to the works and continues to serve as the exhibit’s archival site now indexed in both the Electronic Literature Organization’s
A year later, in 2009, interested in the impact of the online presence of art, art catalogs, and exhibits, I mounted
This was the first exhibit in which I applied curatorial approaches commonly associated with fine art shows to an exhibit that highlighted electronic literature and media art. Unlike
A year and a half later, I co-curated, with Lori Emerson and Kathi Inman Berens,
160 works by artists who create literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance. The works presented at this exhibit have been carefully selected by the curators because they represent a cross-section ofborn digital — that is, works created on and meaningfully experience through a computing device — from countries like Brazil, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Spain, and highlight literary art produced from the late 1980s to the present. Thus, the exhibit aims to provide humanities scholars with the opportunity to experience, first-hand, this emergent form of literature, one that we see as an important form of expression in, as Jay David Bolter calls it, thislate age of print.
Emerson, Inman Berens, and I set four goals for the exhibit:
The exhibit was, for me, the response to my own call to action issued in the article, published in
to bring elit to the classroom, to help promote it in the contemporary literary scene, and support artists who produce it so that it can foster and bolster literary sensibilities and literacies of future generations
Additionally, the new audience for whom we were designing the exhibit required us to rethink the language we used for describing and organizing the show. In structuring the exhibit, for example, we combined concepts found in fine art with those common to Digital Humanities scholars, whom we viewed as our mostly likely primary audience. This approach resulted in the works being divided into the three categories we named
first crowdsourced novel
A report, published later at
I followed up the MLA exhibit with a juried show, once again, for the Electronic Literature Organization. This show, entitled
The curatorial design aimed to match each venue to the art and, then, place the art within an appropriate, or specific, space inside the venue. For example, at the gallery and art center, we used pedestals for the computer stations, while at Colson Hall, home of the English Department, we placed computer stations on tables and provided chairs for sitting down and studying the works. In terms of site-specificity, we placed Jim Bizzocchi’s ambient video in the MAC at the turn of the marble staircase leading to the second floor –– a space that allowed the delicate sound of the water trickling over rocks found in his video to echo and draw visitors’ attention as they entered the building. At the library we installed
An exhibit website produced in advance of the event provided conference attendees with detailed information about the artists, works, venues, as well as with a site map and a curatorial statement outlining the vision for the exhibit. Five trained undergraduate docents I brought with me and the five graduate docents studying under Baldwin provided assistance to both exhibit visitors and conference attendees. The exhibit also introduced a series of retrospectives, the first ever offered at an ELO conference, featuring prominent artists whose work has inspired others. Honored in this way were Alan Bigelow, J. R. Carpenter, M.D. Coverley, Judy Malloy, and Jason Nelson.
The MLA invited Inman Berens, Emerson, and I back to curate an exhibit for its 2013 convention taking place from January 3-5. Emerson was unable to join us, but Inman Berens and I, along with six undergraduate docents traveled to Boston, MA to mount the show. This one, entitled
accessstated in the MLA’s convention title and having already established the previous year electronic literature as an artifact for exploration by humanities scholars, Inman Berens and I aimed at providing more opportunity for in-depth study of electronic literature. So, rather than 160 works organized into 10 categories, as found in the previous exhibit, we offered 30 organized into five. And instead of mounting computers on pedestals, we placed them on large, round tables with accompanying chairs on which to sit and comfortably study.
Also available was a special
lingered for upwards of an hour, even two, immersing themselves in the various generic stations and talking with curators and other scholars about connections between their own research and the exhibited e-lit.We found that
the natural affinity between e-literature and digital humanities manifested itself in conversations that . . . spark[ed] scholarly collaboration on projects, speaking invitations and publicationsand discovered that
young scholars [were thinking about revising] their courses of study and dissertation plans to account for electronic works they encounter[ed] at MLA e-lit exhibits
Probably the most challenging exhibit I have ever mounted was
But it was also intended to achieve another, more subtle, goal –– that is, to establish electronic literature as
make the argument –– one expressed experientially rather than in written form –– that electronic literature is a natural outgrowth of literary experimentation and human expression with roots in print literary forms and, so, constitutes an organic form generating from the dynamic human spirit that is evolving, will continue to evolve through time and medium. No matter the medium –– orality, writing, print, electronic, mobile –– give an artist something, anything, to create with –– air, animal skin, paper, computer screen –– and she or he will find a way to use it for making art. This impulse is, after all, a feature of our humanity.
The overarching conceptual framework underpinning the exhibit centered, therefore, on the experimental nature of electronic literature and its connection to print literature, in general. There were five impulses toward experimentation reflected in the stations: from concrete to kinetic, from cut up to broken up, from pong to literary games, from the Great American Novel to multimodal narratives, and from artists’ books to electronic art.
The curatorial design I produced served to visualize this point. The exhibit was laid out into three main sections. Print books and other analog materials from the library’s collections were displayed on the
The exhibit was reviewed at
I followed the Library of Congress exhibit two months later with a small show for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), at Victoria, Canada, that was open for one night only on June 6.
Held at the opening night reception for DHSI, the exhibit, for reasons stated previously, garnered much traffic. In fact, in its short two-hour run, it saw twice as many visitors as the MLA 2013 exhibit did in three days. The trained undergraduate docents Grell and I brought with us proved a necessity and a valuable resource. They helped field questions and assisted the hundreds of visitors who crowded into the hallway that served as our exhibit space. The event resulted in an invitation to Hamilton College, to give a workshop in the spring 2014 about how to teach electronic literature, as well as an invitation to teach a week-long course on the topic of electronic literature at DHSI 2014.
The final exhibit I discuss is
The show was laid out into two main sections. The first presented three of the four early works of digital literature that comprise the current preservation efforts of the
The work I have been doing for these last six years to promote electronic literature through curating works has involved reading and studying, designing and building, writing and thinking, organizing and structuring, innovating and inventing, judging and assessing, and negotiating and coercing. I have created my own media archaeology lab, replete with 54 vintage computers dating back to 1983, for experimenting with producing, preserving, and curating electronic literature. I am involved in preservation activities, like the
The author wants to acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of the Pathfinders project, which made it possible to gain access to information to Judy Malloy’s work, without which much of this paper could not have been written.