J. R. Carpenter: I went to art school. I majored in studio art. I minored in photocopy. I wrote. I had always written. My writing often had pictures in. I assumed this wasn’t allowed. I made hybrid things. Circular stories, distributed narratives, embroidered sentences, slide-show stories, spoken-word performances, hand-stitched book-works, photocopied mini-books, zines.
I graduated from art school in 1995, the year Netscape 1.1 came out. I applied for a visual arts thematic residency at The Banff Centre. The theme was “Telling Stories, Telling Tales.” I wrote a fictional artists’ statement in which I claimed to be a writer. I asked for a computer in my studio. I’d never had a computer before. I made a small bookwork which told a circular story, but when people got to the end they just stopped. Because that’s how books work. The guy1 in the studio next door said: If you make this in HTML, the last page can link to the first page and the story can go around and around. So that’s what I did. My first web-based work was called Fishes and Flying Things.2 I uploaded it directly to The Banff Centre server in November 1995.
No one knew what to make of this work, least of all me. Artist friends informed me that web-based work was elitist because so few people could access it. Writer friends assured me that the internet would never catch on. None of us could have imagined then what the web would become, what writing would become, what place the digital would come to occupy in our world. I for one would never have imagined that I would be invited back to The Banff Centre a dozen years later to contribute to the creation of a Literary Arts residency program which would support such a wide range of hybrid physical, digital, and performative literary practices.
Charged with representing the digital explorations undertaken within the In(ter)ventions program over the past five years, I asked a number of past mentors, guest speakers, and participants a variation on one question — a question of becoming digital. “If I were to ask myself the sort of question I have in mind,” I told the respondents, “it might be something like: How does your web-based work come from the photocopy machine? My answer might begin: I went to art school . . .” The circular logic has not escaped me. If I had written this introduction in HTML, the last sentence could link to the first and this story of becoming digital could go around and around.
JRC: Brian Kim Stefans, when you were a guest speaker at In(ter) ventions 2012 you showed us Scriptor,3 a graphics application you developed for the creation of what you call “hand-drawn,” vector-based typefaces and doodles. The letterforms Scriptor creates retain a mark of hand-eye (dis)coordination. You contextualized this digital work with images of experiments with letterforms undertaken in the visual art world. My question to you is: How does Scriptor come from drawing and painting?
Brian Kim Stefans: I have a friend with a reading disability who, when writing out a phrase or sentence longhand, can’t help but go back and “correct” his initial execution of certain letters repeatedly, such that many letters have been overwritten several times. The writing seems like a trace of some massive interior struggle — some battleground with a chaotic interior and its attempt to find a civilized face to the exterior world.
Another inspiration for Scriptor is the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made large canvases created with paint-sticks characterized by a dynamic, strangely coherent, amalgam of graffiti tags, poems, and recurring iconography. His exploded cartoon figures morph into lines, these lines into letters, and these letters into words — a visual taxonomy in constant flux.
Philip Guston’s collaborations with poets such as Clark Coolidge, Stanley Kunitz, and William Corbet, again involving a recurring iconography more famously known through his paintings (Klan figures, Nixon caricatures, toxic cigarettes, etc.), also provide an inspiration. His misanthropic vulgarity, unrefined structures of artful (dis)equilibrium, obtain their power from their crudity — they seem like existential shots-in-the-dark, despite coming from the hand of an artist known throughout his career for his careful brush and exquisite colour sense.
Cy Twombly’s large mythic canvases, which often involve text alluding the classic sources, sacrifice the “all-over”-edness of classic abstract expressionism and court wild imbalances between presence and absence that never seem close to being resolved. His canvases, perhaps inspired by the paintings of Jean Dubuffet, court a sort of image of insanity or instability that is inherently dramatic and yet, given the richness of the colours and composition and courting some semblance of compositional balance, invigorating.
Other artists I’ve thought about include Ed Ruscha, in his use of single words or short phrases embedded in ambient, richly textured fields; Robert Grenier, in his nearly illegible poems scrawled in various coloured pens; Stan Brakhage and other filmmakers, who treat each frame of a film as a discrete image such that, when presented at twenty-four fps, the norms of “persistence of vision” upon which realist cinema is predicated are thwarted; and Stéphane Mallarmé, who first broached the idea of using the page space as a field for exploring the asymmetries of visual textual composition.
I’d like to think I’m working “against the grain” when it comes to digital visualization, opting out of cinematic realism — in which the flat screen is to simulate the lived reality of bifocal vision — and instead going for, in my mind, a more obtainable form of simulation: depicting the flat plain of a page drawn upon with a pen or pencil.
JRC: The letterforms Scriptor creates can be redrawn at a limitless number of frames per second, with various randomization methods determining how the form is perverted from its basic shape, how often this occurs, and where on the screen space it is placed. The possibilities are endless. What kinds of projects could Scriptor be used for?
BKS: Scriptor could be used for public art projects, such as projections on/in abandoned structures, encouraging contemplation of issues of form and decay. Scriptor could add a new dimension to video games, for example in the area of object typology. Some commercial game designers have used a sort of “brushstroke” style along with cel-shading to attain a more stylized look to their three-dimensional worlds. With the type of transitioning between legibility and scrawl, between stability and chaos, and between legibility as one thing and legibility as another, peculiar to the Scriptor project, I think a new element could be added to gameplay that more advanced forms of visual simulation would not be able to achieve.
I’d like to use Scriptor to create literary works in which the letterforms seem, themselves, to be engaged in a struggle between an inchoate interior and its determination to “dress up” for a public exposure. I’d like to create pieces where the issues of signal and noise, letter and scrawl, composition and deterioration, etc., are constantly, insistently being dramatized.
JRC: Stuart Moulthrop, when you were a participant in In(ter)ventions 2013 you worked on R, an ongoing digital work based on a print novel written by Michael Joyce. In the late 1980s you and Joyce were among the earliest practitioners of hypertext fiction. I am intrigued by the long line of inquiry that set you on the path of R. I would like to formulate a question which prompts you to answer with an account of the questions that prompted you to attempt to answer with R which is of course a piece which offers more questions than answers . . . My recursive feedback loop of a question for you is: How does R come from a novel that comes from the internet?
Stuart Moulthrop: One day on the long scuffle (2007) I came across a book by Michael Joyce entitled Was: annales nomadique — further bedecked (because you can never have enough subtitles) a novel of internet.4 In an inevitably polyglot way, that last phrase led to the Deutschprachigen question, Was ist? How can there be a novel of internet?
The pullulating voices in this novel speak Welsh, Hindi, Polish, all the metroeurotongues, as well as Spanish from the Yucatan and Argentine, several varieties of American, C, church Latin, and Human-Genome Markup. The scenes dance restlessly round the planet (this being an allusion; as we read in Was, “see Wenders, W., 1991”) — from someplace possibly Venice to Foggy Bottom, from Calgary to Tikrit, Bamako to Poughkeepsie, from any city starting with L (not London) to Paris, in which we are always. How do you talk about a book like this? What do you do with a novel of such relentless, planetary sampling, if you don’t happen to work for the NSA?
What, I found myself asking, does this book want from me? Was er wünschen?
Thus appeared the question of desire. What the novel of internet wants, I found myself wanting to say, is a feedback loop. If anything of internet affiliates to the ongoing worldwide info-dance, then one must keep dancing, step on out, advance the mix. Right reading requires recursion, remix, and perhaps other words of similar resonance.
So I began feeding bits of Was to the Google machine, collecting interesting results, indexing and arranging same, engineering various machines of combination. Thus have come to light many marvels. The surface area of an adult human foreskin (the lost what was, to some) will cover a three-by-five card. Chinese mariners settled the Virginia piedmont in the fifteenth century. British royals visiting the Canadian prairie are expected to rock the Smithbilt. Satellites tumble and ping, sixty cycles per second. Some search terms (Russian whores in satin) defy the operations of metaphor. Still the language radiates, and reaching some boundary layer, provides return.
These recursions belong to something that goes beyond (or on with) reading. We could speak of overproduction, of general economies and cursed shares, of what mavens on the left coast intriguingly call “the surplus audience.” In this exercise we might find, momentarily, something like identity, or plausible alias. This text welcomes us as the multiple, the many, the always already lost. We comprise/embody more than any content can withhold. You will know us instead as the opposite of content, which is to say DATA — that which is given in, given over, always in the long run foregone (a given), but light on our feet in the meantime. We are packet-switched and scattered, endlessly indexed and surveilled, but not conclusively run to ground, not yet. R stands for all of us cast upon the networks, hopelessly lost in the love that was, and for a while at least, goes on.
That was. We are.
JRC: Darren Wershler, when you were a guest speaker at In(ter)ventions 2011 you spoke about the blurring of what is and isn’t literature on an internet full of textual excesses, about how concrete poetry is too easy in a world of text visualisations, about data flow and data stoppages, and about the paradox of data pours such as ads appearing in the body of journalistic texts. You have produced a number of books — if not “of the internet” than certainly out of the internet. In particular, I am fascinated by the paradox presented by the book-works you have created in collaboration with Bill Kennedy, Apostrophe,5 and Update.6 These print books are born out of digital processes. When the digital process stops working, the books become snapshots of that process. My question to you is: How do your print book projects come from textual excess?
Darren Wershler: Over thirty years ago, legendary avant-garde poet and small-press publisher Bob Cobbing remarked that “there is no point whatsoever in adding to the quantity of poetry in this world. The world has quite enough poetry already. Probably too much. Far too much. The only excuse for being a poet today is to add to the quality of poetry, to add a quality which was not there before.”7 From such a perspective, the job of the artist or writer is not to produce more of something already recognizable, but to select and reframe the things that have been overlooked, literally making difference. Rather than adding to the bulk of unread books on the shelf, why not reframe big chunks of culture in a context other than the one in which they originally appeared, so that we can think about just how odd they actually are?
We’ve had a hundred years of exquisitely tasteful small-scale appropriation, suitable for gallery installation or short-run artisanal printing. Such practices have served as a life-preserver for the shopworn figure of the artist as genius. The world doesn’t need any more of that either. It’s time for other perspectives.
At its best, what conceptual writing did was to draw attention to the rhetorical aspects of text that canonical literature usually neglects: weather reports, legal transcripts, social media feeds, stock quotes, Usenet posts, and so on. These texts are the ‘dark matter’ of literature; they make up the bulk of everything that’s written, but we habitually pretend that they don’t matter in any capacity other than the moment.
John Guillory describes such texts as belonging to what he calls “information genres.”8 In order to use them to convey that peculiar modern invention we call “information,” we have to pretend that they have no rhetorical value of their own that might taint it. By repackaging great swaths of information in media and formats other than the ones in which it initially appeared, conceptual writing drew attention to the fact that all writing is poetic — it always says more than we intend, and we assign value to it in keeping with large sets of external factors that have little to do with the ostensible content.
At its worst, what conceptual writing did was produce more poetry, and more poets. The question that remains is how to do something that poetry has never been capable of: recognizing the things that look just like it and transpire all around it that are not published as poetry, don’t circulate through literary communities, aren’t received by people as literary texts, but nevertheless could be formally indistinguishable from it . . . and not colonizing them for poetry in the process.
The price will be actually giving up the last vestiges of the Romantic author, which even a century of modernity refused to erase. In its place, we might install some sort of invisible but open conspiracy that’s capable of appreciating the tactical efficiencies of the things we want to dismiss. If whatever follows conceptual writing really desires to operate differently from culture at large, it would need to produce writers who are willing to hurtle into the void before the laurels can be handed out.
JRC: David Jhave Johnston, you were a participant in In(ter)ventions 2012. You have been experimenting with digital video, text visualization, and random text generation for many years. Oddly enough, I first encountered your work through a print journal. In 2007 The Capilano Review published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies which included an essay you wrote about your digital poetic process.9 You noted that the first step was to “record a lot of little distinctive audio/video files.” Indeed, almost every time we’ve met you’ve been collecting, recoding, note-taking in some form or other. The question I have for you is: How does your digital poetry emerge from a practice of collecting and archiving?
David Jhave Johnston: About a decade or so ago, I built a generative video-poem that randomized an array of files, displaying file-names as lines in a huge shuffled poem. The phrases appeared temporarily above and beneath videos of a decaying cat swaying in river water, tidal flats decimated by rushing sand, and a nymph shedding its carapace to become a dragonfly. Because randomization functions controlled the display (of txt-audio-video: tav), and the bodies were dissolving back into the oceanic archive, I called the piece Interstitial.10 Its image-sound-word conjunctions emerged as shyly and serendipitously as wind might juggle carrion scent. Meaning dripped from raw chance. The archive grew alive with dead things.
At In(ter)ventions 2012 I pillaged the PennSound mp3 archive and built a device called MUPs11 that interwove the voices of poets, so that all spoke as one, intertwined, listening to each other, picking up the poem as each paused, sometimes abruptly, often with dramatic pauses. Dead spoke with living, the continuum awoke.
JRC: The biological body seems to pervade both of these digital projects, or at least, the ghost of the body. How do you account for this presence?
DJJ: I’m in-mortal!
Any discussion about “preserving the archive” is also asking, at a different level, the question “will it live, forever?” Archives are quests for immortality. Behind abstract effort lies embodied deliriousness. William Carlos Williams describes Ponce de Leon pursuing the fountain of eternal youth as a ceaseless slaughterer. Archives kill the idea of death.
Tech is today’s archive: the contemporary delusional reassurance. I am writing these words on a mobile phone (Android 4.2.2) using a Swype keyboard that allows my fingers to swoop instead of peck. I am lying on my back, the phone held above my chest, an illuminated rectangle in a dark room. Because its battery is low, it is tethered to its charger; because the cord is short, my body must contort slightly to the left. In spite of this I feel free, freer than sitting at a desk. Every so often the phone (or myself, my awkward error-prone hands) gets a word wrong. I pause in my skating. I scan the display for predictive suggestions, and sometimes adopt a word from the array above the keyboard, using the networked AI reservoir as once I used intuition, inserting those products of algorithmic paths into my brain. A mysterious reversal: mind-fed machine feeds mind. Ditto intuition, circa decay.
This phone does not know the word “interstices,” it writes “intestines” instead, and for a moment it is more right than I am. Then I add “interstices” to the dictionary; the archive swells. In this sweet pod of youth, writing swipes onward.
JRC: Lori Emerson, when you were a guest speaker at In(ter)ventions 2013 you spoke to us about the role of the typewriter in creating “dirty concrete poetry,” and about the Media Archaeology Lab12 you founded at Boulder University. Much of your recent work has turned to machines to answer (or pose) questions about the texts they produce. I’d like to turn that relationship upside-down to ask you: How does the study of the machine come from the text it has produced?
Lori Emerson: I’ve framed most of my writing on media poetics in terms of how the interface (whether fascicle, typewriter, or computer) constrains creativity, both productively and adversely. Yet the initial seed for my writing almost always begins with my desire to reverse engineer not a particular interface but rather a particular literary text. The first text I wanted to reverse engineer was bpNichol’s now well-known set of digital poems from 1983–1984, First Screening. This work was behind my creation of the Media Archaeology Lab in 2009. Initially I imagined this lab as a place stocked exclusively with enough Apple IIe’s and copies of First Screening on 5.25-inch floppies for an undergraduate class of twenty to twenty-five students to study this text. The parameters of the lab soon expanded to include as wide a range of legacy hardware and software as I could manage to get my hands on, but First Screening continues to define my understanding of both the cultural and the literary significance of the Apple IIe, the machine Nichol used to create this work.
The first and most obvious question I wanted answered through a study of the Apple IIe was why bpNichol chose this particular machine. What was it that attracted this experimental writer who, at that point, had begun turning away from using the typewriter and toward handwriting and drawing to create concrete poems and comic strips? After reading through nearly every issue of Byte magazine from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, the shape of an answer started to emerge. It wasn’t just bpNichol. The Apple IIe seems to have been the first home computer to appeal to writers looking to experiment with this new medium of expression. The first-generation Apple II only allowed for upper case letters and had a maximum 40-column display. Released in 1983, the Apple IIe not only allowed for the use of upper and lower case letters, critical for writers; it also boasted an 80-column display. The first step, then, for me in understanding this very early work of digital literature was to realize First Screening wouldn’t have been possible without the seemingly modest technical ability to have upper and lower case letters appear on screen, as some of the poems in this set visually and verbally pun on the movement back and forth between upper and lower case. Still, as I’ve tried to make clear with this example, while the smallest of technical advances makes all the difference to textual production, my work remains first and foremost driven by literary and artistic artefacts and not writing machines in and of themselves.
JRC: Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, you participated in a panel discussion on digital literature at the first In(ter)ventions conference in 2010. You have collaborated with each other and with numerous others over the years. Your recent collaborative work Sea and Spar Between13 is a poetry generator born out of a conversation between the two of you, between you and the authors Dickinson and Melville, and between print and digital poetry, or, between poetry and code. The question I would like you two to respond to is: How has your collaborative work emerged from conversation?
Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland: We had a conversation about it and decided it would be fitting for us to write a poetry-generating program14 in answer to your question:
# Duels — Duets
# copyright (c) 2013 Stephanie Strickland & Nick Montfort
from random import choice
for i in range(12):
place = choice([‘over email’, ‘at a coffeehouse’, ‘on a wiki’,
‘inside a studio’, ‘outside a library’, ‘in an art colony’,
‘in a hacker space’, ‘at a demoparty’, ‘at a conference’,
‘at a festival’, ‘on the street’, ‘in a food court’])
art = choice([‘’, ‘computational ‘]) + choice([‘visual text’,
‘work involving randomness’, ‘gathering of lexicons’,
‘letterpress poem’, ‘poetic series’, ‘translation’,
‘contribution to the commons’, ‘self-erasing text’])
interaction = choice([‘an argument’, ‘a negotiation’,
‘a conversation’, ‘an agreement’, ‘a disagreement’,
‘a miscommunication’, ‘a pitched battle’])
traits = choice([‘focus’, ‘pacing’, ‘rationale’, ‘extent’, ‘tempo’,
‘mood’, ‘techniques’, ‘format’, ‘accessibility’, ‘poetics’,
‘boundary conditions’, ‘trajectory’, ‘typography’, ‘scale’,
‘framing’, ‘politics’, ‘title’])
result = [‘compromise’, ‘new structures’, ‘mutual appreciation’,
‘further exploration’, ‘false starts’, ‘missed deadlines’,
‘running out of time’, ‘rethinking the project’, ‘dismay’,
‘a return to the drawing board’, ‘a different hypothesis’,
‘a threat to quit’, ‘laughter’]
first = choice(result)
result.remove(first)
second = choice(result)
print ‘a collaboration beginning ‘ + place
print ‘ on a ‘ + art
print ‘ involving ‘ + interaction + “ about the work’s “ + traits
print ‘ resulting in ‘ + first + ‘ and ‘ + second + ‘\n’
JRC: If one were to run this poetry-generating program in Python (which everyone is encouraged to do), what results would it return?
NM & SS: Here are a number of poems produced by this program (more can be found online at http://duels-duets.newbinarypress.com/index.html):
a collaboration beginning outside a library
on a gathering of lexicons
involving a pitched battle about the work’s accessibility
resulting in a threat to quit and new structures
a collaboration beginning in an art colony
on a computational poetic series
involving an agreement about the work’s boundary conditions
resulting in rethinking the project and a different hypothesis
a collaboration beginning in a food court
on a contribution to the commons
involving an agreement about the work’s scale
resulting in rethinking the project and laughter
a collaboration beginning at a festival
on a computational translation
involving a miscommunication about the work’s trajectory
resulting in mutual appreciation and running out of time
a collaboration beginning outside a library
on a computational visual text
involving a miscommunication about the work’s tempo
resulting in a different hypothesis and false starts
a collaboration beginning in a food court
on a gathering of lexicons
involving a disagreement about the work’s poetics
resulting in a different hypothesis and new structures
a collaboration beginning at a festival
on a computational gathering of lexicons
involving an argument about the work’s framing
resulting in missed deadlines and new structures
a collaboration beginning over email
on a visual text
involving a miscommunication about the work’s scale
resulting in running out of time and further exploration
a collaboration beginning in a hacker space
on a poetic series
involving a negotiation about the work’s rationale
resulting in a threat to quit and running out of time
a collaboration beginning on a wiki
on a computational self-erasing text
involving a pitched battle about the work’s boundary conditions
resulting in laughter and further exploration
a collaboration beginning at a conference
on a gathering of lexicons
involving a pitched battle about the work’s pacing
resulting in a return to the drawing board and dismay
a collaboration beginning on a wiki
on a computational contribution to the commons
involving a disagreement about the work’s boundary conditions
resulting in new structures and laughter
JRC: In the comments to Sea and Spar Between you invite your readers to adapt your source code to create new works. Might readers likewise interject their own variables into this conversation?
NM & SS: Absolutely.
# Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for
# any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the
# above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all
# copies.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL
# WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
# AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR
CONSEQUENTIAL
# DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE,
DATA OR
# PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
# TORTUOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
# PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
JRC: Thank you Brian Kim Stefans, Stuart Moulthrop, Darren Wershler, David Jhave Johnston, Lori Emerson, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland for:
a collaboration beginning at The Banff Centre
on a residency program called In(ter)ventions
involving a wide range of hybrid practices
resulting in many more questions than we have room to answer here
NM: Before we go J. R., I’d like to ask you a question. Given that many of your digital works are preceded by and accompanied by zines and performances, framed in textual HTML, and presented in literary as well as visual and media art contexts, how do you relate to those two well-known categories, “writer” and “artist”?
JRC: I never think about those categories when I’m making work. Maybe that marks me as an artist, or, at least, as someone who went to an art school where fibre arts professors assigned Clarice Lispector novels and Usenet newsgroups, art history professors lectured on Vitruvius and Donna Haraway, and I took seminars on geology and Hannah Arendt. Enrolled in three studio classes, I made three times the work required for one class and showed it in all three. I regularly submitted “essays” that might now be categorized as critifiction or new narrative. No one told me there was a right or wrong way to write. Or, if they did, I didn’t listen.
My early adoption of the web as a medium was due in large part to a dissolution of old categories in that new space. In 1997, in Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls,15 I was free to incorporate diagrammatic and photographic visual images, fictional prose, and “found” text into a non-linear narrative structure. I was also free to publish online without waiting for a literary journal or an art gallery. In 2006 I was commissioned to create a new media art work for the fiftieth anniversary of the Conseil des arts de Montréal. No one involved seemed to mind that the resulting work, Entre Ville,16 was based on a poem that had already been published in an online literary journal, or that the interface was an image of line drawings in a notebook. Given my visual arts background, I would situate these drawings within the traditions of sketching en plein air and veduta. For digital literary scholar and critic Jessica Pressman, however, the image of the notebook suggests “a tendency to re-evaluate and remediate the appearance and aptitudes of paper and print-based literary practices.”17 Line drawings and texts from Entre Ville were remediated into a paper zine of the same name and were later incorporated into a print novel called Words the Dog Knows.18 The “Saint-Urbain Street Heat” poem at the heart of Entre Ville was influenced by a play by David Fennario called Balconville,19 first staged in Montreal in 1979. As such, a dramaturge or a playwright might have yet another reading of this work.
Although this conversation has been framed in terms of a process of becoming digital, it is important to note that the digital is not a final destination. If I had it to do all over again I might begin by asking myself: How does your print novel come from your web-based work?
1 Velcrow Ripper, Scared Sacred (1995), http://www.scaredsacred.org/vintage_ss/index.html.
2 J. R. Carpenter, “Fishes & Flying Things,” republished in Boulder Pavement 04 (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2011), http://boulderpavement.ca/issue004/along-the-briny-beach/.
3 Brian Kim Stefans, Scriptor (2009), http://www.arras.net/?p=238.
4 Michael Joyce, Was: annales nomadique: a novel of internet (Tuscaloosa: FC2, 2007).
5 Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, Apostrophe (Toronto: ECW, 2006).
6 Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, Update (Montreal: Snare Books, 2010).
7 Bob Cobbing and Steven Ross Smith, Ballet of the Speech Organs: Bob Cobbing on Bob Cobbing (Saskatoon/Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1998), 22.
8 John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 108–32.
9 David Jhave Johnston, “Interstitial,” The Capilano Review: Artifice & Intelligence 2.50 (Fall 2006).
10 David Jhave Johnston, Interstitial, 2006–2010, http://glia.ca/interstitial_2010/.
11 David Jhave Johnston, MUPs, 2011, sound device from Pennsound mp3 archives (Philadelphia: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/), http://glia.ca/2012/mups/.
12 Media Archaeology Lab, Boulder, Colorado: http://mediaarchaeologylab.com/.
13 Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, “Sea and Spar Between,” Dear Navigator (Chicago: SAIC, Winter 2010), http://www.saic.edu/webspaces/portal/degrees_resources/departments/writing/DNSP11_SeaandSparBetween/index.html.
14 Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, “Duels — Duets,” (Cork: New Binary Press, 2013), http://duels-duets.newbinarypress.com/index.html.
15 J. R. Carpenter, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls, 1996, http://luckysoap.com/mythologies.
16 J. R. Carpenter, Entre Ville, 2006, http://luckysoap.com/entreville.
17 Jessica Pressman, “Charting the Shifting Seas of Electronic Literature’s Past and Present,” Drunken Boat 10 (2009), http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/05ele/charting.html.
18 J. R. Carpenter, Words the Dog Knows (Montreal: Conundrum 2008).
19 David Fennario, Balconville (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1980).