Coding without Organs + Preguntas/Respuestas

Like the bass excess in Hip Hop, guitar distorsions and feedback in Rock, and barely humanly audible beats because of their speed in glitch electronic music (before they became standarized), glitches in electronic literature defamiliarize our sense organs. They force us to ¨cope¨ (Jones) with that affection and reveal our frustrated expectations. Formal organization of time is de-emphasized in order to bring out the raw quality of the sounds and images that stutter that organization, and may allow us to be self-conscious of our own absorption into given structures of experience. These challenges to our habituated senses driven to failure are not necessarily correlated with political implications on the limited accessibility to computers and the internet mentioned by Ledesma (these implications depend on the type of images that are taking shape with the e-poem) but may teach us a way of navigating mass media that resists uncritical self-absorption into the neoliberal flood of images. I can tell three main ways in which our senses are potentially glitched along with electronic literature: in the perception of the opacity of the underlying code; in the perception of the limitation of our sense organs, and in the re-staging of cultural images in the new medium. The perception of the underlying code is unique to the computer medium; the perception of the own senses in e-lit is correlated to the perception of the underlying organizing code that structures the interface through which we gain contact with the e-text; while the flow of emblematic images may be part of trans-medial circulation. <http://subculture.com/> exemplarily integrates these three possibilities. First, this site/epoem may suddenly surprise us with vibrating visuals, as if there was a failure on the computer display, or on the internet connection, or probably a virus that threatens with the disintegration of the display. However, these glitches are simulated, part of the aesthetics animating the poem that makes it harder for the viewer to make sense of the visual representations, which not only vibrate but may shift unexpectedly as well, forcing us to suddenly put together several images as their traces in our awareness are displaced by the following images. The same happens with sounds that may suddenly appear and constantly disorient our comfort of being part of one sensorial narrative. Second, representations of code may also suddenly contaminate the flow of images, which are portrayed as constantly shifting like the instability of sounds and images in the overall e-poem. Thus, this does not reveal the actual code, as in some examples given by Raley, but suggest its presence, at the same time bringing the code to the surface analogically and confirming its opacity, thus highlighting the synchronicity of the structural lack of code in its representation in the same interface. It highlights the essential opacity of code to our senses while at the same time makes us more aware of it, a phantasmatic specificity of the computer medium. Third, and finally, the images remade here make reference to those circulating in mass media, here destabilized and highlighting their speed and how they glitch and numb the possibility of critical engagement, suggesting social annihilation parallel to the ephemerality of images and our limited capacity to deal with the acceleration of media and its overdetermination of the political script. In short, codework as exemplified by subculture.com may hack the limitations of our encounters with code, interface and cultural/political imagination, and hopefully allow for new ways of participating in the hyperconnected world; while making us aware of our fundamental separation from code, as well as from what is represented by images: it is an immediacy of mediation.

Questions/Responses to compañeros:

Ernesto asks something that may have been already at least partially answered in one of Delia´s questions: ¨Unlike the traditional literature that may be found printed on a page, electronic literature is the product of a multi-layered structure.¨ While it is true that we become aware of these layers through electronic literature, i want to believe that is it possible to read printed texts as layered (for example, the layer of the texture of paper, the design of the book; sonic patterns in poetry´s alliterations, rhyme and rhythm, visuals, type, punctuation, etc). However, what would be then the specificity of each medium? Is there something equivalent to the structural absence of the code in e-lit that is equivalently absent though fundamental to our interactions with printed texts? Also, and analog to the absence of the script in the display in E´s question to Luis about performance, for me it usually implies that your are performing something else. That is, in performance there seems to be always an element of transmission, or translation or folding: how is it fundamentally different from the performance of code in the interfaces? It seems like the performed text is always absent in the performance...

Also, Delia says that glitch poetics create spaces that resist capitalist interests: is creating these spaces synonymous with disrupting capitalism, or they are just escapes that while they protect us from the system they do not necessarily disrupt it, but may leave it intact? What would it take?