Possibilities are endless

Both authors Lev Manovich and Loss Pequeño Glazier elaborate on the idea of how technology has broken our preconceive notions of what art and writing is all about. In the one hand, Manovich in his book explores the concept of New Media and attempts to provide some definitions that would make justice to the whole array of mechanism that allow creators to use the many different mechanism of technology to create their art pieces for diverse and bizarre they might seem. Loss Pequeño Glazier, in the other hand dedicates his article to the analysis of some of the specific technological mechanism applied to writing and specifically to electronic literature. Although both works have been fully informative, I will concentrate on the article by the later above mentioned author.

Loss Pequeño Glazier breaks his article in sections to help the reader with the concepts or functions that take place in electronic writing. He parts from the idea of an open field in which all artist are invited to make use of whatever technological inventions are available to create, innovate, and produce their own works. He then moves to the analysis of some of the processes that writing might go through such as implicit strings, variants, code strings, string disturbances and other complex possibilities. The complex possibilities that the author mentions seem to define what electronic writing offers to both the authors and the readers. The author states, “For me, forms of digital literary practices break grammar, spew it across the scree, and reassemble it. At first it makes no logical sense. Then, not making sense seems to make more sense than making sense” (7). The authors posture is clearly observed in some of the works created through any of the mechanism under the umbrella of New Media and also in the work of Loss Pequeño Glazier and in particular in his White-Faced Bromelias on 20 Hectares.

In his poems the authors makes use of variants. That is to say that the poem has different variations that at times do not alter the meaning, but that from time to time do offer a different interpretation. This makes reference to the world of possibilities that the author was talking about. The world of electronic literature is not a fixed one and offers many different venues for creation and interpretation.

As I was reading the poem, I was overthrown by the numerous versions presented of the same poem. I can see that the poet has complete freedom to arrange and rearrange words, ideas, and verses, etc. as part of the creating process, while the reader is not limited to the final version of that process. What I mean by this is that we often don’t see in printed literature, specifically in poetry the other ideas that the author had in mind before he chose the final verse that we read in the printed page. We only get to see the final product and thus only one version of that writing process; whereas in electronic literature the use of variants allows the reader explore many other possibilities.